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[ { "speaker": "MS. JESSIE KRATZ", "text": "All right. Well, let me get the metadata started for this. My name is Jessie Kratz. I am the Historian of the National Archives and today I’m interviewing Margaret “Peggy” Adams in the Washington Room of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC. Today is Monday, January 29, 2018. And Peggy, thank you for joining me today. We are just going to start by talking about your career and your education before you came to the National Archives. Could you talk a little bit about that?" }, { "speaker": "MS. PEGGY ADAMS", "text": "Okay. Well, I’m just thinking. You said January 29. I believe that’s my anniversary date of coming to NARA in 1987." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Yes. There was a snowstorm and so I started later than I was supposed to, but I think it was January 29th. If not, just right around there. And that was '87, so that would be 31 years ago, right?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes, 31 years ago." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "31 years ago I came to NARA. ]Now before that, well before that, I had done a master’s degree in history at the University of Wisconsin (UW) and taught world history for a year at a small college outside of Chicago, Rosary—it was then Rosary College. It’s now Dominican University. Then I got married and moved back to Madison and had to find a job. I interviewed for a variety of things and ended up being hired as the founding data librarian/archivist for the UW Social Science Data and Program Library Service, DPLS. DPLS was established in 1966 by the University of Wisconsin as both an archives and a library for the social science machine-readable data that were being generated by faculty and students at the University of Wisconsin so it could be preserved and reused. [DPLS was also created to serve as the campus repository for the data that the university acquired as a benefit of its membership in the national Inter-University Consortium for Political Research (ICPR, now the Inter- University Consortium for Political and Social Research, ICPSR), and of its membership in the International Survey Library Association of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. DPLS was positioned within the UW College of Letters and Science, funded by the UW Graduate School and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and reported to a faculty board of directors. Gerry Ham, then head of the Wisconsin State Historical Society and a highly-respected archivist and historian, served on this board, as did History Professor Jerome Clubb, who was one of the pioneers of quantitative history.] So, I sort of fell into the full area of data archives. Just lucky because I was hired [to be the founding data archivist] because I had had graduate work at Wisconsin and knew the research process. That's kind of what I was told. [DPLS was a unique organization;] there weren't these kinds of organizations anywhere else. And that was in 1966. [The DPLS holdings were primarily stored on computer-readable punch cards, with a small proportion of the data files stored on computer magnetic tape.] So, I was there for three years and then my husband, Tom, had a Fulbright and we went to France [for a year. Before we left, DPLS sponsored, with support from the UW and the National Science Foundation, a national Workshop on the Management of a Data and Program Library. While we were in France, I edited the proceedings from the workshop. When we] came back I did some part-time work associated with DPLS. But then we moved on to Kansas and we had small children, and I wasn’t [professionally] employed for about six years, although I did some part-time teaching in there, some secondary teaching and some college. [I also took a few graduate courses in Political Science.] And then we moved to Kentucky, and I had a position in what was called Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Kentucky where I managed an online numeric database system on the state’s economy; [I also edited a quarterly journal and participated in] a variety of related research activities. And that took me to the end of the 80s. So, I had done all of that [before coming to the National Archives]. In the course of the work at Kentucky—and I was just talking with Nancy Melley, [now Director of Technology Initiatives at NHPRC] about this. I was a consultant on a NHPRC-funded electronic records project for the State of Kentucky, basically hired because of the work I was doing at the university, and I was familiar [with the commonwealth's computerized records]. So, I did [that project] as part of my job at the University of Kentucky and then we moved to the DC area after I had gotten the position with the National Archives and my husband got a position at NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities]. So, we were both in the same place at the same time, which we hadn't been because of the history of the job market at that point." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "What made you apply for the job at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, what made me apply really was Lew Bellardo had originally been in charge of the electronic records project at Kentucky and I talked with him shortly before he was leaving Kentucky for a position he took in Georgia and it seemed to me at the time that the position he was taking in Georgia was taking him away from electronic records and so I asked him something to that effect and he told me no, \"I turned down a position at the National Archives in the machine-readable project, the machine- readable branch.\" And so, ding-ding, my husband and I were looking to be able to move to the same place, to the same city and have professional jobs. Obviously, data work is a fairly small little universe and when Lew mentioned the National Archives was looking to rebuild their machine-readable branch, it seemed an obvious thing for me to contact them. And I had some contacts from my days in Wisconsin at the Census Bureau and I called that person and talked with her for some time, and she then got in touch with somebody at NARA. And I got called and the rest in history." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay. And that was in 1987 you started?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I started in 1987 but all of those conversations took place in 1986." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And then what was your impression of the National Archives when you came here?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, I had an interview with Trudy Peterson [then head of the Office of the National Archives], and Bill Cunliffe [then director of the Special Archives Division], in Trudy’s office which had a nice big Wang computer [terminal]. They sold me on being part of the rebuilding of the machine- readable branch. When I arrived and was assigned to my office on the 21st floor, or 21st stack level, I had a wooden desk that didn’t have any drawers and I was given an old upright typewriter as my personal piece of equipment. I was coming from Kentucky, right? So [think of] all of your stereotypes, but I had had my own PC for several years. There was an IBM plant in Kentucky, and they made sure the university was well supplied. And to be given a manual typewriter as my personal piece of equipment to help rebuild the machine-readable records program was quite a shock. And what I got introduced to was how under-resourced the National Archives really was. And that comes out in the articles of some of my colleagues in the 30 years book 1 : how under-resourced NARA was. And so that was a major shock." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So, what was your first order of business then if you’re sitting there with a typewriter trying to—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] I wrote a memo. [Laughing]" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "What did your memo say?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Something to the effect that I don’t believe this." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Give me a computer [laughing]." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I don't believe that I'm expected to help rebuild the machine-readable records program and have as my personal equipment a manual typewriter. There was a dial up computer [terminal]. It was a DECwriter, which accessed the [mainframe] computer at the NIH which the staff commonly used. [The NIH computer center was then a data center for several federal agencies.] Then there was also a Wang system [terminal], like I had seen in Trudy’s office. I therefore had been blindsided to the fact that this [equipment was only] in a few offices including in the machine-readable records branch. There was one [NCR terminal] and it was only used there, well, it was primarily used there, for accounting purposes for the Trust Fund’s system for handling reproductions of records and the cost recovery for that. So effectively the staff did not have equipment and the staff at that point, as part of the rebuilding, was being trained in using this DECwriter to communicate with the NIH computer and was learning to do some forms of programming that were then sort of the default processes at the NIH Computing Center, which [the branch] was using for our data services. [All of this was reminiscent of my 1960s experiences at DPLS, but this was 1987, at the U.S. National Archives.]" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And who were your colleagues when you first started at the machine-readable branch?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "The head of the branch at that point was Edie Hedlin. And Tom Brown was down in an office that was off of Trudy Peterson’s—he was on her staff. And I had actually known him through other professional activities from when I was in Kentucky. In fact, it was he who my contact at Census called when I was looking for a job. So, he was a colleague, but he was not in the machine-readable branch at that time. Others [archivists] in the machine-readable branch then were Ross Cameron (who has just recently retired), Mario Lopez-Gomez, Don Harrison, Bruce Ambacher, Chauncey Jessup, Mike Meier, Fynnette Eaton, and Nancy McGovern had just been brought in from other offices. What Edie was doing generally was trying to build up the staff by getting people detailed from other places. I was an outside hire but most of the others were building up from inside. _Thirty Years of Electronic Records._ Edited by Bruce I. Ambacher. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2003." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And in those very early years, what was a typical day like?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, very shortly after I came on—well Mario Lopez-Gomez (who left the Archives about ‘89 or ‘90 and went to Justice) was very much involved in the reference program. [He was handling its technical aspects.] And shortly after I came on, I got assigned, basically, to manage the [rest of the] reference program. So, my work started trying to get a handle on what the holdings of the branch were at that point, how the National Archives was making those records available, and how it was making known that it had those records." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And what were the electronic records in—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] Well, the records that were in most demand and that to some extent still are, are the casualty records from Vietnam and Korea. So, I found myself, after having been at the University of Wisconsin during the Vietnam War and active in the anti-war movement, coming to the National Archives 20 years later and dealing with reference questions from veterans about that war. Initially I found that quite a shock because if the people that I had worked with in the anti-war movement had been more successful, those guys would never have been there. And it occurred to me not long into the whole thing, when you hear the stories and all the rest of that, that well, the least I could do is provide" }, { "speaker": "service to them. And that really drove that reference program for a very long time", "text": "the casualty records from the Vietnam and Korean Wars, which came to the National Archives in the early 1980s. And then other [digital] records that were here at that time were records from the Securities and Exchange Commission and from the former Civil Aeronautics Board. Well, I’d have to look at the list now to remember when that was what. But the Vietnam collection was very definitely [dominant] and it was also the most unique kind of thing. It was a collection that, or a series of records, that none of the academic data services had. That wasn’t the kind of data they had. And so not only was I not familiar with it but it was the only place in the country you could get those records. And for the Vietnam and Korean casualty records, the reference service was to provide as much record-level response as possible. But for all of the other [machine-readable] holdings, copies of [complete data] files [on magnetic tape] were made available." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Can you walk through the process that a researcher would go through to access the Vietnam records?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "It would be a veteran calling and saying I need—among other things—I need to document that I was exposed to a stressing event and the buddies that I served with died. Can I have their casualty records? So, we would be working with them to try and pinpoint sufficient information to try and get down—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] And you would actually go find—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] Right." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "They couldn’t access the—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] They couldn’t directly access. We had full printouts of those records and one practice that the Department of Defense had started even before they transferred the records to the National Archives, was to create state lists of casualties which are extracts from the whole database which organized casualties by their state of home of record. Those were very much in demand for memorializing purposes. In addition to the individual veterans who were seeking records of buddies in order to document their post-traumatic or their stressing event, you had all of the people trying to memorialize. And that was also during the period where there was a lot of emphasis on the people who were at that point still considered to be missing or prisoners, well, not prisoners of war but missing in action—which really were the people whose bodies had never been recovered." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Can you talk about as time progressed and your career with the archives, the kinds of things you were involved in and how your career changed?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, let me just get back to the Vietnam casualties just very briefly." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[The casualty records dominated, yet] the collection was continually growing, and the big goal was to make known the existence of these files. But in the course of that, I had only been here a couple of years when one day I got a call from a veteran who said he had been at the wall [the Vietnam Veterans Memorial] the night before talking to the ranger, and he said to me “I lost my legs but not my life and the ranger said you could help me.” So, I started going through [the printouts of] the casualty records and it was at that point that we were becoming aware of the fact that there were a lot of errors in the data, especially in the data from the Army. [The Army casualty records covered both wounded and deceased and were worldwide in scope. The DOD casualty records, in contrast, were records, from all the military services, of the deceased, missing, or prisoners of war from the defined Southeast Asian combat area.] The folks who built the Wall had used as many sources as they could find for information to honor casualties [from the Southeast Asian combat area.] Since there were errors in the data, they picked up errors in some of the names that they put on the Wall. [As I recall], it turns out there were 13 people whose names were on the Wall who were in fact living and this gentleman was one of them. And so we worked with him to find that his record [of his nonfatal casualty] was erroneously coded in the Army database [as fatal] and that’s how his name got up on the Wall. But we were able to find that and also provide sufficient information that that was corrected in [subsequent transfers] in the databases by the creating agencies. So, news of that kind of support clearly traveled among veterans’ organizations and there was a fair amount of publicity about that particular incident and we then started getting a lot of requests, like from a veterans’ group someplace in Chicago. [One of their members came to NARA several times] with all kinds of information. He had been asked by his veterans' group, [and sometimes funded by them], to come down to DC and see what he could find out about all the different people that all of these people had served with. So, it [our reference services] sort of morphed that way. Among the other Vietnam era records are the records of all the air sorties. And so among other things we were in contact with a reporter, a CBS reporter, who was doing a story on the unknown soldier from Vietnam. And we were able to work with him not only to find—he had enough information about somebody he thought was the unknown. And we were able to find that gentleman's casualty record that conformed to what the family had known. But [using a volunteer- developed prototype system for searching records], we were able to find the air sortie record which then convinced the military that he was no longer unknown, that they had identified this person. So that was working with the media. So, it [the early 1990s reference program] was Vietnam driven but took on many ramifications. At the same time the holdings themselves were growing substantially, I mean, because every agency in the federal government had data that undergirds their systems and those were beginning to be transferred to NARA. So we were expanding in terms of getting on top of—we had something that we called the Title List of Holdings of these files that we kept maintaining and made available. [It replaced an earlier data catalog.] We did it through the NIH computer, so once BitNet, [a computer network] came about we were able to make it available through BitNet, [subsequently using the communication tool] FTP. So, we were putting a lot of emphasis into description as well as in service to the extent—I mean, but limiting the individualized service to the Vietnam [and Korean] casualty records because you could never—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Do it for all agencies." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "No, I mean, there’s just no staff to do that." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right. And about how big was the staff?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, when I started out, I was doing that work and there was, I said Mario Lopez-Gomez who was handling all of the reproductions of records and all the sort of building the databases and helped us increase the Title List and so forth. And then we had a technician and then we hired another technician not too long later. And then gradually a professional. But it never was more than three or four people. And even now [2018] the reference staff, electronic records, is only, I would say five or six people. But a lot more material is available online now." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "But like with anything technological, you evolve and you provide new services and those new services generate demand for even more services. So, but still very understaffed. And it was an era when machine-readable records, or electronic records as they became, as their next identity, for all intents and purposes still meant digital data. The whole business of all of the office automation records and email, and all the rest of that didn’t come until later." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah. So, I was going to ask, how did the advent of the Internet change your work processes or was it something that came like much later? Because agencies weren’t transferring their emails until—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] I don’t understand that." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah, exactly." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I mean, I am removed from the program for the last five years, [so my comments don't reflect recent developments]. But the focus on email of course came with the White House email. I would say it was a slower evolution, when it, I mean, we had BitNet before we had the Internet and BitNet was just in universities and government agencies. But that provided a mechanism for people to get information and having FTP, file transfer protocol, meant that people could download like the Title List and so forth. So, at each stage, technology enhanced the services that could be provided, and we tried to keep up as much as we could, or that resources, etc. [allowed]. But we had a presence on the \"web\" in a sense before the push of the Internet." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "In like the early 90s?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Mm-hm, mm-hm. Right. And unfortunately, [beginning in 1993], the PROFS 2 case ate up most of NARA’s resources for electronic records, handling the demands of that litigation. So, although the branch, by then it was the Center for Electronic Records, had developed a computerized capability to validate the data files that agencies were transferring, which created metadata which, the intent from the very beginning was that that metadata could be used to make records available and assist researchers. Because of the PROFS case, all development on that ceased until the PROFS case was basically done with and so we had a long period — and that’s covered in the 30 years book. We were doing what we could to continue, I mean, the reference program was pretty isolated from the PROFS case—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Okay, I was wondering if you were involved at all." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "No, not directly, no. And Ken Thibodeau, [the Center director], was very prescient in doing that so that the [archival electronic records] program could at least still survive. I mean it was certainly being taxed very heavily to have so much of its resources handling that case. But what we could do didn't involve a sort of building on what had gone before with the intention of it affecting reference and access until the late 1990s, which is when NARA was finally in a position to let the contract that led to the development of the Access to Archival Databases." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "The AAD." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Which is still up." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the development of the AAD and your role in that." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, I was very directly involved in that. We worked with contractors, using the metadata that is produced as a result of processing to then develop a capability for a selection of the holdings, those which really lend themselves to individual record level access to be available for search and retrieval on an individual record level. So those would be records that identify specific persons, places, institutions. A large proportion of the holdings which are research files that agencies produce are not appropriate for record level access. So AAD only deals with files that are appropriate for record level access and we use the metadata from the processing to then have the metadata that could be displayed as the codes and values for the data that is record level accessible, and that’s where AAD shines. And I’d like to see it get some expansion." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "For those who are listening who don’t really know about AAD, could you kind of describe a 2 A lawsuit (Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President, 1 F.3d 1274 [DC Cir 1993]) filed by Scott Armstrong, American Historical Association, the American Library Association, the Center for National Security, and others, relating to access to and the disposition of email records. The case takes its name from the IBM PROFS (Professional Office System) email system used in the White House. little bit about what kind of researcher would use that?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, now the holdings of AAD have not only casualty records but the [immigrant] passenger lists that are computerized and donated to the National Archives in electronic form. There are World War II records of Army enlistees which the Army had digitized, I mean, not digitized, had created on punched cards during the war and then those were migrated to tape. So, the World War II enlistees, there’s about nine million of those records. There are similar records for all the internees of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps where the WRA had also captured that information on punched cards originally which were later migrated to tape. So those are the kinds of records that have individual personal meaning to people. If you sort of think of researchers as those who are seeking information from records and people who are seeking information to create new knowledge, the folks who are looking for information from individual records are the kinds of folks who would best use AAD, whereas those who are looking to analyze data get copies. Now, they get copies [of files] through downloading them. But for the longest time, and continuing to this day, [software-independent copies of files] could be made available on removable media on a cost recovery basis. And that, although people who were unfamiliar with the phenomenon find that a very backward way of providing access to records, is the type of access that analysts want. The fact that they can now download the whole file is obviously better than having to get it on removable media. But they’re still looking for the whole file, so they have the whole file [of records] to analyze. Whereas people who are looking for information from that one record want to use something like AAD to retrieve it. And it’s [AAD] on the Archives’ website going in through the research page and so forth and there are a whole bunch of different categories of records. I just named some of the obvious ones." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So, were you in the same unit the entire time you were here?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Yes, I was. The unit itself changed to many different identities but yes. That’s what I came to the Archives to do. That’s what, I mean, I had had this opportunity that was really very unique and, you know, my work with the University of Wisconsin and then at Kentucky doesn’t fit any kind of real career path nor, even now, is there really training for that kind of career path. So, I very deliberately was coming to the National Archives to be a part of what was then called the machine-readable branch and which now is the electronic records division." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah. So, did the Archives offer additional training opportunities for you?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, yes. I took a bunch of courses at NIH, well, so it was NIH, I mean the government sponsored them. But that's primarily what I did. And then of course from time to time there would be a variety of management courses and that kind of thing. [I also had immersed myself in archival literature when I was working on that NHPRC-sponsored project for the Kentucky State Archives. I also had opportunities throughout my career for the kind of training that comes from participating in professional associations and meetings, and NARA was very supportive in this regard. I published a number of articles and also taught some workshops, and you always learn a lot through that kind of activity. And, I had an opportunity for a several month detail at OMB, which was highly informative]." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And did the change in the Archivist and Acting Archivist and the new Archivist change your work at all? Did they implement any changes or ask you to make changes or did you basically have a constant mission the entire time and didn’t really deviate—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] Me personally?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well, I guess you personally and then also the machine-readable/electronic records programs." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I think that mission has stayed pretty much the same. Has it been understood by the rest of the agency? Not always. And any time you have new people who have no previous experience with [data], then you’ve got a big learning curve for them to have an understanding of how this [digital data records] fits into the rest of NARA. Given that the digital universe now represents to such a large extent office automation and social media and all the rest of that, that's very known to people because it's something that they've had experience. So, the challenge always is you—people’s understanding of what electronic records are depends upon where in their lifetime they first started interacting with them. So, the challenge [for the electronic records] staff always is to meet people wherever that is and then try to bring them forward to an understanding of how this kind of documentary material, primary source material, fits into a traditional archives. In many countries, especially in Europe, the way research is funded in those nations leads to the creation of national data services or national data archives in a way that is different in the United States. Or, the centralization of statistical production in many countries does not exist in the United States. We have a very disaggregated statistical system where you’ve got many, many different agencies." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And they’re not—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] And it’s not one central place. So that diffusion means that there’s also not one obvious federal agency other than the Archives, which does have a government-wide responsibility, to be the host for that kind of service. So, it’s very—I mean, as the 30 years [book] shows, in Meyer Fishbein's work and others at the time and since, using the computer or before, basic machines, was an expansion of the way in which primary source documentation is created. So, the Archives is responsible for all primary source documentation that has long-term value that the government produces, [including digital data]. But it's still always kind of a stepchild." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes. [Laughing] Well, I do want to go back to the beginning when you mentioned you didn’t have a computer. When did you get your first computer?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I couldn’t put a date on that. There was a point at which—and the [electronic records] reference staff moved down to the 18th tier. I mean, obviously it’s not—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Yeah, where you [were] originally?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "On the 20th or 21 st tier, I’m not sure. The machine-readable branch was on 20 and then there were a few people who had offices up on 21; that’s just a stack entry. And then there was a biggish room on 18 which was opened up for the reference staff of machine-readable. And I know we were in there when we got the PCs but I couldn’t tell you for sure when we moved down there. But we moved out to College Park in the 1990s, let’s see. Clinton was elected in...?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "‘92." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "1992. So, the PROFS case began in—so he became President in ‘93 and that’s when all hell broke loose in 1993. So, my guess is it must have been 1994 that the machine-readable branch, by then the Center for Electronic Records, moved to College Park. Before that there had also been expansion when Ken Thibodeau came on as director of the Center. His office was down on the 5th or 6th tier, someplace else." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And it doesn’t exist probably." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "No. I’m sure none of this exists anymore. But all of this was better than the stories I always heard from the folks who were—see Trudy Peterson’s article in the 30 years book—when they were down on 14th Street in some offices on 14th Street when 14th Street was not where anybody wanted to be." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So, then you moved to College Park in 1994." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "And so it was sometime before that that we got computers. Probably at least two years before that so it—but I mean it was a goodly while, I mean, we got pretty adept at using the Wang and there was also the NCR machine for the Trust Fund. and Wang to do a little bit of word-processing. And then the DECwriter interactive terminal, typing terminals. That’s what we used for interaction with NIH and the maintenance of the Title List such as it was that we had then." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So, when you moved to College Park, were you provided new equipment?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And how did things change with that move?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I don’t think a whole lot (as we continued to use BitNet and were already using office automation]. But, you know, you forget an awful lot. It’s like with any kind of pain [laughing], you forget it. I mean, compared to the facility, the kind of physical environment, it was really nice being downtown but the physical environment was really lacking. And those of us on the 18th tier actually had nice digs. So many of our colleagues in the then-expanded Center for Electronic Records, were in space that was just unbelievable. So, it was very positive change that way." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And you were all brought together into one office space?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "One—yes, yes, one large office space. Well, two large office spaces but they were just across the corridor from each other." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Were they on the sixth floor?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Fifth. And then at some point we also moved down to the fourth floor." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay. And then you continued to work in reference." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "While you were—well, I guess your whole career?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Right. And after Tom Brown retired as the head of the Archival Services branch of the Center, I took his responsibilities and eventually was hired into that position. So, for the last six years or so of my career, I was managing the Archival Services program more generally, but up until that point I was doing the reference part of it [although I also had other responsibilities like the review of records schedules and appraisals]." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And did you—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] I [had been] assistant branch chief [since shortly before we moved to College Park] and my primary responsibility was the reference program until I became the chief of archival services." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And how did you enjoy that, being the branch chief?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, it was just a lot more work, with, you know, that kind of thing is always an opportunity to try out things that you thought about for some time. But I had worked very closely with Tom for about a decade so it was not that much of a change really. Except that I had a larger workload." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "What other sorts of projects did you work on?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I mean, all the various developments to make known the holdings, which as I said started out as the Title List and then that graduated, morphed into, I mean, when the staff started putting things [descriptive records] into the Archival Research Catalog. But that didn’t occur until the early 2000s. So, all that time we were developing our own ways of getting in touch with researchers and informing them—writing informal reference papers, focusing on things about which we were getting a fair demand. So, trying to capture something in a brief leaflet. Not a formal RIP but just a casual two pager or so. And then AAD was a full other range and then what we started doing was—and I did not do a lot of this work myself but I directed it—[some very talented staff did it]—the work to making the records available online for download. And that’s a whole additional process of getting the documentation so that it can be in shape to be scanned, so that it can be downloaded, because you can’t use the data without the documentation. And most of the documentation that we received, at least up until the era of the internet, was all print on paper. So that all had to be—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I can imagine. That’s a lot of paper." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Right. Getting it scanned so that it can be downloaded. And we were involved. I mean, obviously we were involved in the planning and implementation of the original ERA [Electronic Records Archive], but since there was a separate program for that, our division, although we had a fair amount of input, had its regular work to do and, you know, our reference demand was continually growing. What we were doing [in lieu of online access] was moving from providing the removable media on which we provided copies of files —analytical researchers wanted copies of files. Initially we were providing copies on tape and then as the various kinds of tape, the densities of those tapes increased and so we had to keep up with the changes in the media, then making files available on diskettes, then making them available on CD-ROM, so I mean, there was a lot of evolution and all that’s before we made records available online. It’s all very evolutionary really." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "But it was more than a full-time job." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Oh, sure. Yes, the new media comes out. It’s almost like, awe, another one. So, can you talk about some of the awards you received for your work?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I’ve been fortunate to receive some recognition both from the Society of American Archivists, being named a Fellow, and from IASSIST, the International Association of Social Science Information Service and Technology, which has sort of been my home professional organization since, well, it didn’t exist when I was in Wisconsin, but since I was in Kentucky. And so that’s a small organization. IASSIST named me a, what do they call it, a lifetime achievement award or something like that. You could look up [their website, www.iassistdata.org]. It’s an organization of people like ourselves whose primary job is to identify, preserve, and make available social science data. Most of the National Archives' holdings in electronic form are archival records which can be used for social science research. [Other awards included Fynnette Eaton's] guest-edited issue of _The American Archivist_ in which I had an article on the history of punch card [records] and how they are the predecessor to electronic records. Tom Brown had an article, Linda Henry had an article, Bruce Ambacher had an article. I mean many of the people had authorship in the—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] the 30 years book" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "30 years book. And that _American Archivist_ issue received an award." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I know you said you do reference but are there certain aspects of reference you really enjoy doing?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Oh, I mean, it's always fun to work with people who think they have found something that nobody else has found. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes NARA will have preserved some record for a very long time that no researcher has really ever exploited and for a researcher to find those records is always very exciting, as is helping them do that. But I would say helping the guy who said, “I lost my legs but not my life,” helping the media find and identify the unknown soldier, those are real high points. But having the rest of the world understand that the United States is committed to preserving its digital data has always been a high point too. So, all my opportunities to participate in various professional associations were... I could carry that message." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Can you talk about some of the challenges that you faced while here?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, yes, the major challenge I would say is the stepchild role. The fact that because the first electronic records were only data. And most people don’t grow up knowing anything about data like you do about words or other documents. They don’t grow up analyzing data and the numerical quality or the quantitative quality of data makes data kind of off-putting to a lot of people. And it’s not something that many people think of as a primary source that they should use. I have an old friend, a historian whom I used to badger because he wasn’t exploiting data sources for his subject and he would say to me, well, you make it easy to use and then I’ll use it. Well, I guess, I mean, the Archives certainly has a role to play in making its holdings as accessible as possible but learning how to analyze data I think goes beyond that. So, for that kind of user, the development of AAD seemed an answer. The other kind of thing that you come to realize is that the documentation that accompanies data files, which is essential for the use of the data files is also primary source documentation in and of itself. As an example, and I have this in an article, the Army kept very extensive records of casualties during the Korean War. Among the things that they coded [for each casualty], was country of casualty, another was cause of casualty. I think there were a couple of different kinds of cause of casualty codes. In the place of casualty, there were codes for almost, and you can look at it, I don't remember exactly, but for many East Asian countries. Obviously, no [casualty record has any country code] except Korea. But whoever put that documentation together at the outset of the Korean War apparently thought that there might be [other countries where casualties would occur]. So that’s some of the mentalities view that you don’t [anticipate]—I don't know if it’s documented anywhere else. The cause of casualty codes, and there were many different kinds: they included chemical warfare, and they included gas, they included something else like that. None of those codes show up in any of the records. But again, somebody thought that they had to prepare for that. Likewise, and this you would find I’m sure also in census records of the period, you had race for the Army casualties. Coded Caucasian and Negroid and Malayan and something else. But then you had Puerto Rican-Negro and Puerto Rican-White. So, you begin to get a glimpse of the mentality of the time documented sufficiently to say hey, the Army had these—and in the case of the race, people are coded all those various races. Things [like] that are very different as we've evolved, our understanding has evolved. So, the electronic records need to be understood in their totality not just the digital bits and bytes but everything that goes with them and the programs from which they came. And that’s where I think there’s a lot of work to be done in educating everybody. The other kind of thing you learn is the way in which our society—there has been tremendous evolution in the concepts of privacy and confidentiality. There’s been change in the law and regulations but there’s also been a personal change. That has happened very significantly now with social media. But social media is just the current stage of a long evolution. So, it used to be that the military used the social security number as the military ID. And that meant that people who were deceased and whose records were therefore very open, their socials were available too, because that was their serial number. Well, for the longest period of time, that was not a problem. But then as various governmental programs of various kinds came to use those numbers, then the deceased person’s privacy was no longer obscured, yet parts of their records may affect the living and you need to think of that. So, I think a consciousness—and there I think technology has played a very real role because getting at individual records like people expect to do from digital records, was a fairly remote activity prior to the computerization of information. And so there’s just been this evolution. Another area where we’ve evolved is for the longest time we worked hard to apply the concepts, the regulations, the everything else that evolved during an analog era to the digital as part of the discussion of it being, the digital being accepted as primary documentation. But there’s a downside to that. And that is, we wouldn’t necessarily come to all the same decisions if we were starting afresh. So, you see, I mean, all of the discussions now about the abuses of social media certainly highlight [all of these issues] and we’re still working off of mentalities and consciousness, regulations, law, you know, everything that was developed for an analog era. Does it all apply? I think that’s still to be determined. So those are the kinds of things you learn [ i.e. challenges you face] in the course of doing this kind of work." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right. And can you talk a little bit about your decision to leave the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Oh, I was getting on [laughing]. I worked until I was 70. So, I think that was time for me to move on. New people could do it and I needed to just step back." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And that was in 2013?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Do you miss it?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I don’t miss the commute." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Where did you live?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I live in DC, upper northwest." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Oh, yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I don’t miss the commute and I think the day-to-day grind after a while, [one] just gets tired. It was time to move on. I did not want to do contract work in this field partially because I think the government should employ more people directly. But of course, I miss it. I mean, it’s been a part of my [professional] life always. And I try to keep up online with as much as I can in terms of evolution, things that are important in SAA and I’ve done some writing and I did edit a volume of articles for IASSIST after I retired. I have an article that theoretically was supposed to be out some time ago that I was asked to do a year or so ago." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So, you’re still active?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Still a little bit, yeah. And I do other volunteer work." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay. Well, I know I said it would be an hour and we’re about 10 minutes over but I was wondering, is there anything else you want to share?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "No, not really. You know, I keep talking about the stepchild. When I \"retired\" for the first time in the early 1970s because we had children and we moved someplace else, I really thought we were at the cusp where digital data, as we call it now, would be mainstreamed [in libraries and archives]. You wouldn’t have to, I mean [make the case for accessioning and preserving them]—they would just be a part, accepted as a primary source resource just like all other primary resources. After all, I had trained as an historian and primary source documentation is the key to that. When I came back to professional data work at the end of the 1970s, I found that libraries had computerized their catalogs. There had been an adaptation to technology but data (electronic records and/or digital data) were still not mainstreamed. Even as we talk about the era of big data, I don’t believe that the electronic records program here is yet really mainstreamed. And so I used to say I was going to work until I was 85 or we win. And the \"we win\" was that we were going to get to that point. Well, I was disappointed in the 1970s and I guess, you know, after a certain point I think a lot has been accomplished and there’s a very, very important volume of electronic records that have been preserved and are available and will live. I would like to see them more understood and I would like to see the [dedicated] people who work with them more resourced. But the National Archives’ pie keeps getting cut up into many, many pieces so there’s a constant competition for resources, and then of course the National Archives has got to deal with the universe of federal government records, [and tremendous pressures to digitize its analog holdings]." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right. But we’re all moving towards electronic—I mean, eventually that’s the business we’ll be in." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Yes, but what kind of electronic business are you going to be in?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Can you see, I mean, you worked here, do you think the Archives is—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] You see, my soft spot is still with the data, right?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Okay. Will the Archives as a whole really—I mean, do the research reference staff here in this building as well as the ones at Archives II think of digital data as a primary source when they’re working with people? They do if they know about a particular file or they know—I mean, I think there’s a fair amount of use of resources that are on AAD. But, does primary source documentation to them incorporate that kind of resource? I mean, it’s not unlike, you probably would find some people challenged by thinking of photographs, still photos, digital photos now. Well, the historical record is very word based. Data is not word based. So yes, I think we’re going electronic and I think [digital] data are going to continue to be created because that’s what runs agencies." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And that’s what’s really—I mean, I think the data, because you can study and you can find trends and you can point out things that are wrong—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] Right. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Especially since the agencies don’t talk to each other, we really need to keep that information." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And make it available." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Right, and make it available and preserve—well, have to identify first what’s valuable and then, I mean, for the longest time, and I don’t know what the policy is right now, but for the longest time the policy of the National Archives was only to accept digital data that was in a software independent format. Now I know that’s gone by the by but the logic behind that was that it was through having software-independent records that you could preserve them long term and retain the ability to use those records with whatever software and hardware gets developed down the road because we know this is never going to end. And it’s never going to be the case that something happens out there that’s going to solve the problem and you’re not going to have to keep migrating or whatever it is we’re now doing. I think an understanding of technological innovation says that that’s not going to happen. So, I would just like to see us move a little bit more to, you know, integration of mentalities about the value of digital data as a primary source." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well, thank you so much—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] Well, you’re welcome." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "—for sharing with me. This was great." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "But, I mean, it was an exciting opportunity to have a chance to work on [and talk about] this, all those years and from the punch card era to the online." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah. That’s quite a change when you think about punch cards to, I mean, you probably, I probably, couldn’t even envision the internet. I don’t know, it must have been a huge technological advancement while working with these electronic records, having this created and—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] Oh, yeah, it was marvelous. I mean, you know, you could see how technology was going to take us down the road. The advantage I had by starting with punch cards is I also could visualize what it is to store bits and bytes and so I had a mental picture. So, I’m not unlike what I’m critiquing here, saying that people are only going to go with what they understand, I mean, so I could understand how information was being stored and so when we migrated to tape, it was still organized the same way but I could understand it in a way that somebody who didn’t have that opportunity had to learn it differently." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right. That’s great. Thank you so much." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, you’re welcome. It’s always fun to talk about what you do. [Revised and embellished by Margaret O. Adams, August 2023]" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "This is Rebecca Brenner and Emily Niekrasz, and we are at Archives I about to conduct an oral history of Sam Anthony, in room Mezzanine 110. Today’s date is July 7, 2015. Sam, will you please provide a brief overview of your career time frame at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Sure, I’ll do that, and for the record, my name is Sam Anthony. I started working here in August of 1991. I began as a young recent college graduate working in the research room here at Archives I. The unit initials were NNRS, and that was many re-organizations ago. The old timers would know it. My job was as a GS-4 technician, soon to be GS-5, and I worked in our textual research room and our microfilm research room. And back in the day, we also had a motion picture and still picture research room. I had the great pleasure of kind of bouncing between all four of those over the years. I did that for about three years. And in 1994, we were in the midst of constructing Archives II, the “Glass Palace” as I call it. I saw an opportunity where we were doing different things because this was a unique circumstance with this move. I had a wonderful opportunity to work in the detail in the library to help manage the move, essentially to see the Mayflower company contractor movers to make sure the books were being loaded up properly in the right order before being sent. I did that, and then I was able to transfer to the library in 1994. That was a great moment for me, and I enjoyed that. And as a result, I started working between Archives I and Archives II, which was fun. I did that for about four years. In 1998, because my career has never been clear or planned or defined, I started working in another detail while I was in the library, working in the public programs office. I started hosting author lecture programs and genealogy workshops. I did that from 1998 until 2005. From 2005" }, { "speaker": "to the present I have been Special Assistant to the Archivist", "text": "first Allen Weinstein, and then for Acting Archivist Adrienne Thomas, and now for David Ferriero, ten years on, so." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "How did your education influence your decision to begin work at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I knew that in college that history interested me because it was the stories that" }, { "speaker": "a few of the professors that I had were telling me. Let me clarify that", "text": "there was a Medieval History professor named Frederick Behrends at the University of North Carolina, who could just sit there without referring to notes, and talking like a televangelist, it was the gospel of medieval history, the fief, the vassals, Ostrogoths and I was transfixed. It was fascinating. And then, I took two courses from a professor named Alan Downs, who taught a course on American Military History. One was from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, and the other one was from the Civil War to the present. And again, he would tell facts and such about this battle and that, but then he would get into the stories about a sniper hitting a famous general from 800 yards, or this, and it was just intriguing. I thought there was more of a history than what I remembered from my high school days which to me seemed rather boring, plotting, and pedantic. So, I knew that somehow, history, the storytelling, sharing information, was there. I didn’t know exactly how but I just knew it was there." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "When you first arrived here, what were your original impressions of NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Intimidating. Professional. Serious. I felt like I was out of my league. I felt very young. I also had the sense of looking at the building while it was a beautiful building. There were some other parts—inside the lighting was somewhat dim. And it was very easy to get that impression: what a drab place. And that wasn’t helped or that drab sense was confirmed in the early 1990’s by some of my colleagues, who I will not name, who really hadn’t upgraded their wardrobe. And they seemed to be wearing their clothes that they still had from the ‘70s. And so, oh geez, I said what the hell have I gotten myself into? There were a lot of very nice and helpful people here, but there was also this sense that this place was a little shopworn, a little stale, that kind of thing." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Did you have any mentors early on?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Oh ya, oh ya. My career has been moved and enhanced because of mentors: Ken Heger, who at that time, oh boy: “I’m dating myself!” But back then in the research rooms, not only did you have technicians, you actually had archivists of a professional grade who served as daytime and nighttime supervisor. Because, another thing you should add here, the research room, then, used to be open Monday through Friday until 10pm. Or was it 9pm? That shows you how old I am. It was late. It was 9pm because the museum was open even later until 10pm. There were just these long hours, so with research rooms being open from 8:45am to 9pm, you had a lot of time to cover—archivists, Ken Heger was the afternoon and evening" }, { "speaker": "supervisor. He taught me a lot about research", "text": "how to do research, how State Department records were set up, how to use the Congressional Serial Sets—the nuts and bolts of what was important. Another mentor was the daytime supervisor Connie Potter. She was a genealogist by trade but Connie was kind-hearted, and she showed me the lessons of how to interact with people, how to get along, and how to figure things out around here. I looked at both of their examples. They were very different people, doing the same job with some overlap, and I saw how they both got along together and I thought I could learn something from these guys. So, those two helped early on. In the library there was my colleague Jeff Hartley who at the time was a senior reference librarian—he became the Chief Librarian, and was a good personal friend. But I also liked his cool, calm demeanor when it came to deadlines of research. People would come in and could say: I need this. And they could come into the research rooms or the library in a variety of ways." }, { "speaker": "They could say", "text": "“oh, Jeff, I need this.” Or they could say: “I need this tomorrow.” He was always confident in his ability. He wouldn’t let them see him sweat. And I liked his command of knowing where to look. If he didn’t know the answer, he knew how to find it. And so that was kind of a buildup from what I learned earlier. After that, I transferred from the library into the public programs office. I felt like I was learning a lot on my own. So, as far as my mentors for that, I didn’t have anyone that, shall we say, guided me, but Edith James, who is the division director who brought me on board, the unit was called NWE, and she was basically a good boss who said: “look, be creative, I’m going to rein you in because you’re young and a little impetuous, but go.” In a way, having that hands-off management style was very, for a buck like me, to go where I wanted to and did, but on occasion she would correct me and get me back in line. And it was Allen Weinstein—he was the ninth Archivist, came aboard in February of 2005. I had known him by doing the lecture programs. Behind me are all those books by him, about six of them, and involved him. Wow that was time. February 2005. I think it was February 15, 2005. He came on board as Archivist, and it was that spring he wrote me a very nice letter because, again, in my previous job in the author lecture program I had met him. And when he came on board, I remember him and his secretary both said: “we don’t know anyone here at the Archives except you, personally. We know these people professionally, but we know you personally. It’s a great comfort to know you.” Then that spring he wrote me a very nice letter, saying: “I want you to work for me. You have a choice, but I’d like you to work for me.” And he was the kind of, I would say, father figure where I didn’t know the first thing about being a special assistant. We were figuring it out as we were going along. And there was another time when David Brown, who was on board as well in the office as a special assistant—I found out Weinstein, we figured things out: what were my strengths, what were his strengths, and we tried to figure out, okay, what could I learn and grow and improve to help support him. What were things that I could do to enhance what I already knew to be a better special assistant, but he had a very long slow fuse, and he barely lost his temper, and I think that made a big difference with me because I could screw up plenty of times and still get away with it and learn from my mistakes." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What were your strengths and his needs?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "His needs were—he was very much aware of, I would call him a historian activist. Not only was he passionate about history, but he also wanted to help make a difference, and so it was one thing to be interested in history to be kind of a passive observer witness. But Weinstein was the kind of guy where he would bring, because of his previous job, he was very well aware of the international scene, and he would bring people here to visit the Archives—former leaders of, say, Czechoslovakia and Poland, former leaders, former movers and shakers involved in, you know, nationally and internationally, and so as a result I realized I always felt that I was good at entertaining. That’s been told by many a mentor that we’ve listed. And I realized that I had a bit of a confidence and comfort in dealing with ceremonial events, so whether it was my experience in doing public programs, literally having a stage, speaking, planning things. How will things appear to the audience, how will things move, you know, how will things appear and look professional and skilled. Here at the National Archives, I’ve learned always early on, and ever since: we have to do things on a shoestring budget, so there is a bit of a feat of leger de main to make something look quite polished when we’re doing it with very little in the way of material, manpower, money. And so, I found that we had this beautiful building, we had these great documents, but we had these people who work here who know stuff, and some of them were rather passionate and willing to share, and I figured there’s got to be a combo, and I saw all that, and I found that was one of my strengths was pulling this all together. With a shoestring budget, or with no budget at all, how do we make this place great, and how do we make it inviting to people whether you’re head of state or a school kid or won an award, and get them in here and then see the Archives through their eyes. Show them the records, allow them to shake hands with the Archivist, and then they go, and so, I think one of my skills was event planning, protocol, public programs, and someone once called me a uniter." }, { "speaker": "That was an interesting thing", "text": "bringing groups together and bringing people together and different people. It’s something that I like doing." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Did Allen Weinstein create your position for you, or was there already a special assistant to the Archivist?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "There was already one on board named David Brown. The special assistants, as I learned early on, were new. They had been around for a long—previous Archivist years before, and for those of you who can’t see, I’m gesturing here back in time because I’m that kind of person—way back then with my left hand, but I found that those with specialist titles knew, and" }, { "speaker": "it was viewed by some people in the Archives with suspicion because they were going", "text": "“who the hell are these people?” Because here’s how Allen Weinstein brought me on the staff, and the" }, { "speaker": "staff was very small at first. It was", "text": "The Archivist, it was Donna Gold, his secretary who he brought over from his previous job who was his executive assistant. There was David Brown, who was very familiar with records management and archival processes and procedures, and there was me. And it kind of quickly came on that I would work the ceremonial things, public programs, and David would work with substantive things like records management and other issues. But David Brown liked to say that my job was a one off, and at first, I was insulted by that, but I thought: “wait a minute, it’s not how you drive; it’s how you arrive. I’m here; I have the title of special assistant. I’m doing a job I like. I can make a difference. So, what, how it was created, I’m here. I’m a member of this team. I’m a contributing member. Let’s go for it!” So yes," }, { "speaker": "I have a feeling that Weinstein said", "text": "“Sam, let’s do it. Let’s make him special.”" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Well, you mentioned a few questions ago that the hours of the researched room and the exhibits changed. Why has it changed, and how has that changed influenced the—" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "[interposing] Budget." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Oh, okay. And how has that affected the goings on here?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Sure. The early 1990’s saw the economy change, and this was right as Bush was leaving office and Clinton was coming in. And the economy was kind of on the [insert spitting noise]. The late ‘90s saw a great improvement, and we can actually see that through the Archives’ budget. But I would wager, and you all can check the records but the budget of the National Archives in 1987 was 117 million dollars, which is nothing, but it grew over time, but still I had heard that there were RIFs, reduction in forces, or other problems in the early 1980s, so I was aware that the Archives was always a small budgeted agency. But I find it interesting, whereas a GS-4 technician when I was working in the research room with the researchers and up until 9:00 at night." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Can you clarify: what does GS-4 mean again?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "There was a pay scale, a General Services pay scale, scaling from Level 1 to Level 15. Within each level are ten steps, and that’s a way that you can get promotions, your time-in-grade, you can get promotions for your years in service for your particular job. So, I was, shall I say, getting paid very little. And for the record, in 1991 and 1992, the paycheck for a GS-4 after taxes for me came to be $495 in Washington, DC, which was the exact amount for my rent. So, you know, one paycheck went to rent. The other went for everything else. So, I found it interesting that the research rooms were open for that late and I remembered that the technicians who were more senior to me were in charge of getting us to sign up for overtime. And they were begging us, so I remember how, back when we had paper, a technician would come up to me and look at the schedule and say: “fill in a day or two here,” and I’d put in one and go: “Come on Sam, you can do more.” I want to go out; I want to have a life. But so, in essence, I worked from 8:45AM to 9PM at night, with breaks in between, but the overtime helped, and that’s the reason I did it. But I know that the research rooms were reduced because" }, { "speaker": "archivists at the time like Ken Heger were noticing our budget officers saying", "text": "Why do we need to keep it open? It costs us money. We have to pay technicians, staff, the whole thing—we’re facing a budget crunch overall in government, and they realized that it was costing more to stay open to fewer researchers at 8:00 at night or 9:00 at night. When they changed it, it used to be open only three days a week. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays we would be open until 8:00 or 9:00 at night. But I remember in 2006 we had a rescission to our budget. And eight million dollars was taken out of our budget. In fact, we had to close on time, even on Saturdays, so research was only open 9:00 to 5:00. And it was a dramatic change. It shows you how just a few million dollars can adversely affect. We had research rooms. How they are now—I can’t recall." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Going back to your overall time here, what would you say are the successes that you have achieved?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "That I didn’t get fired. That’s a big success. I think there are about seven times that I could have been fired over the past twenty-four years, with cause. Definitely with cause. Falling asleep on the job —" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Can we dwell on that for a second? What were the ways that you almost got fired?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "No one ever came up to me and said: “You’re this close!” Nothing like that. I remember once I was really tired, and I was working as a technician in the research room, up in the microfilm research room. And in the microfilm research room there was this thing called a cage. It was kind of a stack area in the back which had access for the researchers to look at microfilm and it was a small location area where only we could go. And I would bring a pillow, so I would take a nap. And once I overslept. And I remember looking and there was Dee Cartwright. She was a lead technician, and she was just kind of standing there. And I just thought: I’m gone. I’m toast. There were other times …" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "That’s really priceless, but back to the successes. Thank you." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "For me, I would say, going to the library was a success because I was able to go from working in the research room to working in the library. I saw the value of the primary sources and using secondary sources, using books to help complement and supplement your research. And from that, I then said: “I’m going to be a librarian.” I got my Master’s in Library Science, but that to me was a success. I tried something new and made something to work from it. But the one I’m most proud of is working with the author lecture program. In my office we have two book cases which have books from some of the couple hundred lectures and book signings we have done in my ten years from 1998 to 2005. Each one tells a story, and, you know what, I can look at one and be like: “That was a packed house that day. That one, C-Span came to it. That one only twelve people showed up, but boy they enjoyed themselves. That one there was a thunderstorm, and the turnout was horrible, but those who turned up came in soaking wet, and the author, just, they had a wonderful time.” It was very impromptu. To me, these were the successes because these were a way of bringing history to life. It tied in my skills, Rebecca, that I have, the early ideas, my interest in the ceremonial, of the performance idea, educating and entertaining—started to come together. So, I view those as big successes. But for me, now, over the past ten years, every day I can walk away from the job or the Archivist, whoever he or she is, can say: Sam, thanks, that helped. To me, it’s just, okay, writing the speech, or getting an answer, or getting something. If I can help the head of the agency do these jobs, then I’m doing mine. That, to me, is a success, so I’ve learned to check my ego at the door because here, my ego means nothing. There are people more important than me here, but to be able to help them, and to see it." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What—you may have answered this a little bit already, but—" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "[interposing] Yes, I did." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What aspects of your current position do you most enjoy?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I enjoy being able to thrive in chaos, being able to channel all of my experiences from the past twenty-four years, and be prepared to answer anything. Just before we started," }, { "speaker": "the Archivist said", "text": "“Find me an example of the earliest records of the U.S. Secret Service, for the event that we are going to do tonight.” And I’m just thinking, you know, I remembered working with an archivist where he took me to a stack and showed me some records of the Treasury Department from the Civil War. There was this ledger of Pinkerton’s agents, who became Secret Service. This was their payroll. So, I’m just thinking, you know, I remember this from the past, I remember the archivist, I remember the staff, and I can apply it. So, I guess the greatest thrill for me is being able to apply everything, whether it’s professional or hobbies, what have you, to this job, and make it work, because I feel like I’m flying without a net. I don’t think there was a formal training for this job. I don’t think there is a formal training for this job." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "That’s why I skipped that question." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Okay. Well, now you bring it up." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "No, continue. I was just joking." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I would like to create formal training. I think a manual could be created for a special assistant. I think it could be done." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Out of curiosity, what are those Pinkerton records?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Sure. The Pinkerton records were, I think, from the Treasury, from the Department of the Treasury, and it was from the Civil War. I can’t remember exactly what year. But what I remembered was in a stack area, mid-level, on the west side of this building. Rick Peuser, Richard Peuser, who now works up at College Park, great guy, very helpful, and I’ll put him down as kind of a one-off mentor. Rick Peuser had an enthusiasm about his job, and it affected me, kind of like Connie Potter and Ken Heger, they all were passionate about their job, but Rick had this outgoing style that appealed to me, that I could relate to, and we were also close in age, so I felt like we had more in common. But Rick showed me this record. It was a grey Hollinger box, and he opened it up, and it was this listing of names of people from the Pinkerton Agency, which was a private company doing security and what have you, and it was their payroll for that particular month, and they were getting paid for working for the Federal government. And, as I’ve learned over the years, that eventually became what we now know as the Secret Service. For some people it might not be anything but right now it means the world to my boss, so I have to find a way to find it." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Can you describe a typical day in your unit?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "No, but I will try. My typical day does not begin when I get here. It begins before. I’m holding up my iPhone, just so we can see what the future holds—so outdated. But before, it was a Blackberry. But I keep this on me all the time because I never know if a call might come. An email might come through from the Archivist, or Deputy Archivist, or chief of staff, and special assistant, or anyone, saying: “Sam, I need some help, or answers.” I’ve found that those calls can come any time, any day. So, it starts when I wake up and I look and see what’s waiting for me, and I come into work. There is a schedule, and usually my day will go according to the Archivist’s schedule, kind of balance it off of that: what is he doing today, and how can I support him. Or, how can I keep out of the way. From that, then, I determine how I’m going to go about my day, how I’m going to prioritize—and all the various parts that I’m doing on my own, things I’m doing for the Archivist directly, and I plan. You can have a rule book, but you need to know how to throw that rule book away. And an example of that is when the" }, { "speaker": "Archivist comes around the corner and says", "text": "“I need something, or can you get, or Sam, help me with whatever.” I know I’m going to pay complete attention, and I’m going to do what I can and see if I can get that as fast as I can. So, my days are unpredictable, and I love it that way. I do find that there are times when I can catch up on other things. But like laundry, there is always some more to do, and I’ve learned not to stress about that. If you’re not careful, you’ll start working 12 to 14-hour days, and there will always be something else. You just kind of have to let go." }, { "speaker": "MS. NIEKRASZ", "text": "I’m curious about—so, you’ve worked for three Archivists of the United States." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Yes, I have." }, { "speaker": "MS. NIEKRASZ", "text": "So, how does that go—the transition from one Archivist to another? I know one was acting." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "You know, it’s been, I would call it peaceful and professional. When Weinstein, Professor Weinstein, left, Adrienne Thomas was his Deputy Archivist, so it was pretty matter of fact that she would just kind of take over for a bit. There is always, I think, anxiety, amongst the immediate staff, and then it trickles, so you see it through the senior staff, the various senior level people executives, like office heads, and we’re all kind of wondering: “what does it mean to them?” I think it’s very easy to fall into the trap of perceiving that people are trying to jock you from a position, when really, I think people just don’t know what to expect, and so, I found that when Weinstein left, it was somewhat easy because Thomas said: “I want you to stay on board.” And during Weinstein’s time we had increased our staff and we had an executive assistant, and she had an assistant to help her. David Brown and I were special assistants to begin with, and then we had a third special assistant: Jackie Budell. We had people working on detail with us. We had a woman named Sandy Collins who worked with us as a special assistant, and Michael Hussey was on detail, Rick Blondo and some others, so our office was growing, and so Deb Wall came aboard, and the senior special assistant—so our office was getting somewhat large, but when Weinstein left, we shrunk down to Adrienne Thomas, her personal secretary, Mary, and me. Everyone else was sent off to different various jobs." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What are some challenges and issues that you have experienced here at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I found that a lot of staff feel, and rightly so, that they’re overwhelmed, that they’re undermanned. If you look at it from the amount of records we have, that’s obvious. I mean, we have barely a brigade worth of people—3,000 people around our agency. We’re dealing with 12,000,000,000 textual records we estimate, millions of photographs, motion pictures, electronic records are going faster on the geometric scale. So, as far as knowing everything that is there, we make do more with less. I found that the budget is also big, that our budget grew over time in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, and now it is shrinking. And we’re having to really make our shots count, and one way that’s manifesting itself is I don’t think we’re able to hire more people or promote people as much as I think they should be promoted. So, I think some of the challenges we face are—we have so many people coming into the research area from the Archives, so many people coming in from museums, so many people wanting. And we have so few staff having to deal with the records and the research and the museum goers and what have you. It could wear on you. It could be a source of stress. I think a challenge is also technology. I wish there was a way to like Star Trek or something—that we could find a way to immediately digitally scan stuff, not only scan it, but organize the records so they can be retrieved. You know, it is one thing to say scan everything but as I’ve learned from library science you’ve got to find a way to index it, so you can receive the data quickly. I just wish we could somehow jump a hundred years into the future, get pieces of technology, bring it back, and then apply it because then I think people’s jobs might be easier. So, the challenges, I think, are we’re outnumbered, outgunned so to speak. And we don’t have enough money. I don’t think Congress and the President are allocating enough money to this agency so we can really do the job that they want us to do. I think we’re getting by—I think we’re getting by a lot on the backs of hard-working people like Rick Peuser and others who, again, have a passion for this agency—Trevor Plante, any reference archivist, project archivist, and the number of technicians, who are just going above and beyond, who make my job easier." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "How has the relationship between NARA and other Federal agencies been?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "That’s a great question. I think that it’s improving. I think that there has been a lack of understanding of what we do in other government agencies. I’ve heard enough stories of archivists or records managers from the National Archives who would go out and meet with government agencies and they might be like “Oh really? You all are, you know, we deal with y’all? They [records] go to y’all eventually … ” It’s like holy cow, did you not know? So, I’ve kind of viewed, early on, Rebecca, that my goal in life has been in this agency to help make people more aware of what we do. There have been enough times in my job over the years, whether it was family and friends innocently saying: “oh, you work at the Library of Congress?” because the Library of Congress or Smithsonian is more familiar to people than the National Archives. When you think of tourists, people are like: Smithsonian, Air & Space Museum, or you know, Library of Congress, but now the National Archives is not quite there yet. And so, I had enough people, friends and family, say: “oh, you work at the Library of Congress.” “No, I don’t, asshole.” Or, I even had a publisher, when I was in the author lecture program, when I was trying to arrange for an author to come speak here, I had an email—I wish I could find it again. But the publisher said: “could you tell me the command structure of how the National Archives fits in with the Library of Congress?” I was like: “F you, it does not. We are an independent agency. No, if your author is going to speak at the Library of Congress, they can also come speak at the National Archives. So, go to hell.” You know, so, enough of that happened. Enough stories from colleagues saying that people from NASA or the Department of Energy or whoever were not sure about our role with them. I thought, let’s see what I can do. And whether it’s giving tours, whether it’s telling stories, or whether it’s just showing off this agency, to kind of reinforce it to people: “we are here, here’s what we have, here’s what we do, remember.” So, I think that things are getting better. However, I just had a thing last night where I went to Allen Weinstein—had passed away, the ninth Archivist, he passed away on June 19, and his widow invited me over to their house last night, and there were about thirty or forty other people there, and I recognized some faces, and there was a colleague, a friend named Tim Naftali, who used to be head of the Nixon Presidential Library. He has since left, and he is working at New York University, but he is somehow—he finds that he is up there in a university setting, and a lot of archivists and librarians are in that sector, maybe the university sector, or others, don’t like the National Archives. They think that we—he says that they think that we operate at a different standard, that we don’t really take into account them, or whatever. I was just kind of sitting there with my glass of wine thinking about my former boss, who you know, he was telling me this, and I thought: “wow, there must be more behind this. So, there must be a story back there.” So, I’ve got to figure it out and talk to Tim Naftali. What the heck does this mean that archivists don’t like or don’t trust the National Archives, or why? What’s the founding of that, or is that just an isolated thing that Tim is hearing, or is it more widespread, I don’t know." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "About a minute ago, you mentioned the tours that you do. Could you speak to that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Yes. In this office my primary responsibility when it comes to tours is giving what I call VIP tours, or tours for special guests of the Archivist. He just gave me a request to talk to a gentleman who works for the United States Court of Appeals. Who is a special guest of the Archivist? Anyone he says, whether it’s a head of state, we actually have the Archivist from Tanzania coming here later in the month. I will figure out who that person is, what they want to see, what their expectations are, what resources we have available, and then tailor it toward to make it worth their while. And again, we talked about earlier, my job and all, I feel like it’s just a culmination of all my experiences. I really believe we are the sum of our experiences, and it’s wise to apply all of it. When I played kickball in third grade, playing soccer, and little league, doing community theatre as an adult, playing piano throughout my life, all that kind of factors in somehow, and so, it’s kind of like how can we put on a good show? I don’t say that as far as being trite or anything, but how can I make that special guest feel welcome, how can we make it feel like their time has been well-spent, and how can they walk away again, understanding who we are, what we do, and what we have, and to me the biggest trick of all, when we give a tour, is whether it be for Prince Charles, or the President of Afghanistan, or former Vice President Dick Cheney. How do you make him walk away hungry for more? How do you make him say—how do you hopefully give a tour that makes him want to come back and learn more, say: “I want to do that again. Jeez that was great, they were nice.” How do you walk away with a good feeling and that they want to come back? To me, that’s how you build allies and build relationships. That’s how you build stakeholders, or that’s how you make people know who the heck the National Archives is." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Could you also speak to your boot camp program, as well as any other programs that you may have initiated?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Boot camp, boot camp is a personal thing. It started when, back in my second-to-last surgery, in 2012 I had surgery for cancer. It was the fourth one at the time, and I realized that I was really tired. I was worn out, and I said, “you know, Sam, you’re not getting younger. See what you can do to get in better shape.” And an interesting course of events I started picking up a sport that my daughter had been doing in high school: crew, rowing. I found that was a great way to get healthy. I also started taking some classes being offered here at the Archives. There had been a yoga class offered by some contractors in our gym, and they were also offering boot camps, and I found they were wonderful. They were wonderful, it was beating me up, was great. I was learning a lot, and they were great for me. But it was making me a better worker because I was getting fit, and my energy level … my whole mood was. And I was getting to meet people in the gym, who I might not normally see. And all of these—I always liked going to the gym, but they made me more conscientious and structured: go, go, go, go. And then with our budget cuts at that time, which occurred in 2013, that contracting staff in the gym left. The contract ended. And I saw how popular the program was, but I feel like I learned some things. I’m an entertainer and an educator like I’d like to be, and can try this. Let me try this, and see if others can help me, and let’s make this kind of a group thing. And so, we started calling them staff-driven boot camps. And, you know, it was fun. We averaged four, five, six, seven, eight people. We show up at a certain time and do it. So, who wants to try this next time, and we do things with our backs and arms. It made me force myself to learn more about different forms of exercise, better ways of stretching, diet, mixing it all together. So, it’s a great way to meet people, including you. Thanks for coming in." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Absolutely!" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Like I said, I’m feeling very sore today, so, as a result of all this." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Yes, and just a comment that I might add, one of the things I loved about your boot camp was how you talked to us about lots of interesting things throughout it. It was like we got to listen to music and you are our personal radio. It was so much fun." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Thank you. That’s nice of you to say, Rebecca, because I found that if I could exercise and talk at the same time, first of all it might improve—I know what kind of pace we should be going at, and there’s one level of exercise that you’re going that you can have a conversation, and then there’s one where you’re going passed that threshold of being able to breathe, and where you’re not taking enough oxygen, where you’re actually burning and forming your lactic acids actually, so I’ve found you have to gauge the people you’re with, and if you start seeing them turn purple, you know, let’s back it off—when you socialize, you can all learn." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Over the course of your time at NARA, what changes have you witnessed in the agency?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Technology, I think, has been the biggest. I remember talking to Don Wilson, who was the Archivist when I came on board, and actually, I’m sorry, he became Archivist while I was here. Let me get my facts straight here. Don Wilson was Archivist back in 1987, and he stayed on until Bush 41 left. So, when I came on board, he was here. And then, when he left, Trudy Peterson became the Acting Archivist from ’93 to ‘95, and then there was John Carlin. But what I remember Don Wilson telling me was when he was Archivist for a while, there was one fax machine in this building, and it was in his office, and through my studies of library science and working here, I knew about MARC records—machine readable format, and computerized records were here, you know, staff, protect, take care of, preserve, but it seemed kind of new to everyone. It was unfamiliar. But now we’re at a time where I remember being at Archives II, when it was opened up, and we were all getting these accounts, these computer accounts, and we were getting these email addresses, which were like 58,000 characters long, and it was all new. It was fascinating, so to see how our life has changed since the printed memo, or paper with a routing slip which you could check off and sign and move around, which you can see in our old records, to now having emails and telephones, but just the iPhone, and just how I can access my calendar on my iPhone, I can read the emails, I can communicate with anyone pretty much anywhere with this, it’s just a total change from what it used to be. I remember answering machines were a big change back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. You didn’t have to be by your rotary dial phone—and then you had your push button phone, but now you actually have this, so the technology with communicating is staving information, and being able to drag documents into your email and send out a whole bunch of stuff is big. But also, being able to digitally scan records, to me, digitization is huge, and it’s changing the whole ball game. I think it’s making some things complex and more complicated, but I think it’s an opportunity, and we have to seize it, and there are some people in this agency who are resistant to change. Okay, that’s fine. But there are others who aren’t. Have them bring everyone around to it because digital records and computerized records are going to be part of our future." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "I am actually writing a research paper on this, and it seems like your timeline here has been roughly the timeline of what I call the technological transformation of the past twenty years." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I am glad that I am part of history. Thank you." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "You truly are, in my opinion." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I’m living history! Fossil and everything! Yes!" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Can you possibly condense the key turn points in the technological transformation?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Sure. I think that the personal computer was big. From the late ‘70s through the early ‘80s, to make a computer small and affordable that means instead of taking up a whole room at NASA you could have it on a person’s desk, soon to have it on every government worker’s desk. From that, you start looking at the applications of the computer: communications, storing information. For a long time, computers were like fancy typewriters, but as a result, word processing. So, I think going from computers being small, the portable computer, the PC, to then having the smartphone, and Blackberry, being able to have your cell phone, your portable communications device, and how that’s enhanced over time, so you can now store information on it. You can record like you are doing now; you can really make this a tool for your job. It would be curious to see, ten, twenty years from now, how this tool or something similar would be used by the staff, or used by the Archivist. Will you be able to do really high-level scanning with something like this? Will a technician be able to go into a stack area and say, here’s a nineteenth century record from the provost marshal, which we were just talking about, from the 1860’s—can I used this to make a scan, which today we have to use a flatbed scanner, something the size of like a notebook, something the size of, you know, this briefcase, but could be something that is handheld. How will that change the nature of our jobs? Technology does change your job. It can change your job. The PC, the smart phone, and the digital scanner being affordable, heaven knows what it’ll be like if 3D printing could be used. I mean, I’m not sure we have those at the Archives yet, but it would be curious to see if it could be." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Any specific anecdotes on how any of these devices that you’ve mentioned have affected your work or the activities of the agency?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Digital scanning allows us to make copies of records and then we can use records, as I call it, as currency, as gifts. When we talk about these VIP’s come in here, to be able to say: “thank you for coming to the National Archives, you know, I’m sorry we only have an hour here, but I’m going to give you something to walk away with”—and to do that, you have to say: “ah, this guest is a big fan of tennis; let’s make a scan from a patent of a tennis racket in 1904.” Small things, because I say it small in that it’s kind of an offhand courteous gesture, but because it is easier to make now, that I had seen over the years that it’s quicker for the staff to make it more high quality, and to make something more affordable, where it doesn’t take as much time or money to me to digitize or not to say we’d go on a tour or to say, “Rebecca, you saw this record, you saw this record, here, I’m going to send you some more scans by email later,” or I’ll text them to you or something. To me digitizing the records and having a method to transport them either by smart phone or by computer, is a wonderful thing. So, it makes my job easier." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "And in the age of emails and text messages, can you speak to the future of the ERA, the Electronic Records Administration, is that what it’s called?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "The Electronic Records Archives." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Archives, and how will it change the nature of research, specifically of things like government department records?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Sure. I think that government department agencies are creating more and more electronic records. We are going to work with them to get those records to us quicker, we’re hopefully going to find a way to use technology and along with a human element, to make sure those records are organized and retrievable—that way it will be easier for people. A challenge I think we have to face is storing it all and making it safe, so that you can access it, but someone cannot come in and hack it or manipulate it, or change it. But to me the biggest challenge is going to be storage, as the data gets larger and larger, and then also retrievability—how can you come up with the right algorithm, so if you type up Elvis Presley, you know, terabytes of information, petabytes of information, how can you make sure you get five records of one, instead of the five million hits, how can you make sure you get exactly which one in an intuitive way? We are seeing on google and other databases, some are better than others, when you type in the search. You say, “okay, I was trying to limit the search. Okay, how can you make that part quicker, easier? How can maybe the computer start anticipating what you want and start saying, well, how about if we do this, but still giving you choice?” We don’t want the machines to start rising up because that is every science fiction nightmare, but I really think that the idea of the ERA can help. And I think it’s inevitable because science fiction writers have a great way of guessing the future and they can be quite accurate. Think about Star Trek with the communicator device. We have our phone, but others like Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, and others—some of that stuff has already come true. And, you know, we don’t have our own little air-cars yet, you know, flying cars, but you’ve got to be able to have computerized databases, databanks, whatever they’re called. And you’ve got to be able to access the records because you can’t transport twelve billion paper records with you. But there’s got to be a way you can access them on the moon when you are five thousand feet up in an airplane, or whether you are in Arkansas, and the records are here in DC. There has got to be a way, through the computer, or whatever the future iteration is." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "You mentioned some resistance, and you mentioned a lot of benefits, but for you, what is the overall impact of the technological transformation at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "It’s helping. It’s helping me. It’s helping my job, and I think it’s going to help the researcher eventually." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Can you describe your involvements with other professional organizations, such as SAA, or OAH?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I don’t, I’m not a member of any of them. They come here to the Archives because we have various leaders who meet with them—so I see them as I’m preparing the Archivist for a meeting. I know they have a benefit and a purpose." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Emily, do you have any questions before we conclude?" }, { "speaker": "MS. NIEKRASZ", "text": "I’m okay." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Is there anything you would like to add to the interview such as anecdotes or words of wisdom?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Yes, I think that the strength of this agency, well, what I like to promote about it are the records and the people. It’s the people, and I think that some of the hardest working people are the reference archivists, the staff who deal with the general public, with their research questions, who become familiar with the records. I wish we could find a way to increase them fivefold. They are great. I just think about the years here, and you know, look outside my window, and here I am with an office on the mezzanine level of what we used to call mahogany row, and I get to see Pennsylvania Avenue—I think: jeez, I’m sitting here, and you’re actually asking me questions. I’m humbled by it." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "We are humbled by the opportunity to ask you questions." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "You may be my boss one day, who knows, because I realized, you know, time is changing, and I was your age once. I am 46 years old, I could retire in eleven years—I could retire from the Federal government in eleven years, and by then, I will have had 35 years in government. Me, I don’t feel old, well, I do, I physically feel old, but I still feel like a kid in a candy store. I feel like there’s always something new to learn." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory—isn’t the National Archives kind of like it?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Okay, you know what? That movie scared me as a kid. The oompa loompas scared me. As a child, they scared me. And you know what else scared me? Sesame Street had these characters, where there were like these shaman priests, and they were very wise, and they would sit there. And first of all, the Count, I liked him with his bats, I thought they were creepy. I didn’t like how he talked to them, but they would never talk back. But there were these, one characters, who sit there, and they just scared me because they have these big eyebrows, and they would sit there and puppets, and so the Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory movie scared me because I remember one kid fell into the chocolate, and he got really plump, and yeah, that scared me, so to heck with your Willy Wonka?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Back to the kid in the candy shop?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I can deal with that—the kid in the candy store, unlike Willy Wonka. And I thought Willy Wonka was weird. This place, there’s hope, it’s given me a career. I’ve learned something new every day, and it’s really through these mentors I was telling you about—it’s really, I was talking about Rick Peuser, but Gary Morgan, who was an assistant branch chief in the textual research room, taught me how to weather the storm here, but Allen Weinstein, Adrienne Thomas, David Ferriero, Deb Wall, David Brown, they were all—I’ve really had a lot of people who gave me a break, but then people like Rick Peuser and other archivists, who shared with me what they found: “hey Sam, I was in the stack area, I found this.” It totally helps me out because then I think about that author lecture program and the stuff that the authors have found in our holdings, or what they come across—I learn something every day, and I have no regrets. But I have made some great screw-ups in my time, I mean some fine ones, oh yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Do we want to return to those for entertainment value, and/or learning from them?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "1850s’s census for Day County Georgia, in the very northwestern corner, I remember in the research room I had a researcher named Charles Bibb, and Charles Bibb came up, and he started giggling. He showed me on the microfilm that the third-to-last page of the census for that county for 1850—there was a group of four women, and their occupation was “fucking!” For 1850, it’s a historic record, so we can put it in here, and as a young 22 or 23-year-old I was tickled pink, and I was like: “wow, how cool, a whole new world at the Archives here, gee whiz!” And so, I remembered that. So, whenever I would tell stories, about work, you know, I would always include that. And people went: “wow, that’s an interesting place where you work.” And then they’d get into a debate the word “fucking” was around back then? Well, it was an 1850 census, so you tell me. And I once gave a tour to some people from the Department of Justice, and I showed them that, the fucking document, and of course they were all like: “wow!” And one of the women who" }, { "speaker": "were there at the Department of Justice afterward said", "text": "“thank you very much for the tour, and I wonder if you could show that to my husband one day.” And I realized that her husband’s name was Gene Weingarten, who was a humor columnist for the _Washington Post_ , and I remember that my bosses were very unhappy. Because he was contacting them, saying: “I want to see the “fucking” document. I want to see other documents, so I can write a humor story about the holdings.” I just remember they were very unhappy with me. They thought that this was going to put the Archives in a bad light. I did save the article that he wrote for the _Washington Post_ Magazine, and it includes some other interesting things. I just remember how my boss and my boss’s boss were just, and I think that was one of those moments where if they weren’t going to fire me, they were going to find a way to push me out or something, make my life hell. But ya, I remember that." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Then there was the pillow in the cage." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "The pillow in the cage. Yes, makes me sound like a zoo animal. I also remember, up the street now, which was the Old Post Office Pavilion, which Trump is trying to make into a hotel. But that used to be a large area where you could—the Post Office Pavilion had a lot of restaurants that you could go to. And as a technician who didn’t have a lot of money, very tired of eating his own bagged lunches, I knew that there was a place up there called Enrico’s Pizza. In the early to mid-1990’s, in the Post Office Pavilion, there was Enrico’s Pizza, where for a mere pittance you could get a slice or two of big greasy cheese pizza with pepperoni, but if you bought one of their 24 ounce plastic cups, you can get a coke in that, but whenever you came back with it, they would fill it up for half price. So, what was a young guy to do? I’d go buy my two slices of pizza, get my 24 ounces of beer at lunch, right? I would come back, get another one, at half price, and back then it was seven bucks—I could get all this food and drink. Well, a few of us would come back at lunch, and in the research rooms, we had lunch either 11:30 to 12:30 or 12:30 to 1:30 or 1:30 to 2:30. Coming back from lunch we smelled maybe like a brewery and we thought maybe but then when the buzz wore off, you’d kind of be in the research rooms getting a little sleepy—we were a little rambunctious. So, there were probably moments then when I was almost, I was this close, but you learn to maintain your buzz." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Well, thank you so much for your time." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Yes, make sure that gets put in the records. Thank you very much. You’re very good at interviewing. It was a pleasure to do this. #### NATIONAL ## AR **CHIVES** National Archives History Office 700 Pennsylvania Av e. NW Washington DC 20408" } ]

[ { "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", "text": "Okay. I've got the recording started. Thank you for participating in the National Archives Oral History Project. We're documenting the history of the agency by preserving firsthand accounts of events. My name is Stephanie Reynolds, and I'm based out of our National Archives facility in Denver, Colorado. I'm assisting the agency historian, Jessie Kratz, on this important project. Today is Monday, September 25th, 2023, and I'm speaking with Jason R. Baron. Okay, Jason, just to get it started, could you just tell me a little bit about your background, like your education, where you're from, that sort of thing?" }, { "speaker": "Jason Baron", "text": "Of course. Thank you so much, Stephanie, for the opportunity to participate in this really important project. I am an enthusiastic supporter of oral history. My own background is that I was born and raised in Massachusetts. I'm the son of an MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] professor, I went to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and then I went on to Boston University School of Law. I graduated there in 1980. I started working in the federal government at the Department of Health and Human Services in 1980, and then transferred to the Justice Department in 1988, to work in the Civil Division’s Federal Programs Branch. While there, I defended lawsuits involving the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] and federal recordkeeping policies, among many other types of lawsuits. I was there for 12 years. In 2000, I took a visiting scholar position at the University of British Columbia. And then I was very lucky that there was an opening at the National Archives for a position as the first director of litigation at the National Archives, posted in 2000. And I was very privileged and honored to be accepted there. So then I spent 13 years at NARA [National Archives and Records Administration], which we'll get into. So really, I know that you first want to speak to the Justice Department portions of my career, and I'm happy to do that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to ask you about, to rewind back to your time at DOJ [Department of Justice]. I know that you've covered a lot of high-profile cases, and I didn't know if you wanted to go into any detail about any of those cases, for example, like the PROFS case and how that morphed into the _Public Citizen v. Carlin_ case? Do you want to talk about any of those things?" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "I'd be happy to. The PROFS case— _Armstrong v. Reagan_ , _Armstrong v. Bush_ , _Armstrong v._ _Executive Office of the President_ . It had different titles. It was really the most important case of my career. And it is one of the most important cases that the National Archives ever faced. It is a landmark case that established, in particular, that electronic mail can be a federal record and a Presidential record and should be preserved in electronic form as well as paper form, when appropriate. So the case was filed on the last day of the Reagan administration, in the afternoon on January 19th, 1989, by Scott Armstrong—who wrote the book called _The Brethren_ with Bob Woodward—and a number of other plaintiffs, including Gary M. Stern, who became general counsel at NARA many years later in 1998. But in 1989, the plaintiffs had heard from John Fawcett, who was then the head of Presidential Libraries at NARA, that backup tapes containing Iran-Contra [Affair] PROFS notes from Ollie North and John Poindexter were going to be destroyed at the end of the Reagan administration. They were going to be recycled. And because they believed that there was unique history on those backup tapes in the PROFS notes that may or may not have ever been printed out either because of the special counsel investigation of Lawrence Walsh into Iran-Contra, or otherwise by staffers at the National Security Council, they went into court, sought a temporary restraining order, and got one from the late Judge Barrington Parker. I should add that John Bolton, as assistant attorney general of the Civil Division, argued the case. And that afternoon, he said that backup tapes are sort of like furniture. They're like chairs and desks. They can be thrown out at the end of an administration. The court did not accept that. The court said that there might be a case here for the plaintiffs and issued a temporary restraining order for 392 backup tapes being preserved. That case went on to seven years of litigation with four appeals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. It had many ramifications to it. The case expanded in 1992 at the end of the George H. W. Bush administration when ... the late Judge Charles Richey issued a second ... TRO [temporary restraining order] and preliminary injunction, stopping further destruction of any backup tapes from the Bush 41 [President George H. W. Bush] administration before Bill Clinton came into office on January 20th, 1993. And Judge Richey finally got to the merits of the case on January 6th, 1993, when he held that email in paper form was different from email in electronic form. It did not have sender and recipient information. And so in his mind, the computer knew something that the printed versions of email didn't. The [computer] had all the recipients of email. So, this was—he didn't say the word metadata—but it's the first judicial decision that recognizes that metadata is important and makes electronic versions different from paper versions of records. And that decision was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, and it remains an important landmark decision. Along the way, there was an appeal on issues of whether courts should even be involved in Presidential decision-making. And an early decision, the first appellate decision in the case, is still very relevant to today. It said that plaintiffs don't have standing to micromanage the President's recordkeeping. And so, any portion of the case that involved Presidential records was off-limits. But at the time, the backup tapes were the National Security Council's backups and the NSC’s status as to whether it was Presidential, that it was covered by the Presidential Records Act, or was a federal agency, was left for a remand, as was recordkeeping guidance ... left to the district court to further rule on. Plus, the case got expanded to all the other components of the Executive Office of the President [EOP] through amended complaints. And so OMB [Office of Management and Budget] and USTR [Office of the United States Trade Representative] and the Office of National Drug [Control] Policy and others were caught up in the case. It wasn't just about the original backups. It was the email from all of the White House in the Bush administration and the Clinton administration. And so what are the outcomes of the case? Well, I'm going on at length because this is really important to how the government works today and what happened with the National Archives. One of the outcomes of the case was that emails have been archived by the White House since 1994. Up till then, email was not considered a record, but the case said it was. And it was only considered a record if somebody printed out the emails. But because of the case, John Podesta went to Bill Clinton. They succeeded in getting money appropriations out of Congress for what was known as the ARMS system at the White House. That was the original system that archived email. And at the end of the Clinton administration, there were 20 million Presidential emails, 32 million from the EOP as a whole, and that number has only increased over time. So since 1994, White House records have been archived because of the Armstrong case holdings and the voluntary position of the White House that everything should be archived electronically. So now if you fast forward to 2023, NARA is holding on the order of 700 million emails between the Reagan administration and the Trump administration, which comes to about 3 billion pages. And as an aside here, I'm on record in many of my talks that we need better ways to access that information, including through artificial intelligence, because only .5 percent of the 700 million emails have been opened and are accessible to the American people. Think about that. Ninety- nine-and-a-half percent of White House emails as of 2023 remain unopened. And there are reasons for that, but we can talk about that some other time. So this, the Armstrong case, also led to NARA issuing email regulations in 1995, and they still are in existence. They've been amended.... The last thing I'm going to say about this, there's one more thing that happened, which is that the case ended up deciding that the National Security Council was a Presidential component and produced Presidential records as opposed to federal records. And that was another decision that was held in the case. So the case is important in many ways. It did have a successor case that you mentioned, _Public Citizen v. Carlin_ , and it involved the General Records Schedule [GRS] 20, which has now been superseded. At the time, that schedule was an attempt by NARA to satisfy the Armstrong holding, but also not impose electronic recordkeeping throughout the government, which at the time in the 1990s, agencies considered to be extremely burdensome and costly. NARA got hundreds and hundreds of comments on a notice of proposed rulemaking, which was issued as a one-time thing, with respect to the General Records Schedule 20. The bottom line was that the GRS 20 said that emails could be printed out, but they had to have the metadata that the Armstrong case and Judge Richey decided. So [emails] had to either have sender and recipient information printed out, or agencies could archive email in some form. Plaintiffs objected—a different set of plaintiffs, with Public Citizen being the lead—objected that that really wasn't in conformance with the Armstrong case, that everything should be electronically saved. And this was kind of a makeweight solution, a halfway solution with still allowing the government to print emails with metadata. And plaintiffs wanted [to litigate] this [in] court. They lost in the court of appeals. And so the government at that time did not have to electronically archive email or come up with email schedules for every agency. If you fast forward to 2016 because of a memorandum issued in 2012, which we can talk about, titled the _Managing Government Records Directive,_ NARA and OMB required all agencies to electronically manage their email. And so the print-to-paper era of Armstrong and the _Public_ _Citizen v. Carlin_ case came to an end in 2016, and now every government agency has to manage its electronic records and particularly manage its email electronically. So the Armstrong cases had profound implications for the rest of the government. I will pause and not go into the Capstone archiving policy that I'm happy to do. But in any event, the echoes of that case, the way that that case set policy continues as a really, really important precedent to this day. I was honored to be lead lawyer in the case from 1992 until it ended in the late 1990s. And also, I was the lead lawyer on the _Public Citizen v. Carlin_ case." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, it sure reverberated through the entire, you know, through the years since the 80s, 90s, to today and continuing on how records are being managed for sure. What [CROSS-TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "... and how lawsuits can or cannot sue the President, whether complaints can be filed that survive a standing analysis that courts don't throw them out because of something that is happening in the Oval Office. In the White House, for example, there was a lawsuit by CREW filed—Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington—filed against the Trump administration, all about the use of ephemeral apps like Signal and Confide that were used by individuals at the White House. And the suit was all about whether those should be considered records and preserved. And the courts threw the lawsuit out, not because they didn't think they were records. The DC Circuit said, \"Of course, they're probably covered under the Presidential Records Act. But the President decides what is a record and cannot be micromanaged.\" [Paraphrasing.] And so the court dismissed the lawsuit. So, the early Armstrong case has implications for what is going on currently in many lawsuits." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "You said that you were the lead on the Armstrong case. Can you talk about what your role was in that case?" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "Well, I was the guy standing in court when many of the events happened. I was not the lead at the beginning in 1989. Other lawyers were, who worked for John Bolton and then others in the Bush administration. Again, it was filed on the last day of the Reagan administration and carried over to the Bush and the Clinton administration. But I came in June 1992, and as lead lawyer, I was the person defending the merits of the lawsuit. The positions of the United States, DOJ and NARA had already been set out in briefs prior to my entering my appearance. But there were many rounds of further briefing in 1992, and I was arguing the case in late 1992. I was standing there when a preliminary injunction was issued by the court. I was there during the Presidential transition as lead lawyer. That was an unhappy experience of transitioning from George H. W. Bush to Bill Clinton. The court held Archivist Don Wilson in contempt for failing to abide by certain preservation standards with the handling of backup tapes. And the transition was chaotic. At the end of the Bush administration, there were a lot of things that went wrong. The court got upset that its own guidance hadn't been immediately satisfied. That is when the court ruled that email was a record. It wanted to have the EOP change all of its systems and do archiving and do restoration of tapes, whatever. On all sorts of grounds, the court thought that the White House and the Executive Office of the President were moving too slowly, and so it accepted plaintiffs' arguments on lots of grounds, including alleged mishandling of backup tapes. And the Archivist was held in contempt. It's the only time, to my knowledge, the Archivist of the United States has ever been held in contempt by a court. That ruling was stayed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and ultimately the DC Circuit overruled the contempt finding. But it was a fraught time. And as the head lawyer of the case, I took a lot of flak from the court as to what the government was doing. I think Judge Richey and I had a good working relationship, but I could only defend the government's actions to a certain extent. And it was a highly visible experience and written up in _The New York Times_ and _The Washington Post_ repeatedly as to what was going on. And I stayed on the case, and what I was happiest about is that I did have a role in settling aspects of the case with respect to electronic recordkeeping. There were various stipulations of settlements that let the case go forward and let the White House develop its own archiving system. And plaintiffs did not object—they had a role in both the email regulations in giving comments and also in understanding what was going on at the White House. I really was privileged to play a role in quieting down the case, in some respects. And then the case went on with respect to the National Security Council’s status. In any event, it is a great privilege to be able to stand up in court as a Justice Department lawyer and say that you're representing the United States. You're representing the White House and NARA. And because of my role in the case and my great interest in recordkeeping, as a result of the case, you know, I continued on the _Public Citizen v. Carlin_ case. But I was absolutely enthralled with everything about the National Archives. And I loved it as an institution. I got to know many people who I thought were consummate public servants. And so, when an opening came up for a position as director of litigation, I applied. Miriam Nisbet, who had been special counsel to the Acting Archivist Trudy Peterson, left for an appointment at the American Library Association. So when the Office of General Counsel and Gary Stern—who was the general counsel in 2000, replacing Elizabeth Pugh, who had been general counsel for a couple of years—when that position was opened, I thought it was the perfect position for me having spent all this time on the Armstrong case. And I thought I could play a useful role going forward at the National Archives. I was delighted to be there." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So, you've brought up a few things here that I want to touch on. First, I want to go back to the email regulations in 1995 that came out of that Armstrong case. Did you have any input on that?" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "Well, yes, actually I did. I worked very closely with Jim Hastings and others to essentially draft those regulations. After those regulations were put into effect, I was honored to be given an award from the Archivist [John Carlin] for my role. It is and it was a very special thing. I think Justice Department attorneys do get involved in agency policies from time to time. But I really felt that I wanted to be “all in” on how to solve the email recordkeeping issues that arose in the case. And so I actively assisted NARA personnel in that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So, did working on that and working with NARA on these lawsuits, did that really give you the interest in email and electronic records and the legality surrounding all of that? Or were you already interested in those things?" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "Well, Stephanie, I actually did my honors thesis in 1977 on recordkeeping and also on how the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] and its criminal databases were accessed by Interpol. So I've always been interested. I took a FOIA seminar in law school. All I can say is that Malcolm Gladwell believes that if you do anything for 10,000 hours, you become a subject matter expert. And I spent almost that many hours on the Armstrong and the GRS 20 cases over a period of my eight years remaining at the Justice Department. I did other litigation, but—. So it was natural for me to go on. And when I came to the National Archives, the Armstrong case followed. The backup tapes followed with me! There were still issues regarding preservation of the backup tapes, and continuing issues about disposition of those tapes over time. In any event, when I came to the National Archives, I was in my dream job. And I'm happy to talk to you about all of the things that happened on my watch in the 13 years I was there." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, certainly. So it sounds like because of some of the Armstrong cases and working with NARA, that that built some interest in you wanting to move over to the National Archives. Is that correct?" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "I had great interest in pursuing these policies and assisting NARA further." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So did the Archives make this position for you, do you think? Or they posted it and you just saw that it was open?" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "They did not make the position for me. But no, as I said, Miriam Nisbet left and there was a reformulation of the position. She had been special counsel, but Gary Stern and others, Chris Runkel and others, believed that there should be a broader mandate for a director of litigation that covered both federal court litigation, as well as administrative proceedings like EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] administrative hearings under Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964] or MSPB [Merit Systems Protection Board] hearings. And so there was a broader portfolio for the director of litigation. I should add that there have been three successor directors of litigation since I left in 2013, but I was privileged to be the first in this position, as there were many candidates that applied for the job." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Did you find it challenging to be the first one?" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "Well, first, what I wish to say here is that Gary Stern, who has been general counsel since 1998, and continues through the date we're having this discussion, has been the finest civil servant I've ever met. He has set the tone for the General Counsel's Office for 25 years as someone who is nonpartisan, fair, gives appropriate advice both to appointees from Democrat and Republican administrations, and is always on top of everything. He comes out of Vassar and Yale Law School. He is one of the smartest lawyers I've ever met. And he's one of the kindest. And what he allowed all of his staff to do is to blossom in the job, whatever responsibilities they have. They can go with whatever interests them as much as they want. And in my case, early on, I told Gary that I thought of the job as more than just a litigation job. It was also an educational job of what the Federal Records Act means to government agencies, and that I would be happy to act in a public-facing way to go out and give talks and briefings and be involved in the world. He not only allowed me to do that throughout the government, but he also allowed me to pursue outside interests in terms of the greater legal community. And I'll tell you how. It was the case of _U.S. v. Philip Morris_ , which involved a RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] racketeering case against seven tobacco companies that was filed in the Clinton administration, which was all consuming to many federal agencies for many years. There were 100 billion dollars at stake originally that the Clinton administration said was the remedy that should be disgorged back to the American people from these companies, because they had been in a conspiracy since the 1950s to withhold information about cigarettes and about cancer from the American public. And that case went on for a very long time. But in 2001 and 2002, right after I started, the Justice Department received a request for documents directed to many, many agencies, including the National Archives. The National Archives was asked for all documents related to tobacco going back to the Eisenhower administration. And because NARA owns Presidential Libraries and runs them ... there were tremendous numbers of paper records. There were also, in the Clinton email collection that was accumulated because of the Armstrong case, 20 million White House emails and 12 million other EOP emails all to search for responsive records. And I should add that the request from Philip Morris and the companies to the government for documents was 1,726 paragraphs long, where ... the last paragraph said, \"All the prior paragraphs apply to the National Archives.\" So I was tasked by the Justice Department tobacco litigation team to go search 20 million emails. And the way to do that in 2002 was simply to type in keywords and use a vendor who had put up the emails on a platform—I believe it was Booz Allen—and do a search. So there were search terms that were used, and I was asked to create the search terms. I actually got about 25 individuals, lawyers in the office as well as archivists, to go look at 200,000 emails that were found to be responsive to a set of search terms. At the end of that process, after six months, I believe, we found about 100,000 responsive records. There were a lot of false positives that were there—you type in the word \"smoking\" as a keyword and you get a lot of policies on smoking in bathrooms, but it has nothing to do with tobacco policy. Or you type in Marlboro, you get lots of emails that have to do with Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Any term you type in will get false positives, get a lot of noise. You have to separate that out. Plus, you have to look for various categories that would be privileged and have a discussion about that with the other side. In any event, that all went forward. I don't think we have the time to talk about all the particulars of the litigation, but what I emerged with afterwards is that I saw the future in some respect. And I saw that if there were 20 million emails of Clinton, that at the rate of growth of email there would be tremendous numbers in the future. I've been proven right. There are 700 million now. And when you get up to those kinds of numbers, keyword searching doesn't work. And so I went on a quest to find better ways to search than lawyers did in 2002. That led to a whole other set of actions and developments that I was part of that really don't relate to the history of the National Archives as such. It relates to my personal history in going to computer scientists at the University of Maryland and at the National Institute of Standards and Technology using lawyers in my office to work with me on a research project called the Text REtrieval Conference, TREC Legal Track, which by itself set the basis for finding that machine learning and AI [Artificial Intelligence] methods worked better than keywords, were much more efficient, and were just as good. And so all of that work started out of the _U.S. versus Philip Morris_ case, and I continued it in various forums and wrote about and spoke about it and then did research on it, and it ended up influencing the case law that came afterwards where judges accepted that machine learning methods could do a very good job in answering document requests. And that continues to this day. There's a growing number of hundreds and hundreds of cases that accept that AI methods for search, known as technology-assisted review or predictive coding, work well if the parties are able to talk to each other about what is going on with the software.... I feel very good about the role that I played in evangelizing AI methods early on, and it was all originally due to these requests to NARA for a search. No one had ever searched 20 million emails in 2002. So, the fact that that obligation was imposed on NARA in the litigation led to thinking about better ways to search. And not to toot my own horn, but there was a documentary about my career and about another lawyer's career in 2014 called _The Decade of Discovery_ , that outlined the case and the efforts that I had made, and I'm very proud of being part of that documentary. The documentary had many other individuals—judges and lawyers—in it, and it was basically tracking the way that the law developed in terms of this area. So if you fast forward to today, I have sometimes now been a critic of NARA. One of my failures in my time at NARA was not being able to push sufficiently for tools, software, that would do the machine-learning-type methods that I think would help with huge volumes of electronic records that are coming in, that were known to be in the White House. And now for the rest of the government, there are directives that say that the entire government will be transitioning to electronic records and accessioning permanent records to the National Archives after June 2024. That's the latest deadline as of now. But I've been pushing for NARA to use machine learning more and more, especially due to the experiences of searching for records of Supreme Court nominees for John Roberts in 2005 and Elena Kagan in 2010. They both worked in the White House in prior administrations as younger lawyers. NARA had to search for those records. and then later, after I left my position, for Brett Kavanaugh’s records. I think [these experiences] have all convinced NARA officials that when you're asked for records of Supreme Court nominees and they end up being, you know, on the order of 900,000 emails, you need a better way than keyword searching to search. And that was a matter of some [considerable] back and forth [with Congress], the last time with Justice Kavanaugh being nominated. So, because of those [appointments], and the special role NARA plays in historical records and needing to search during the nomination process for individuals who worked in the prior administration, plus litigation, plus FOIA requests, there are many reasons that one needs machine-learning methods that are well-known in e-Discovery in the private sector to be employed. And I believe steps are being made now [by NARA] in 2023 to have more robust search methods. But I've been out there in the ten years since I've been at NARA to argue that NARA should be a leader on this. And in various forums, I've made that point. I think, yeah, things are changing. And there's also machine learning that is being done at NARA in other contexts involving searches of web online records. Pam Wright, in the Office of Innovation, has done excellent things in terms of advancing the ball for the use of machine learning and AI in other ways. But in the litigation world with email, email is not a web record. It's not put up online presumptively as soon as it's created. So even now, I've told you that only .5 percent is up there. So there are different worlds of records that NARA has, and there are tremendous efforts to deal with digitization and putting up all portions of the collection. But with respect to email records from the White House and the coming wave of email from all government agencies, NARA is going to really need to, in the future, consider artificial intelligence to help." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Again, lots of topics here. So, you mentioned Gary Stern. He really allowed you to blossom in the job and kind of, you know, look into things that were important to you or that you were interested in, and so that led you to learning more about keyword searching and FOIA and machine learning and all these other things that you were looking into in terms of being a successful director of litigation, specifically at NARA. Do you think that you need to be given that latitude to really learn and look into being in the forefront of records in terms of, you know, searching records, providing access, FOIA, e-Discovery, things like that? Do you think that's largely what helped make you successful as the director of litigation at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "I think that every director of litigation—there have been four of us—has brought their special strengths and expertise to the job. I did believe, and I still believe, that it's extremely helpful to have been a trial lawyer at the Justice Department—as was Alina Semo, who succeeded me [at NARA] after we worked together in the Federal Programs Branch at the Justice Department. The fact is that when you are a former Justice Department lawyer who comes to the National Archives, you have a certain respect for your colleagues that they know that you know how litigation works. And so while others can do a fine job without having been at the DOJ, I always felt that in my own case, it tremendously helped, because I knew how litigation worked. I was a lead attorney [at DOJ]. And I was happy to be second chair on any number of lawsuits as director of litigation at NARA and play a different role. But being able to talk as a peer to one's former colleagues and new colleagues, you know, in the Justice Department Civil Division, was a big plus. So that's really one set of expertise. Others bring their own expertise. They can be experts in privacy. They can be experts in other ways with classified records. And so it's a great thing to have, you know, expertise in any number of areas. Obviously, if you're director of litigation, your focus in the General Counsel's office is primarily on assisting on litigation and helping the general counsel frame the arguments for NARA, hearing what NARA's position has to say, and being a strong advocate for NARA in all of its ways. But inevitably, you get involved in non-litigation areas, as in writing memoranda, including in interacting with, for example, the Office of Legal Counsel if there's a difference of opinion between NARA and another agency. I wrote a couple of memoranda that were part of [inter­ agency] disputes, and we were successful. But in other ways, I did believe that, because of my role in Armstrong and having helped fashion the email regulations, that I had something to say about electronic records and email as a matter of policy. And that wasn't always well-received by staff who thought that I should stay in my own swimming lane. But I think I had tremendous support from Paul Wester, who was the first chief records officer of the United States, and support from his successor, Laurence Brewer. And the two of them are absolutely wonderful. They have been wonderful civil servants. Mr. Wester, Paul, is now at the National Agricultural Library as director. During his years and in Laurence's years, I think they understood that Gary and I, and others in the General Counsel's Office, had a role to play in assisting in the fashioning of policies. And one instance that I will say ... I was heavily involved was in the _Managing Government_ _Records Directive._ Actually, Gary Stern took the lead in working with OMB in creating a memorandum that Barack Obama issued in 2011 to the entire government, saying that the era of recordkeeping needs to step up to embrace technology and so we should really pay attention to it, and that recordkeeping is the backbone of transparency and open government. That's a phrase that Gary actually put forward and then others took the mantle up. And so Gary fashioned something that ended up being this memorandum that was adopted by the President, issued, and then that [was] followed in 2012 with something called th _e Managing_ _Government Records Directive._ And that was a mandate from OMB and NARA to tell the government that there were certain deadlines that had to be met. The original deadline was 2019 for transitioning to electronic recordkeeping, and all accessions at the National Archives after 2019 would be in electronic form. I remember there was a series of retreats and facilitated meetings where we were brainstorming about what the _Managing Government Records Directive_ would look like, and I played a role. One day I channeled JFK [President John F. Kennedy] [with respect to going to the Moon], in suggesting that by the “end of the decade” we would be asking for electronic records solely to be accessioned, so we would become an electronic records repository. There would always be legacy paper, but whatever. And that was adopted. The 2019 date was originally adopted. It went to 2022, and now it's June 2024—in a series of updates and revisions to that policy. But the central mandate was set in 2011-2012 by the efforts of Gary, and I contributed to the fashioning of the directive. Now how the government would then go about archiving email and what policies were in effect, I'm very happy to have played a role in the development of what is known as the Capstone archiving approach to email. Because as you recall, Armstrong was all about email being a record. And NARA then said you could still print to paper with metadata, but that didn't work. No one in government was really paying attention to the regulations. There was massive noncompliance, in my view. And so I believed that senior officials' email should be archived, presumptively, that we should just deem all senior officials in government that are designated by their agencies as such to create permanent records. It was a disruptive idea because up till then, email was scheduled. Every email was to go to its own record schedule, depending on its subject matter. But this was a different way, a role-based way of archiving email. It was controversial in the beginning. There were individuals on Paul Wester's staff that believed that senior officials' emails contained a lot of junk, noise, temporary records, that would be swept up if all of their emails were deemed to be permanent. And they were right.... But the problem is, as I tried to say in many places, the National Archives could either accept zero percent of email from the government, or it could take in a huge amount, which historically would contain records that it wouldn't normally take a lot of temporary stuff, but then it would have the good stuff, the permanent stuff. So, what did you want? Zero percent or too many records? I think the National Archives was right in adopting a Capstone policy that said to the agencies voluntarily, if they wanted to adopt this as a way to meet the _Managing Government Records_ _Directive_ , that all email from senior officials would be deemed to be permanent and everybody else's email would be preserved for seven years. Two-hundred-and-fifty components or more of the government have adopted Capstone. Today there are hundreds of millions of emails being preserved in cabinet agencies. And that, of course, leads to what I was talking about before, a search issue of how you search them for responsive records. But the fact that they are kept means that for history's sake, the emails of senior officials in the administrations from 2016 on, will be preserved for the American people. I think that's a tremendous plus to history and, look, there'll be issues about search and filtering for sensitivities and exemptions but at least we have those emails. And so in that, I played a role. The word Capstone was not mine. It was invented by a gentleman named Ken Hawkins, who was on the staff at NARA. But as to the idea, I remember pulling out a dollar bill and on the back there's a pyramid with a capstone on it. And the idea, I think, resonated with me early on that that should be a government policy. And then Ken came along and named it Capstone. So I was very pleased to be part of that effort." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. I mean, like you said, it was kind of a landmark thing where this was unheard of before. I remember being at a conference one time, just attending and sitting with others nearby and talking about it and expressing it as more of like this role-based approach that the senior officials would be permanent. And it just blew their mind. They didn't really understand it yet, but it was still new. The idea was still new. But like you said, there's so many agencies now that have adopted that approach, and I think it has made it a lot easier to get those emails captured, although there are issues. [CROSS-TALKING] Go ahead." }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "The reason that it has been widely adopted is that there are no alternatives that work. Because if you rely on people to drag and drop into folders, they won't do it. Nobody wants to spend extra time on every email. There are just too many emails, and now there are text messages and other forms of ephemeral apps that may or may not be incorporated into Capstone. There's a recent policy that Laurence [Brewer] put out that urges agencies to think about expanding the Capstone repository to other forms of electronic messaging, consistent with various legislation that exists on the subject. And so it's a workable thing, because it's automated, but it's not the end. It would be nice if through means of AI, there could be some greater differentiation and granularity to email to separate out good stuff and, you know, wheat and chaff, noise and signal. But for now, it is a very good first approximation of what an archiving scheme should be, in my view. But it has been controversial, and there are flaws." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, I think, you know, agencies are working toward making it a more efficient and smooth process. I know that when we inspect agencies, some of them talk about the challenges of having to track, for example, like an acting senior official. When did they get in the role? When did they leave that role and, you know, no longer are senior officials and that sort of thing? But they're all working on processes to improve that. But I think the basis of it is pretty sound in terms of keeping all of the senior officials’ emails. And there are agencies accepting Capstone or using that approach for electronic records now, too. So, in terms of the M-12-18, what goes into crafting a government mandate like that?" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "Well, in the first instance, I mentioned brainstorming on the part of NARA individuals. But that brainstorming effort was aided greatly because the memorandum from President Obama originally set up a process where agencies would comment by certain dates, and OMB followed that, so that NARA received hundreds and hundreds of comments. I forget the exact number, but the way that NARA staff dealt with it is to read every one and, in a spreadsheet- fashion, decide what action should be taken, whether it should be accepted, rejected, accepted in part. So there were hundreds ... of comments that agencies had as to what would be appropriate in a _Managing Government Records Directive_ . In the end, we did accept many of those comments. But it was mostly fashioned in a way by NARA staff, because they are the experts and we were the ones that set the 2016 date and the 2019 date that was in that mandate that really are the hooks in later memos. We've seen an evolution in terms of the Federal Records Center Program and NARA insisting that agencies transition to managing all of their records and not storing paper records in the future in Federal Records Centers. So while that may be a legacy aspect of the National Archives history, which is very important, you know, it won't continue. Agencies are supposed to be managing electronic records ... privatizing paper storage and using their own resources. So that's a point that is worth talking to individuals about, that has been ... a very important, core part of the National Archives in the 20th century with respect to the Federal Records Centers. These memos developed over time, but I think the 2012 memo set the basis. It's foundational for the other joint memos that have come out, and we'll see how the overall transition goes. COVID slowed down transition efforts. That's why the date was extended from 2022 to 2024. There are complexities in electronic recordkeeping that everyone knows, but we will get there. And so the oral histories of the future will, I think, incorporate the notion that the entire government is sending permanent records in electronic form to NARA. And frankly, 50 years from now, if not sooner, 99.9999 percent of what records there are at the National Archives will be in electronic and digital form. That is not to say that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—the Charters of Freedom—and the records of the 19th and 20th century are not important, and of course legacy paper has continued to come into NARA in the 21st century. All of those records remain important. And as permanent records, they need to be curated. And the National Archives contains thousands of treasures and documents, whether it's maps or photographs or in all kinds of media. But the future is electronic, and one of the giant challenges is how to provide access to government records. And NARA is in the access- building business according to its strategic plan. And so “making access happen” has been in the current strategic plan and the last one, and that is a tremendous challenge in the future. We've seen the dawn of the electronic age on my watch and, you know, it will continue with a faster pace in the coming years." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, I think the M-12-18 was really huge to the records management community in pushing the federal government to do business electronically faster than the pace that they were doing it before. But in terms of now you've got all of these, for example, emails coming in, like you said, the volume just keeps growing. What are some of the issues around being able to even ingest that as an agency for NARA? You know, we're telling agencies to send us everything electronically, but the issue then is being able to accept everything that we're telling them to send us." }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "Yes, that's an issue. And I'd like to talk about what I consider an even greater issue. The issue of formatting records in accessioning to NARA has become a much more sophisticated exercise over time. Back in the 1990s, there were still regulations that talked about ASCII [American Standard Code for Information Interchange] and EBCDIC [Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code] as the transfer mechanisms for electronic records. And I'm sure in other histories, you can discuss with individuals who know more than I do about the Center for Electronic Records that started in the 1970s, with Charles Dollar as the first head and Ken Thibodeau following. There were certain formatting requirements that that office required, and then it reviewed records to see whether they met the standards so that they could be accessioned permanently. Today, there are a whole set of transfer requirements in all sorts of media, and every couple of years, there's some updates of those. There's also been digitization standards for both permanent and temporary records that have been recently issued. And it is a big deal because, obviously, NARA does not want to be like the Smithsonian and keep every type of proprietary software that's out there for every format that could be. And with backwards compatibility, it's a huge issue when you're thinking about permanent records. We're thinking about the life of the Republic, and that can be hundreds or thousands of years into the future. And so NARA needs to get it right as to what it's accepting, when it's accepting millions or billions of records in electronic form. There are absolutely very important issues about transfer formats. Beyond that, however, dealing with the volume of records—what I have been interested in ever since the tobacco case and my interest in searching for responsive records there—is very important. The obstacle to opening up records is the fact that they are chock full of PII or personally identifiable information. And when you have Social Security numbers or you have other types of personal information, both in numerical form and textual form, traditionally archivists have looked at every page and redacted or put in sheets or, you know, ... withdrawal slips, to say that there is personal information on certain pages or certain documents. That can't be done in the electronic world. You can't look at every object. And so, again, there is a need for AI and machine learning to help human review in looking at whether collections have personal information in them. So most recently, I've been involved in research that looks at, particularly, Exemption 5 of the FOIA, to see whether through various methods, including generative AI, but mostly classical machine learning methods, software can differentiate what are facts and what are opinions in documents so as to tell the human reviewers what to redact in terms of the FOIA exemption world. There are lots of sensitivities in NARA records, both in email and other electronic records, and you will not be able to open access to the American people of billions of electronic objects until we do a better job of filtering for these sensitivities. Otherwise, it defaults to human review, which is just impossible to do in real time. You need the help. Not that you're giving over to the software to do everything and just release based on what the software says, but the software can help in rank ordering what is important, seeing what parts of collections have sensitivities and the parts that don't. And then combined with human review, it could expedite the process. There's a tremendous challenge that NARA faces. Otherwise, as I've written about, that 99.99 percent that I'm talking about that's digital will become a dark archive. For example, my father fought in World War II in the 3rd Army under Patton, and he was in a certain regiment battalion. I can go to AII. I can ask for boxes. I can find that regiment with finding aids and with the help of subject matter experts. And I can be given a set of boxes at a time ... and I can look for records.... But when hundreds of millions of records are at NARA in electronic form, you can't sit at a terminal, and you can't sit at your home through a portal and look through these collections. They're all dark. They're all closed to the public because of this PII and personal information problem. So we need to help solve that to make accessible the history of the American people in the 21st century. Otherwise, the Archives will not be a place where you go to find records or even that you sit at home and search for records. Yes, there'll be a tremendous number of records that are online, but that's the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg will be mostly dark archives. That's ... what I have been so concerned with and giving public presentations on." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you think that machine learning is there yet to help with some of these issues?" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "So machine learning ... absolutely. It's a solved problem with respect to searching for responsive records. The e-Discovery, private-sector, legal community knows how to do that based on methods that were evangelized in the 2000s, between 2010 and 2020, and I had a role in that. But filtering for sensitivities is a really difficult problem. And until that is solved better than it is now, we are [still] in the soup of human review. And also for, like, declassification of records, that's a whole other issue that I haven't touched. So there's lots of ways that we can advance the ball, and hopefully NARA will be given the resources to help and other agencies will be given those resources, too." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "We're going to follow up with a few more questions here, and we'll go on from there. Right now, I wanted to ask about just the overall history of the Office of the General Counsel. I'm not really familiar with the start of that office. I was wondering if you can tell me a little bit more about that." }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "Right. So, of course, the National Archives became independent in 1984. And at the time of its independence, Steve Garfinkel was general counsel at the General Services Administration, and he carried over into NARA. It was the “National Archives and Records Service” [NARS] at GSA between 1950 and '84, but with its independence going forward [the agency became NARA]. The first general counsel that I had occasion to interact with was Gary Brooks, who's passed away. He was an excellent lawyer, and he was an institutional memory. And I remember meeting him in 1988 as a new DOJ attorney talking about a lawsuit involving an envoy to Richard Nixon [Kenneth Rush] and documents that had been stored at the State Department. I remember coming into warren-like rooms, I think it's 305, but it was on the third floor of Archives I in kind of a closed space with low ceilings and two rooms. It had a couch in the outer room. Oh, it had a secondary little area. He had a tiny office that you walk into, and that was the extent of the General Counsel's Office at NARA. It was him and one other individual in a very small space. And it was very intimate. And I talked to him, and I thought he was great. I thought he was just the perfect person to talk to about records in general. And I think that may have triggered my interest in all things at the National Archives. But [later], he was caught up in the Armstrong litigation. And for his own sake, there were issues as to whether he had acquiesced with what the Justice Department lawyers, including myself, wanted, which was something called the Bush-Wilson Agreement where Don Wilson, who was the Archivist at the time, signed an agreement with George H. W. Bush to basically address the problem of what to do with backup tapes at the White House during the pendency of the Armstrong case. And that agreement was eventually found to be inconsistent with the Presidential Records Act. And Gary [Brooks] got caught up in that maelstrom. Acting Archivist Trudy Peterson decided that he wasn't the right person going forward to be general counsel. But I always have believed that Gary acted honorably, and he was somebody I always looked up to—Gary Brooks. After him, Chris Runkel, in the General Counsel's Office, served admirably on a couple of occasions as acting general counsel in the interim between others. Elizabeth Pugh, who was in the Civil Division at Justice with me, and was essentially my supervising attorney on the Armstrong case, came to be the replacement to Gary Brooks and Chris Runkel as acting in 1996 as general counsel at NARA. She was only here for two years at NARA, and then she went on to be a general counsel at the Library of Congress. During her time, the office expanded. When Archives II was built out, there were ... a suite of offices that were actually in the back of the building and then, due to her, eventually the GC office moved towards the front of the building to be directly closer to the Archivist's office. And after her, Gary Stern, who I've already mentioned, came in 1998, and I was lucky enough to be hired by him in 2000. So he, as of this recording, is still general counsel, one of the longest serving general counsels in government. In my time, there were on the order of 12 lawyers and other staff members total. There was a FOIA specialist and a couple others that made up the office. It's generally been around that size. You'd have to ask others what the exact number of FTEs is today, but historically, the General Counsel's Office has been a very small shop, doing all sorts of things including in terms of supporting litigation, supporting the management of NARA in Title VII cases or MSPB cases that are brought against officials by individuals settling those cases. I was supervisor to the head FOIA person who handled the active records of NARA that are within the scope of FOIA requests. There's another office at NARA that handles FOIA requests coming in for archival records. But for NARA records, the general counsel assumes that. General Counsel assumed the RESOLVE program of mediation of disputes. And, you know, lawyers ... wear many hats. And one of the best hires I ever made was Stephanie Abramson, who's currently still there as procurement and EEOC counsel. I supported the movement of lawyers going from journeyman status to a GS-14 level as a cap to being a GS-15 non-supervisory position. I thought that the talent in the General Counsel’s Office was always great, and I enjoyed working with colleagues. And as I've said before, Gary Stern has set a very high bar for what constitutes collegiality and outstanding work by all, and he is just respected by everyone who's ever worked with him. So that's my little mini capsule of NGC [Office of General Counsel]." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. I can't imagine walking into, like, this little tiny room. It sounds like a dungeon, [LAUGHS] and you've got two or three people there. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "It was on the third floor. Every room there, you know—that were little rooms around the corridors. So yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So, it's grown a little bit since you first started there. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I also wanted to ask you about, you know, during your time that you were at the Archives, Sandy Berger ... this whole incident about unauthorized removal of classified records, just everything surrounding that. Are you able to tell me anything about that case?" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "Yeah. Sandy Berger was the National Security Council legal director during the [later part of the] Clinton administration. Head lawyer. And he was very much involved in events involving Osama bin Laden and what happened in the Clinton administration with various matters ... like the bombing of the World Trade Center and incidents that were precedent to 9/11. For reasons that only Mr. Berger knew, he was very interested in reviewing documents that he had been associated with in the Clinton administration, after the Clinton administration. And so in 2003, and I believe in parallel with ongoing proceedings that happened [due to] ... the 9/11 Commission, he wanted to independently review documents. And he did that at Archives I in offices that were not a SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility] but were traditionally the offices where senior representatives went to look at documents. There was a long tradition at the National Archives to give deference to former officials who still retained their top-secret status or security clearances to review documents. And nothing like what happened with Sandy Berger ever had happened before. There was a culture of deference, just like until Les Waffen stole NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] tapes and photographs out of AII and was convicted for that. There were never any guards checking briefcases or anything else walking out of AII. That came into being because of a bad actor who violated every principle that, you know, archivists are trained under to preserve records, and so whatever his motives were .... But similarly, there was a culture and tradition of respect. And the staff were, unfortunately, subject to being present in a series of meetings where they only slowly came to realize that over the several times that Sandy Berger was in these offices that he was engaged in taking certain documents. And, of course, it turned out that he took them out in his pants or his socks or whatever. Staff noticed that. They marked certain documents. They ultimately found him out that he had been taking documents and storing [some of] them in a dumpster. The Inspector General, Paul Brachfeld at the time, was upset that the General Counsel, Gary Stern, and others in the Office of Presidential Libraries that had been interacting with Sandy Berger, hadn't alerted him in a timely way for him to somehow either entrap or, you know, be more active between these various meetings where there was some suspicion that something's going on till the time that individual staff members reported what was going on. And he launched an investigation, which led to an in-house investigation that really, in my view, should never have taken place in the way that it did. Ultimately, Mr. Brachfeld, as inspector general, referred his findings of investigation of NARA staff to the Justice Department for possible criminal referral, but nothing ever happened; in my view, they did nothing wrong. But along the way—I mean, Sandy Berger did something wrong, and he was prosecuted, and he pled out to a misdemeanor, and then he passed away. And we can discuss his case. But that's separate. The history here, though, is that there was a long investigation of NARA employees. Allen Weinstein was involved in getting advice from Paul Brachfeld as to whether to engage in any kind of disciplinary action. And I was acting general counsel during this time because Gary Stern was involved in conversations that took place in October 2003, which was the time period of the original incident. The investigation went on for years. The House of Representatives had an Oversight [Committee], behind-closed-doors [staff] meeting. I testified, or at least I spoke on the record, at this meeting representing the Archives. I also was very much involved in ensuring that the Inspector General's Office did not release the names or circumstances of employees who, in their view, had done something wrong, but weren't publicly named. It was very important to me to protect the interests of NARA staff. And that's what a good general counsel or acting general counsel would do. That means coming to grips with, and disagreeing with, decisions that the inspector general might make. In the incident that really brought things to a head for me was that, along the way, the inspector general's lawyer and the Inspector General Paul Brachfeld wanted to release a report of their investigation in a way that, although they redacted names, it would have been clear who was involved in terms of their view that they had done something wrong, that they had aided Sandy Berger in this effort and that they shouldn't have. And so it would be obvious to any reader who these people were. And I objected to the level of redactions, anticipating FOIA requests and other requests. I believed the IG report was not sufficiently redacted for purposes of keeping personal privacy. And I went to bat for these employees. One or more of them had a private lawyer, but I, as the in-house lawyer, ... I went to bat with them right up to the Archivist Allen Weinstein. And I came close to being a former whistleblower, because at a meeting with Allen Weinstein, the question of whether Paul Brachfeld would get his way and the report would go out the way that he wanted it to go out, or in a more redacted way that I was suggesting, this was for the Archivist to decide. He's the only person at the agency who the inspector general ... [must by law] report to in any fashion. That's by the Inspector General Act of '78. So, it was the Archivist's decision. Allen Weinstein sided with me. I did not have to be a whistleblower. That didn't make the inspector general happy. But, you know, one has to deal with that. And if you're acting general counsel, you have to deal with it. So, this was a very tense time. To this day, I believe no one at NARA acted improperly, and I would defend them on that again with whatever facts that came out. But in any event, there was a great deal of tension, and that tension continued between the inspector general and the General Counsel's Office during Mr. Brachfeld's tenure. He ultimately was suspended on other grounds and left the agency under circumstances that I'll let others speak to. But during the time here, it was a very fraught relationship with him." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, I guess so. I bet the staff really appreciated you standing up for them. We all know when your name gets out there, you know, it can be kind of hard, even if you haven't done anything wrong, to turn your career around after that." }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "That's right." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. I wanted to ask you about the Presidential Records Act. I know it's been in the news a lot recently, but you also served under, I think it was three different Presidential administrations. So I was just wondering if you could talk about that a little bit." }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "Well, I've been in government since Jimmy Carter. But at the Justice Department, I've mentioned previously that there was a rough transition in terms of the litigation involved in the Armstrong case between George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton with the handling of backup tapes and otherwise. And the problem is, whenever there's a Presidential transition, there are lawsuits that involve Presidential records. There are lawsuits, there are subpoenas, there are access requests from Congress. And they're caught up in this transfer where records need to be appropriately preserved and indexed and transferred in appropriate ways for either paper or electronic form. It's very difficult. And there are legacy issues that carry over to the next administration. So, 1992-93 was one. 2000-2001 between Clinton and George W. Bush was another. And at that time, there had been a glitch in the email system—that I talked about [earlier] that had been implemented in 1994— with missing records of various types. All emails with the letter D were missing, last names with D. And there were certain emails that were mixed up. Because of that and because of other transition issues, there had to be a restoration of backup tapes that carried over into the George W. Bush administration under special circumstances. And there were pending preservation obligations and litigation. So that was one thing. Let me go to, however, the end of the George W. Bush administration, the transition to President Obama. During the last couple of years of the George W. Bush administration, there had been a lawsuit that had been filed to challenge the fact that allegedly 22 million emails were missing from the White House archive, the email archive that was in existence. And the [public interest group] Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington brought this lawsuit— _CREW v. EOP_ . And there were meetings that were ongoing. Gary Stern and I had gone to the White House, the West Wing, and talked to White House Counsel Fred Fielding. And it played out that when there was this transition, particularly with this litigation, the Obama administration didn't want to—really, it wasn't their issue. It was the Bush administration that had the allegations of 22 million [missing] emails. So there was an ongoing series of settlement discussions going on. I had a role in playing with the settlement of the case, because at one of these conversations, one of these settlement meetings with White House lawyers and Gary Stern as representing NARA and plaintiffs’ counsel and some outside counsel that they had hired—one of whom was in Saudi Arabia or was in the Middle East on the line—there were a lot of people gathered at a meeting at the White House and on the phone. And I was part of that meeting. And at some point during the meeting—I was at a hotel at a conference, I was taking it from my hotel room—at some point in the meeting, I realized that people were laughing because someone had fallen asleep in the meeting and started to snore. And it was completely disruptive. The meeting couldn't go on because of this loud snoring, and they couldn't hang up because there are all these lawyers from different parts, you know, in government and in the Middle East on the line. They didn't want to sever the connection. Well, I realized it was myself. I was the one who had fallen asleep and was snoring. And I must say that what happened after that is that it broke the ice. [After] that meeting, what followed was a settlement of that lawsuit. And [all] because the parties were talking to each other, they were amused. I think if I had been in the room with Gary, he would have kicked me if I ever fell asleep. But in any event, ... they don't teach you that in law school about how to settle lawsuits. It was my unique way of contributing to this transition! Presidential transitions are hard, and of course, we are aware in more recent times of the indictment of former President Trump for taking records out of the White House and having boxes at Mar-a-Lago. And I've been very critical in the media about that. Of course, the Presidential Records Act was enacted in order to have the American people own records, not the President own records. So up through Nixon, all Presidents from George Washington to Richard Nixon had owned their records. After Nixon left office, there was a special statute to take back his records for the American people. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter owned their own records. But the Presidential Records Act of 1978 said that from Ronald Reagan on, the American people owned the records. They're to go to the National Archives as soon as there's a transfer. So on January 20th, each time there's an inauguration, the last one being in 2021 between Trump and Biden, legal custody of all Presidential records go to the National Archives. And any departure from that is inconsistent with the Presidential Records Act. And it becomes especially very problematic if classified records are brought to some other place. And so now there's been an indictment of President Trump, a former President, and I must say that it's inconceivable to me during my time in government that a President would take 15 or whatever the number of boxes are, of unclassified and classified Presidential records and claim that they were his. But there always have been issues with each Presidential transition, not perhaps as highlighted in the news as this last one, but during my time it always was fraught, and litigation made it more difficult. These are huge operations. In the Clinton era, they used to have C-5 A planes coming in during the last year, taking pallets of documents in huge crates and boxes. That was in an era when there were tremendous numbers of paper records.... I know that the Obama Center, which is operating under a different model than prior Presidential Libraries, has been leading an effort with NARA to digitize all of its records, so it wouldn't have any paper records in Chicago when the building opens—it[‘s records] would all be in electronic form. Whether these records are accessible goes to the issues that I've been talking about. But in terms of the form of it, there's less and less paper records now, and more electronic records. And that's why actually the current scandal, the current controversy with respect to removal of records at Mar-a-Lago, is kind of a retro scandal. It involves paper documents, not the tremendous amount of electronic documents that are part of these transfers. I also will say that NARA's role becomes much more prominent at the end of a Presidential administration. NARA officials get involved because there's the potential for a library, and there have been Presidential Libraries in the traditional sense through George W. Bush. They were getting larger and larger, and Congress put restrictions in effect that basically they had to be better endowed because of their special public-private nature—that through private sources there had to be an increase in the percentage of the endowment to allow it to go forward and then NARA to take it over and assume expenses after being built. And because of that, there's been a different model with President Obama, and we don't know what his successors will do. But anyway, NARA is very prominent when it occurs to the President and his staff that they're going to be dealing with NARA. Presidents have representatives after office that are talking with NARA officials all the time about matters involving their records, because they can assert executive privilege or otherwise. I was privileged, because of the litigation I was involved with, to have occasion to meet Vice President Cheney at a Christmas party where other NARA officials were there. It was at his [VP] residence, and we all met him and we met other senior officials. And I also was present once [at a meeting with President George W. Bush], along with Gary Stern and Adrienne Thomas, who was the Acting Archivist at the time, Nancy Smith, and Sharon Fawcett, who was head of the Presidential Libraries. We went over and met President George W. Bush in the Roosevelt Room right next to the Oval Office during the last couple of weeks of his Presidency. He had just concluded his last press conference. He couldn't have been more charming. He knew things about us. He was sort of briefed beforehand. He hung out for a while. He took pictures with us. I thought he just was sort of the kind of person who you'd want to hang out with and have a barbecue with and, you know, go to a football game with. In any event, ... Gary and others at the Archives, the Archivist of the United States, of course, more routinely met with Presidents and their staff, and particularly in the last days of the administration, the last weeks or months. There is a tremendous effort behind the scenes generally, and I've been part of it ... [getting] to work with White House officials for an orderly or smooth transition. It never completely happens, but there's a tremendous effort to make it as smooth a transition as possible, and that can take many months or years. When a President is in the second term of a two-term Presidency, they know they're leaving. When there's a one- term President like George H. W. Bush, he loses an election, he's not as prepared for that transition, that part of the chaos there. When a President is in denial that they have lost an election, it becomes even more chaotic." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. And what about NARA's role in enforcing that Presidential Records Act?" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "So, NARA does not have a police force. That's what I've said to everyone in the government when NARA does try to inspect or audit recordkeeping practices. There isn't any monitor of a police force from NARA in special uniforms, like the Public Health Service, going over and looking over the shoulder of a records manager. Similarly at the White House. Yes, there are a couple of people on detail who, according to public reports, were very frustrated when records were torn up or shredded or flushed down the toilet. Those individuals can't possibly be responsible for alone enforcing the carrying out of the Presidential Records Act in the last days. The PRA does not have a provision for enforcement. But the good people at NARA ... are acutely aware of their responsibilities and very conscientious in preserving records for the American people notice things. When they find that there are gaps in some portion of records that they believe should have been transferred, they ask questions. And in case of the latest incident with former President Trump, Gary Stern and others were asking questions for a year until they got the return of 15 boxes. So there is a felt responsibility on the part of consummate civil servants to do the right thing, to ensure that Presidential records are properly transferred to NARA. Let me segue, though, to an important other part of the general counsel's duties, which is replevin. Apart from making sure that Presidential records go to NARA, there's also a responsibility that is felt throughout NARA—but actually executed by attorneys in the General Counsel's Office working with others, including in the IG's office—to have to take steps to get records that have walked out of government improperly returned. If documents have been taken out of the White House at the end of, or an abrupt end of an administration like what happened in FDR and JFK, any records that are then sold on the open market, whether it's eBay or an auction or whatever, there's a responsibility ... and a duty to try to retrieve those for those Presidential Libraries or back into federal agencies. There was a Cuban missile [crisis] map that JFK annotated and, through the efforts of Gary Stern and others working with the Justice Department, that was a litigated case. NARA got the return of that map from when it was being sold on the equivalent of eBay or somewhere. I was involved in something called the Grace Tully Collection, where there were 5,000 or so documents taken by Grace Tully, who was, with Missy LeHand, ... [one] of FDR's top assistants. FDR, of course, died suddenly in 1945, in his fourth term—and Grace Tully walked out with 5,000 documents. She [later] claimed that they were hers. She passed away in the 1980s. They eventually came to Conrad Black, who was a noted publisher, and then [after his passing] his estate was selling them. It came to the National Archives' attention that many of these should have been part of what would be records and objects at the FDR Presidential Library, that they shouldn't have been taken. So there was a lawsuit that was drawn up but not filed, because we attempted to settle with the parties, with essentially Christie's holding the materials on behalf of Conrad Black's estate. And there was an inventory that was created by an archivist, Bob Clark, at the FDR Library, and me, where the two of us were sitting at Christie's going through a collection of documents to see which ones really should be considered U.S. Government records. Some of them might be gifts to Grace Tully, but documents that were drafts of FDR's speeches in his nominations at conventions and other important documents, correspondence that Grace Tully should not have had, we made a claim for. And there was a special legislation allowing for some compensation being given to the [Black] estate that [former Rep.] Elizabeth Holtzman, now in private practice, was assisting with. There was a great deal made of the return of the collection in 2010; the Archivist and others were present, including members of Congress, at a ceremony when we had gotten the return. And I felt very good about the role that I played. During my time at Christie's, during the week that I was inventorying these records, ... things like Picassos and Monets and other artwork that Christie's was selling would be walked by in the back room where I was. This was an experience that I never thought I would have as a lawyer at the National Archives doing inventorying of records! And so you never know. I have had many other unexpected experiences.... I've experienced a joint sovereign Navajo and English ceremony in Lenexa in a limestone cave, celebrating an agreement between Secretary Gale Norton of Interior and John Carlin, the Archivist. This was in 2004, —... to [have] ... 200,000 boxes of Bureau of Indian Affairs records in one place, to consolidate them from around the country into this newly formed American Indian Records Repository that is maintained in archival conditions in this limestone cave. And it was quite something to be part of, you know, Navajo dancing and speeches and whatever in this cave. This was another event that I never thought I'd be part of, but I was a drafter of the memorandum of understanding with [Department of the] Interior senior officials. And so I did get involved there. Just all sorts of incidents, all sorts of experiences, that I never thought I would have as a director of litigation that I had along the way." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Were there other [CROSS-TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "Let's stop the tape, because I need water. Or you can just have the tape go. But let me just for a moment..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "Sorry about that, Stephanie." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Oh, that's okay." }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "Okay. Going on. All right. What else can we cover?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I didn't know if you wanted to talk about the Pearl Harbor incident?" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "The Pearl Harbor incident was that [Director] Cynthia Koch of the FDR Library basically wanted me to take back a huge painting of FDR's sailboat, the Amberjack meeting the USS Indianapolis. That painting was gifted to FDR, but he never took possession of it. He was on the Indianapolis, but he never actually physically took it. Later the painting ended up in the captain's quarters in Pearl Harbor. I went there on a mission from Cynthia to go about getting it back. And I'd already told her that we don't own it. NARA doesn't own it. But I succeeded, probably because of my daughter being [there with me], eight years old and cute. I don't know." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "[LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "As part of the meeting, I got an agreement to have the painting displayed at the Library for one year on a loan. During that time, Ms. Koch decided on her own to write to the Secretary of the Navy and claim ownership on behalf of the National Archives. That was not something that I had advised her to do, and for whatever reason, she did that. She thought it was important to do that. I got a call from the head of the 7th Fleet, the lawyer for the 7th Fleet, telling me that I was a bad lawyer and having negotiated in bad faith this transfer of loan. That was not the best day. Not a good day. We ended up actually having the painting for two years on loan. There was a ceremony ... a reception and an event celebrating the painting being at the Library. But it was returned. I'm not sure whether I'm banned from Pearl Harbor now, but that was another experience along the way." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, yeah, you've got so many. In terms of awards, I know that you've won three Archivist awards, which has to be something of a record, I think. And I know you've won numerous other awards. Do you want to talk about any of them in particular and maybe what these mean to you in your career?" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "Well, let me say—and you didn't quite ask me this, but ... I know you were going to ask me about my impressions of the Archivists that I've worked under." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's right." }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "And I don't want to avoid the question. Let me just lead up to it by saying that I've had the privilege of working under [Archivists] John Carlin, under Allen Weinstein and David Ferriero. And John Carlin didn't like lawyers very much for whatever reason, I thought. But he was very effective in getting the Electronic Records Archives funded. Originally that project failed, and we don't have time for that in this interview, but you should talk to others about it. He was very good at getting money [for NARA from Congress]. He was a former Governor of Kansas, and he knew how to work legislative levers. Allen Weinstein, from his background as an academic, knew a lot about history. He was someone who I had difficulty hearing, because he was such a soft talker that you couldn't even hear him when you were three feet away. Allen Weinstein suffered from Parkinson's [Disease], and ultimately, he's now passed away. I won't say anything more about him. He had a difficult tenure with some degree of controversy. I will let others speak to that. David Ferriero is a very impressive person. He always struck me as the brightest person in the room. He cared a lot about how the Archives could sustain itself and was a tremendous presence during his years as Archivist, was in the forefront of all of these memoranda—the 2012 memorandum with OMB—and constantly ... understood the cutting edge of where the Archives should be on electronic records issues. I'm personally grateful to David Ferriero for participating in a really lovely ceremony in the Chandelier Room 105, whatever it's called now ... but it is on the corridor with the Archivist's office.... In 2011, I was very privileged to receive something called the Emmett Leahy Award. It's an international award recognizing one's impact in the records and information profession. I was the first federal lawyer to win the award, and only the second lawyer in 40 years. And I ended up chairing the Emmett Leahy Committee [during five of the next] 10 years [while I served on the Committee]. David Ferriero was very, very gracious in his speech. There were other speeches that day that said that it was the equivalent of a Nobel Prize. And everyone was waiting for me to retire in that room, but I stuck it out for a couple more years. So, it was a very special event. He also was very gracious when my mother passed away in sending a note. I wish him well in whatever next steps he does." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I know we've got just a few minutes here. Do you have a minute just to talk about your part in the FOIA Advisory Committee? I know this was after you retired from NARA." }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "... The FOIA Advisory Committee works with the Office of Government Information Services [OGIS]. Miriam Nisbet was the first head of OGIS, and Alina Semo is the current head. And they both have been very passionate about working with this FACA committee, a Federal Advisory Committee Act committee, to get input from both government representatives and outside representatives. Now, I have served for two terms, and I'm on the current term of it to advise the Archivist and to make recommendations about improving the administration of FOIA. I have been pretty much an evangelist on the same issues that we've been talking about during this interview, that there is a need for artificial intelligence and machine learning to play a role in filtering sensitivities, FOIA exemptions, and for recordkeeping purposes generally. And I served on a subcommittee a couple of terms ago that tried to integrate recordkeeping— Federal Records Act issues—and FOIA issues, because they're often siloed in agencies where the FOIA officer and the records officer are basically doing whatever they're doing, but they're not talking together. There's a whole field of information governance that would encourage that, along with lawyers and cybersecurity people and whomever, CISOs [Chief Information Security Officers] and CIOs [Chief Information Officers] .... So I think the advisory committee aspirationally has the role of trying to make progress in government, making it more efficient under the FOIA, to have improvements. There have been 52 recommendations to date. One of the aspects of the current term of the committee, the 2022-2024 term, is to evaluate past recommendations and how they've been implemented by the government. So, expect a report in 2024 about that. Alina Semo and Kirsten Mitchell and others on the staff of OGIS do a tremendous job in trying to make sure that the committee functions well, along with all of their other important duties in OGIS." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Hey, I know you left the Archives in 2013. What does it feel like to still see the Archives when you're in the DC area or ...? What does it feel like to finally have moved on from the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "I left the Archives after 13 years on October 1st, 2013, during a government shutdown, and I was responsible for Jay Bosanko and three others coming in that day and actually getting paid to process my exit! And let me say this—I say this in many kinds of public forums when I'm asked: my time at the Archives was a dream job for all the reasons that I've talked about in this interview. You get involved in so many different aspects of American history and litigation against the government, and you're playing a substantial role. It's an organization that doesn't have many layers. And so you could go talk to the Archivist—just as the general counsel, and director of litigation—walk into the Archivist's office or the Deputy Archivist and ... discuss serious matters that involve Presidential records. You get to go to the White House. You get to go for [high-level] meetings, go all around the government. I've gone to all sorts of black box agencies, you know, from CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], NSA [National Security Agency], and you can go down the list. My time in all of these experiences that I've had was a tremendous education, and I loved every minute of it—maybe not every minute of the Sandy Berger time, but almost every minute of it. I worked for 33 years in government, and my last government position was at NARA before going to private practice and then now in academia. And I said in my retirement party when I left NARA that I still feel the same way as I did coming to Washington as a 19-year-old doing summer jobs and then after law school, that I believe public service is the highest calling one can do. And I know that every night when I left Archives I—I had offices in both Archives II and in Archives I—but when I was at Archives I and leaving in the evening after a long day, you know, you cross Pennsylvania Avenue, go to the Metro, you look down east and down the avenue and you see the Capitol lit up. It's a tremendous feeling that you are part of the Nation's history. Main Archives is such a wonderful building with a history, and you're part of the workings of government in an important way and that you have a mission to do the right thing for the American people to preserve their history. And I was caught up in that. And it never ceased to affect me walking out of that building. And I feel that way to this day that the finest civil servants that I know have been at the National Archives, and I admire them and their mission. I admire what everyone does. They wake up every morning to preserve records and to provide access to American people and the world. And so, you know, I salute them, and I will always, always look fondly back at my time in government and especially at the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's really great. Yeah, I think NARA has a really important mission, and you played a huge part in that." }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "I played a small part. We all are part of a relay race in life where you get the token for a while, you're given the token by someone, and then you hand it off to the next person. And if you've done your part in the relay race, running as fast as you can, doing as much as you can to help, you know, knowing that your time is limited, you value that time and then you hand it off to others to continue." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Well, hey, I think I've kept you over our time here, so I just want to say thank you for participating in this. I'll go ahead and get you that transcript as soon as I can, and then I'll reiterate in my email some of the points that we talked about previously. But yeah, thank you so much for all this information. It's been really great and interesting. I hope you had a good time too. And I hope [CROSS-TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "I did! This is a lot of fun with all these memories and thank you for giving me the opportunity. And, of course, I wish you all the best and want you to keep interviewing people." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yes, yes. I will. All right. Well, thank you so much. And yeah, I'll be talking to you soon then." }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "Thanks, Stephanie." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "All right. Have a good rest of your day." }, { "speaker": "Jason", "text": "All right. Bye." } ]

[ { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Great, thanks. And I know you did an [interview](https://www.archives.gov/files/about/history/bob-beebe.pdf) with Erik several years ago about your time in the Navy, so thanks for doing that. And I'm going to link to that as well. But can you talk a little bit about what you did after being in the Navy but before coming to the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "OK, first I attended a small state school in Nebraska called Peru State College for a history degree. Life got in the way, and I ended up getting engaged and married. So I transferred to the University of Kansas, where I finished that degree and then also got a master's in historical administration/museum studies there. I worked at a number of different places. The first one was the most related—I worked actually at a place called the Golf Course Superintendents Association, which is in Lawrence, Kansas, and there I basically set up the records management and some of their archival program. They basically didn't have any at that point. I worked there for a few years, then I went to the—we have a local science museum that was starting up, and I worked there for a few years. And then after that I went to a small historical museum in the area that was a stagecoach stop back in the 1860s along the Santa Fe Trail, and I actually drove a stagecoach for a couple of years doing that. So that was kind of fun. And then after that, I joined the National Archives in the Records Center Program in Lenexa in 2004." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So how did you end up at Lenexa?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "So, basically I hadn't worked for a few months because of a surgery my daughter had, and I was kind of looking around and I saw the GS-4 archives technician position and applied. It was fairly early. I think the facility opened in late 2003. I started, I believe, April 5, 2004, just as a general archives technician. I had always had an interest in working at the National Archives in one capacity or another. The Lenexa Center is relatively close to where I live. I live outside of the Kansas City area a little bit to the southwest, which puts the Lenexa place at a very convenient location for me. So that was kind of how I ended up there." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So can you talk a little bit about Lenexa itself, and what it is like to work in an underground facility?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "So, it’s interesting, and getting there is, I think for some people, intimidating. It's a very large facility. The National Archives is a large tenant down there but by no means do we have the majority of the space, and driving in there are semi-trucks driving in and out of this cave on a daily basis many times a day. Obviously, the line of sight is broken up and just getting physically to the spot you drive in a little ways and park. When I did start, I think, the facility had five bays, but now has 16 bays plus Ice Cube, which is a whole other operation, so it's grown. It grew rapidly during those first several years that I was there. I don't really find myself thinking I'm in a cave most of the time I'm in there. I find it quite comfortable. You come in and there is no need for a coat when you get out of the car because it's always nice and warm—sometimes too warm. And then the same thing as you leave. And so I always kind of find it fun during the winter because my car is always covered with snow when I drive in and it's all melted in a puddle of water around it when I leave. So, I consider that kind of a benefit to the thing. But inside our offices, occasionally, you'll see some rock walls that they leave to support the overhead, obviously, but it's really pretty comfortable. It seems like a fairly normal office. It has large rock walls and columns every now and then breaking up things, particularly when you get out into the stacks—they break up what would be a large open warehouse space. You'll have a column every so often that breaks that up and they have to manage the shelving around that." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Thinking back to your first day, your first time at the Archives, what were your impressions of the agency?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "I don't know, it was a little overwhelming. More from the facility's size—having worked with the Golf Course Superintendents Association records, I don't think we even had a 1,000 cubic feet total and, you know, walking out into a bay that holds 250,000 cubic feet of records and knowing that there's multiples of these all over is a little overwhelming to just grasp the size difference in what you're handling and then, just wondering how are you ever going to even remember how to get back to the office once you get out into the stacks. Learning the maps of the place and how to negotiate your way around the facility is an interesting thing. Fortunately, people are pretty good at pointing out, “here's how you get back here,” or “we're going to leave you out here to work on this and come back out, look for the sign.” And there is signage up to help you get back to where you need to go. But it's a little overwhelming in some ways." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I can see that. So when you first got there in your first position, what were your typical days like or what were your duties and what did they entail?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "So, I was an archives technician. I was in an IRS unit. At that point, our office was all just one unit, basically, and we all did IRS work or primarily—there are a few other records we did, but everyone started out doing reference requests, so pulls on IRS records. And we had such a backlog that we didn't even do refiles for quite a while. And that was primarily taking the request out, matching it up to the number that they needed, pulling the file, getting it ready, and taking it back to the office when you're done. Not the most glamorous, but certainly I find almost anything interesting and find ways to amuse myself in doing it. So, it was all right. Later on we split the office into a refiles and a requests section. And I ended up in the refiles section. So rather than spending most of my day doing requests, I switched to spending most of my time doing refiles and putting documents back that the IRS had returned to us." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And then how long were you in that position before you moved to the archival side?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "So, well, I was in that one and then I was promoted to a GS-5 technician and after a year and a half or so, I don't remember how many years, quite a few in that position. So, in 2015 I was promoted to a team lead to start up an audit team within the FRC there and then in September of 2015, I was hired on as the archivist at the Lenexa Records Center. So, I was with the FRC for 11 and a half years, roughly." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And did your duties change when you became a GS-5 and then a team lead?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Yeah, so as of GS-5 you basically were preparing the work for the grade 4s, and so you would get the work that came in from the IRS, you would prepare a batch and get it ready and then move it on. Then the team lead, say, I was only in that position for seven months, so we had just started setting it up. I think if I remember right, just before I switched, they brought in two people to help me out because we were like, say, we spent most of that six or seven months just trying to set everything up and getting an idea of what it was going to encompass. But then I transferred out into the archives. So, I didn't have a whole lot of experience on the other side of things, so." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "What made you decide to apply for the archives position?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Well, so, I had obviously always had an interest in history with a history degree and everything. I had contemplated applying for positions at the archives before, but they were always down at the archives, which is a considerably further distance away from me. And the convenience of working at Lenexa always appealed to me. And so that position was basically the best of both worlds. I was in Lenexa and I was at the archives. And so I was like, OK, if you're going to have a position out here, I'll apply for that. So I took a swing at it and fortunately I was hired, so." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And so what do your duties as an archivist entail?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "As I said before, the first thing is always reference. The highest priority is getting reference done for researchers. During normal circumstances, that can be either pulling the files and taking them down to the archives, where our research room is, so that the researcher can look at them in person. That's actually a fairly small portion of my reference. Most of my reference is done where I'm scanning and sending the files, running the purchase through for the researcher, and doing a whole request that way. That's probably 90 to 95 percent of all the reference I have, even in normal times. Beyond that, then we have accessioning that takes up a larger and larger portion of our time every year, it seems like. So we do that in two or three different phases. And then processing of the records once we accession them, holdings maintenance, when required. We hired a specialist to work with me in Lenexa a couple of years ago, I think, when we took over the ownership of the patent files. And we're still working on just getting all of those boxes barcoded. So, that could be something I might do or I might go out and barcode new accessions because all those need to be labeled and up to date, and description, and just generally having anything to do with the records that are stored there in Lenexa." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Is there an aspect of your job that you really enjoy?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Well, the patent files are certainly a preference, as far as a record group, but I truly enjoy reference. I enjoy working with the researchers. I have some regular researchers that generally work with companies that are looking for document retrieval services. But I've got academic researchers that contact me regularly. Most of those are for patent records. I never know what I'm going to go into, what somebody is going to ask for. And when it comes to the patent records with that, I mean, I learn things about all sorts of areas of innovation that I had no idea about before. And it's always a thrill to see what's out there." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Those are interesting, the patent records are a very interesting record group. You're lucky to have access to those." }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "I consider myself very, very lucky to have those files there." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So, thinking back on your career, even when you were working at the records center, are there any particular challenges you faced while at the archives?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Particular challenges?" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "That you faced while working; you may not have." }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Well so, you know. I don't know, I can't think of any particular challenges necessarily, I mean, the size becomes one of the issues, particularly prior to the archives when it was a records center. The facility, I think I kind of measured it out once, and from room 1 to room 16 is in the neighborhood of maybe a third to a half of a mile. So, if you're going from one side of the place to the other, it can be a long haul, but I don't know. I can't really think of any specific challenges beyond just the physical aspect of how big the place is sometimes." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah, the folks in the records center always did really well on those health challenges that we did." }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Yeah, yeah, yeah. My brief time was the audit team because you were checking things all over the place. I mean, it was amazing how much walking I would do. And then when I switched to the archives, it was like, OK. And I still walk a fair way, but it's nothing like I used to. Because I just have basically three bays that I'm in. So it's a fairly small area relative to the whole place." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Is there anything that you're particularly proud of that you've done at the archives or major successes?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "So, one thing that I'm known for, and I should only get partial credit or certainly other people involved, was the locating of the Wright Brothers patent in 2016. That was obviously a high point. It was an exciting moment. It was one of those moments that you just can't forget parts of it. I remember when pulling the box off that it was in and opening it up and looking and seeing this folder. And once I saw the folder behind it, I was like, well, that's weird. That shouldn't be there. And you start to have an inkling. And I remember pulling it out and that particular patent number, which, again, patent numbers get seared in my mind, is 821393. And I remember as I pulled the folder out, I could see in large block letters 393. And I'm like, oh, this is it. And you know that was one of those moments. You're just like, wow, I can't believe we found this thing. And I remember going back to my office just, you know, almost trembling at the excitement of having this thing knowing that it had been missing for so long, and then for a few moments looking through it, making sure it was what I had. And then contacting Lori Cox-Paul, our director, and sending off an email to Chris Abraham, who had been working with the recovery team that was kind of directing the search and saying, hey, I just found it. And, you know, I think back to things that you do. You know, I had another box to take down for a researcher and grab the government vehicle and drive down to the archives. And normally we just put everything in the backseat. And I thought hmmmm. I had taken the file out and slipped it in an archival box for safe transport. And I was like, I'm just going to set this in the front seat next to me. [Laughter] Like, worst case scenario, if something happens, I can grab it before I get out of the car if there's some horrible accident on the way. [Laughter] So it's just, you know, things that cross your mind. The other thing on a reference side of things, there's one reference request that sticks with me to this day. The DC [District of Columbia] civil case files are in Lenexa from, I can’t remember what the years are, but I received an urgent request one day from a lady and she needed the divorce file for her mom, which, of course, that's one of those weird things, because in Washington, DC, there was no state court system to handle divorces. So back in the 40s and 50s, divorces were handled by the U.S. District Court. And she was just in a panic. She really needed this, and it turned out that her father was in palliative care. He was going to be passing away and he had worked for the DC Metropolitan Police. And I believe he'd gone up fairly high in the ranks. But he was close to passing away, and her mom had Alzheimer's, and they were trying to make sure that his benefits would transfer to her. And when the powers that be in the DC city started looking at and said, well, their marriage isn't valid because she was married before and never divorced because they had found a marriage record for her. Well, you know, I went through and searched, and found the files. There was actually a divorce file in the records. And essentially, she'd been married through an arranged marriage, never went home with the guy, and went straight back to her parents’ house. So I had to make a certified copy, run that down and get it signed, get it overnighted out to her so that she could maintain the benefits for her mom. And that's probably the most memorable request of all the things I've had, just because the way you get to touch people's lives like that. So, she was just delighted to get the file and maintain that continuity of care for her mom so that one sticks with me all the time." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "That's great. I'm sure she was very happy." }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "That's the best part, I think, about working with the agency when you can actually help people." }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Yeah, it is, and yeah, and I mean from simple things like that to just a researcher, whether it's an academic or a genealogist that's connecting with their parents or with a grandparent. It's a lot of fun." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Do you get a lot of recurring researchers, the same ones, or is it pretty much a new one every time?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "I get both. I have to say, there's a lot of document retrieval companies that deal with patent records, and so I have probably half a dozen or more researchers that it's like when I see them I’m like oh, it’s another patent request or something along those lines. We've got probably three or four or five academic researchers that come back pretty regularly. Again, a lot of these are for patent records, and then sometimes associated records because we'll get into court records that involve them and sometimes they're here, and sometimes I have to direct them to another field office or somewhere where they might find the patent infringement case, things like that, so it's kind of a mix. A lot of one-off genealogists, where people have found out, you know, my grandfather had a patent, and I'd like to get copies. I had a guy, and it still baffles my mind. He flew in and out from Chicago in one day just to come and view his grandfather's patent. And I was like, wow, that's some dedication to genealogy. But I went down and sat with him and walked him through the patent case file. It was for, basically, like an early dirigible from like the 1915 or so, and it was a pretty neat patent. But he was excited because at that point, the patent office, in most of the patent files, included physical addresses that the patentee was at. And so he was able to get an address in Philadelphia, I believe it was where his grandfather had lived. So he said that was going to be one of my next trips—to go to Philadelphia and see where he lived. [Laughter] So he seemed to have a travel itinerary based on his genealogy." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So did the archives train you, or did you just kind of get thrown in and be like you're now the patent guy?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "No, I mean, there was certainly a lot of training starting with HMS and DAS and ERA and all the different programs we use so there is certainly a lot of training there. And then I didn't have a lot of formal classroom trainings, but various staff, primarily it was Jake Ersland who would come out, he's now our director in Kansas City, he would come out and work with me directly with the records. So it was kind of a training by doing but with help. So he would, you know, walk me through—here's how to find all this stuff out here, because it's very different finding things in the archives than it is finding things in the FRC. That was probably, going back to your challenges question, that was probably one of the biggest challenges was a change of mindset of how to do what you're doing and how to get to things. Also, just the mindset of within the records center you're there to pull the record and get it and get it back to the office so that it can go to the people that need it. And it took me a long time to get used to being able to go into the file and _look_ at it, because you're not supposed to browse records within the FRC. That's not good. Within the archives, it's like, no, feel free to browse. Since I've had 11 years of you telling me not to do that, and now I get to this, and you know, that was probably one of the hardest things to get used to was that I could look at these things and see them. So that was probably the hardest challenge I had just mentally was convincing myself it was OK. I mean, I remember emailing or calling Lori Cox-Paul and asking is it OK if I pull this file just because I want to see it? She's like, yeah, OK." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "You mentioned ERA and HMS, those programs, over your career, I guess, have you seen those programs evolve?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Not appreciably. Other than, you know, I think when I started, the HMS was just in the Explorer version and then they came out with the Chrome version. I don't remember when, but as far as the programs, I don't recall any massive changes to those." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "You mentioned Lori and Jake, but did you have any other mentors while you were working at the archives?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "So, at the archives, I mean, those are really the two main people. Jake ended up being our deputy director. So he became my direct supervisor for a number of years now. All the staff there are really good. Joyce Burner, who has since retired, was really helpful in description, and she was always good at description, and to say description is probably one of my least favorite things to do. But she helped me work through quite a bit of that. Within the records center system, the one person who really taught me an enormous amount is Randy Kelly. To some extent, I kind almost can give him credit for me being as qualified as I was to switch to the archives, because some of the different tasks I've taken on there required me to learn more and more about ARCIS and how to handle and how to move things around in ARCIS and how to find things in there. And I think that process, and also just working well with Randy, was very beneficial." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So, a lot of archivists don't necessarily start in the FRC and move to the archives side, so you're probably one of the few ones. Do you think working in the FRC better prepared you for work at the archives?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Yes, I think without doubt. One—it can give you a better appreciation for what the FRC does. By and large everything that's in the archives at one point lived in the FRC, and if they don't handle it right, we don't get it. And appreciating the work they do and the difficulties they have in their job compared to ours, which I would say for difficulties, our job is a lot more complex, but the physical and time constraints that they are put under is a different type of difficulty that I don't think everyone on the archives side actually understands real well because it's a different type of pressure. I mean, we have to deal with the public. They don't have to deal with the public generally, but, you know, they have metrics of how many requests to pull in an hour. We don't have that. We have a rather almost leisurely time in some ways, comparatively. We can take our time and do things at a slower rate. And I handle a lot of requests in a year but I can tell you that I handle as many requests in a day as I handle in a year when I was in the FRC. Now obviously I wasn't scanning them, I wasn't doing all these things, but I mean the scope that they work at is so much greater than what the archives works at. I think spending time within the FRC and appreciating and learning what they do gives you a better idea of what goes on with these records and the whole lifecycle of the records as well." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "What is the relationship with the archives and the FRC in Lenexa? Do they have a good working relationship?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Oh, yeah, yeah. Since I started, I've tried to do things to engage with them. I haven't done it in quite a while but I have taken oddball antique things that have patent numbers on them and patent dates. A gasoline-powered iron was one—trying to think what else I had. A number of things that I brought in and I would find that in case file that I might find some advertisements for it and kind of a little history on this artifact, and I would bring the artifact in and set it outside my office with some scans of some of the patents and kind of what it was and what not. I've made a point of sharing things within the records center. “Hey, I've got this kind of cool patent,” and send scans of it around to your staff, maybe print out some. I've actually got a bulletin board near our office. We're kind of physically separated from the records center staff for the most part right now, but I have the bulletin board and I'll scan some patents. The same ones have been up for a long time now, obviously over a year. But that's the last one I did was the patents for _Toy_ _Story,_ the movie—the slinky dog and all these things. So, I would get images of those patents and put them up. One other time—there's a patent file for a camera device from the 1860s. And this was one of those that kind of blew your mind because it got a request from a researcher that they wanted this document from this patent file. And it's supposed to have this letter in it that describes the day of the Gettysburg Address. I’m like what on earth would that be doing in a patent file? So I go out, sure enough, I pull it out—actually, I brought it to Jake who was there that day. And I was like, yeah, this was supposed to be the patent file that has the letter describing the Gettysburg Address. So we’re looking at it, and he has one of the documents, and he starts reading it and he’s like, okay, it is. So, it turns out the guy that was issued the patent was the same guy who basically helped disinter the bodies from the battlefield and move them into the national cemetery. And he was a photographer and he actually took a lot of photographs that day. His brother lived, I think, in Philadelphia, and he had submitted this patent, and whoever was supposed to pay this fee with the patent office had presumably stolen the 20 dollars fee. And so he sent this letter to his brother saying, hey, can you go to the patent office and pay this fee for me? And then he wrote out this description of the day of the Gettysburg Address on the same letter. Well the patent clerk took that letter and there's a note from that office that the fee was paid in this and that. So ironically, there in this patent file is a one-page description of the day of the Gettysburg Address. Just mind boggling. So, with all due precautions, I'm like, “hey, come and look at this.” So, it's kind of fun to be able to share because, I mean, they don't get to see these things generally. And you can see that they're like, “this is really awesome to get to actually see.” So, that was kind of fun, and I really enjoy sharing what I get to see with them because I know they don't get to for the most part. And I think in general, they really appreciate that as well." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Do you do special document tours when people come in?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Not real often, I mean, occasionally. I've taken a few people, generally nobody from the public. The FRCs are closed to the public now, so we can't have anybody come in. We do have the bring your kids to work day, and they'll tour them through the space. And I'll usually pull a few interesting patents out or some other documents for them to see. Occasionally with a staff person, if they're particularly interested and they've got time outside of their regular work, I might take them back and kind of show them what we have and whatnot. But not a whole lot of that other than when they come on it with the archives and they come out, and that'll be a little bit more in depth because they have a more of a reason to see and know more about it." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So I think of you as the patent guy—so how about patent records? Have they gone electronic now or are they still physical pieces of paper?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "I believe starting in like 2003, they went all electronic. So there are paper copies up until somewhere around 2003, we stop right now at about 1978." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah, so I was curious to see how you could see reference changing if you're not showing a physical piece of paper but you're showing the electronic record." }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Yeah, yeah, all the electronic side of things is a whole different story. So, in a lot of cases, if you go to the USPTO’s website, even on applications, there's lots of rules with applications, but you can go in and see a lot of the actual documents online through the Patent Office's website on things that would be still being prosecuted or that are still in the application stage. I don't go in there very often because obviously those are outside of my scope of work for the most part. But I do end up in there on occasion. And I get links sent to me from people that are like, “hey, look, I can't find the rest of this.” I'm like, “well, because it’s in paper form and it's sitting out here.” So, you know, we do have some newer records, but they are still College Park’s ownership. We've got some trademark records that go up into the early 2000s, even I think as late as 2008 or 2009 that are trademark opposition and cancellation files, and those get into that paper-electronic transition time frame. And I'd have to look at it. I don't get in them very often, but I think the later ones you start to see where they stop filing paper records and it became an all electronic record. So you've got kind of part of the file. And the same thing happens with court records, with an all-electronic. You get these cases where it's paper up to this point. And generally you run into that with dockets where they stopped making paper dockets and they became all electronic records. I had a request like that the other day where they're like, we couldn't find the first couple hundred docket items in the docket list because they are paper ones. So I had to go out and find the paper copy so that they could pick the documents that they wanted." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Well, it sounds like you've seen a lot of really amazing documents. Do you have a favorite record?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "There's several—it's hard to pin down a favorite, but I wrote a piece for our newsletter last year, I believe it was, that involved three important patents from the 1800s that are often overlooked that I think, to me, are amazing. One of them is by a guy by the name of William T.G. Morton, who is a character in and of himself. But essentially it's a patent for anesthesia and, if you think about this, and this is from the 1840s, and if you think about anesthesia and all that it allows and it is a small patent file, but if you think about what has become of that and what medical miracles would not be possible without that invention. It's startling to me how many people whose lives have been changed and improved and saved because that patented its beginning. The other one, and it's on a similar vein, is and this was one of those where I pulled it out and saw that it just boggles the mind to see because patent files always have signatures of the inventor. And it's the patent for pasteurization by Louis Pasteur. This guy to me was in my science books in high school and college. I'm like, there’s Louis Pasteur’s signature. I mean, that one still is one of my favorites to go and see. The other one, and again, that one changed lives, The other one from the 1800s that I absolutely love is Alfred Nobel's patent for dynamite. Of course, it has both positive and negative sides of things, but again, it's an impressive document to see and to handle and think, wow, to think of all that changed with that one patent. Consider that of Edison and Bell and even Tesla and some of these guys, but in some ways you could make a case that those three patents changed the course of human history. In some ways on par with Edison's light bulb or Bell’s telephone. I mean, I think they're certainly right up there with them and to see those kinds of documents. The dynamite patent, there is a little story behind that one as well that's kind of fun. We have our staff meetings, and oftentimes at the end of it, we would share interesting things we’ve found. And we were having active shooter training or something following the meeting, so they were up there setting up for their presentation, and I said, so I came across Alfred Nobel’s patent for dynamite. I'm like, it turns out it's really not that hard to make dynamite, and it's not, it's actually very simple. Now you have to get nitroglycerin, which is a lot harder to manufacture and make it. But the actual process of making dynamite is fairly simple. And one of the officers said, “we might need to talk to you later.” [Laughter] So, that was kind of amusing. But those three are my favorites. But oftentimes I say that my favorite one is the last one I looked at. I mean, I had a request for Christian Sharp's patent for a rifle, and so I was just looking at that the other day. So, pretty much the last patent I look at is almost always my favorite it seems like." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I do want to ask you some things about COVID, but before we go there. Is there anything else, any interesting stories that you want to tell me about your time at the archives so far?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Well, not that I can think of, I've covered a lot. I could go on and on, but we'll leave it at that for now at least." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Well, we can always have another interview, but I did want to talk to you a little bit about COVID because it sounds like you've actually been going in, which is interesting, but we'll get there. I was going to ask you when did you first hear about COVID-19/coronavirus?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Probably January of 2020, somewhere in that neighborhood. Just kind of, you know, seeing little news stories here and there, and talk about its spread. I didn't pay too much attention to it at that point." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I know we've been in various phases, but I guess going back to the lockdown to today, have you been going in or have you been mainly working from home?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "So we were open from, I believe, it was July 20 to November 6, we were in phase one, so I was going in two or three days a week, and then we just opened again March 29. So we've been in for about two weeks and again, doing two or three days a week. And then the other staff person goes in on the other days when I'm not there, so. The rest is all telework." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So what kind of projects have you been working on during telework?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "So initially, I think for a lot of people, it was kind of chaotic at first trying to figure out what to do. We did a number of finding aid projects and things of that nature. One thing that I took on because I saw it as an opportunity with our changing IT and moving away from Microsoft Access, I had always done our accessioning database, and I had created this database in Microsoft Access _._ I like it better than what we have now in a lot of ways. But knowing that Microsoft Access is probably going away and that we're moving towards Google and said okay, I want to learn Google Sheets and figure out how to do accessing through Google Sheets. So, that's probably been my biggest project. And I've worked on it in the first shutdown that we had up until July. I spent a lot of time, one—learning how to work in Google Sheets. And two—creating the framework for what we had. And then after we shut down in November, again, of course, then we were heading into the December 1st list of transfers eligible for accessioning. And it's like there were parts of it that weren't quite up to snuff so I spent a fair amount of November going back and cleaning those sections up so that we can track a transfer that we've done. We did a pretty big one in April, and when it comes up in the December 1st list, we can then see all that information in that same spreadsheet. It all comes across in various tabs, and then [we] can actually track it even after we accessioned it. It’s got the ability to track the processing steps as we go along. So it's become a pretty substantial spreadsheet. If I have to say, I like it. If I could go back to Microsoft Access, I probably would. But I don't think that's really going to be an option since it looks like Microsoft is going to end Microsoft Access. [Laughter] So I’m not sure we’ll get a chance. So that's by far the favorite thing I've been doing. Other than that, a lot of finding aid work, and we've been putting file units into the catalog to help with reference and things like that." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So for accessioning because I'm curious—were you able to physically assess the records, and how did that work?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "No, we didn't do any such thing, really. I mean, I think we did accession a couple of transfers in that July through November timeframe, we actually were able to physically check a few transfers that are in Lenexa, and we accessioned those. But until we get the physical reviews done, we’re not going to touch on something unless we've looked at it, because occasionally you come across stuff, you go out, you look at it, it's like, well, you guys said it was this but it's not that. So we don't want to create more of a headache for ourselves by accessioning something we shouldn't. So, until we get those reviews done, well, they're kind of on hold for now." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Do you have a lot of backlogged projects that you have to work on now that you're back in the building a couple of days a week?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "So we have, I forget, 70 some requests right now and they just keep coming in. As soon as we clear three or four off we get one or two in. And it seems like places are realizing that we're open again. I mean, I think we saw that when we opened the last time. People realized, “oh, they're starting to respond to us,” so then we started getting more emails from researchers, particularly from those repeat researchers. They start to realize, “oh, they're back in the office,” so they start sending stuff. That's the first priority, and when we do go in, it’s reference or scanning. And that's what we do right now. I think our next thing will be the accessioning and trying to catch up on all the box reviews that we need to do so that we can start accessioning the stuff. And then once we do that, then there will be all the description and processing work that needs to be done on the stuff that we accession. So it's just never ending. It will be interesting to see how long it takes us to work out of this whole backlog of things." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So what has your daily life been like during COVID?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "So, I live outside of the city limits by quite a ways, on about a 75-acre farm. I don’t have to worry about locking my door or running into a neighbor because my closest neighbor is about a quarter mile away. So that's been nice. And I've always loved that about where I work. I get to be by myself. My wife and daughter and I have a very comfortable and peaceful place to live. So that's been beneficial. The hazards of going into town and dealing with all of the masks and gloves and sanitizing has been challenging, as it is for everyone, but I think I've certainly had the benefit in my mind, at least to me, of being out here and away from everybody. I can wander around outside as much as I want and I'm not going to run into anybody. And even if I do run into a neighbor we can stand across the fence and chat for a while also. So in that way, I've had it kind of easy, I suspect." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So I'm sure a lot of people, including myself, are jealous of that. You have all that space. So did you decide that you wanted to go back to the National Archives; did they give you a choice whether you wanted to continue to telework or return? And what are the local conditions like there?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Yeah, it was optional. So right now, the numbers are really good. I haven't looked at them super recently, but I know they've been pretty good for a while. I know the percent positive is down around 3 percent or so, so it's been holding pretty good. For the most part people, even though I think Kansas may have actually lifted their mask mandate, it seems like everywhere I go people are still wearing them. And it seems like people are doing the things that make sense still. It doesn't seem to matter for the most part." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "That's good. So talking about the National Archives again, are there any policies or processes that were put into place during COVID that you want to see continue after we're all back in the building again." }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "So, you know, I will say I was not a fan of ever thinking about doing telework partially because I miss the records when I'm not there. But having the flexibility to do it, if needed, is kind of nice. There are times when you can come home that you can just concentrate and do things here that you might not get that chance there. I can devote time to a project. I could devote a whole day to a project like working on accessioning as spreadsheets if I need to. And one, I don't have that draw of “I could get up and go and do this reference request that just came in.” And, you know, because it removes that distraction. As soon as I get a request in, I might be like I'm going to run out and take a look at this and see what's going on. Whereas if I'm home, I can't do that. And it just keeps me on that task that I need to work on. So it's nice to have that possibility." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Had you worked teleworked before or was this the first time?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "This was the first time I've ever done it. And Sarah, who I work with, she was laughing at me the other day because I had checked my email on my phone, and she’s like, you know, “I remember you steadfastly refused to even be able to check your email on your phone.” I'm like, “yeah, I know times have changed.” And I have too a little bit, I suppose." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Did you have a NARA laptop or did you get it during the pandemic?" }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "I got the laptop when we were open. I think towards the end of October, they rushed the delivery of all of our laptops to us because they saw that we were going to be closing down again, our numbers were such that we knew our days were numbered, so they rushed. So during the first shutdown, I was working off my own. And since then we've had a laptop to work off of." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "That's great. I know we're coming up to an hour, but I wanted to ask you if you had any other COVID stories or just any stories about the National Archives that you want to share." }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "So I'll tell you one. So, I have this tendency when I know I'm going to be gone for a little while. I used to do this in the Navy before we would go out for six or eight weeks. I would just write myself a note and leave it. I have done that, you know, 30, 40 years now. I've done that kind of thing. And so I was in the office on November 6, the last day we were open and just before I left, I sat down and wrote myself a note just reminding myself to stop and enjoy the records. So, when I came back, I had largely forgotten about the note and I saw it, and it's a little poignant in that in December I was actually diagnosed with colon cancer. I'm in treatment now. I’m three-quarters or two-thirds of the way through my chemotherapy. Everything should be fine in the end but obviously, it's a long, long haul. I'll have radiation therapy for five weeks in Minnesota and then I'll go back up there for a surgery six weeks later. So it'll be the end of August or September before I’m through this initial treatment stage and then we'll go on to the rest of it. Even talking with various oncologists—I have two different oncologists—one here locally, and one at the Mayo Clinic. And everyone is like, “your treatment's going great” and there's really not much of a concern, but it was a little startling to see that note. And I've taken my advice. But the one thing that led to that was some time ago—I've been under treatment at the Mayo Clinic for stuff for a little over 10 years. There are no patents that are issued to the Mayo brothers or to their father. The father had two sons and the three of them are basically considered the founders of the Mayo clinic. But William Worrall Mayo, the father, was a witness to a patent, and it’s for a crane. So I actually went out, I think, on my first day back and pulled that patent just so that I could see. Because being a witness, he had to sign the document as well. So that was kind of a fun thing to get to see—here’s this guy who founded this amazing clinic. And so that was kind of fun. That was a moment. I had a virtual appointment with the oncologist from the Mayo clinic in early January where she kind of laid out the first stages of our treatment. My wife asked the inevitable, “so what's the prognosis?” And the treatment I'm undergoing is a fairly new one. They have only been doing it for about three years and it shows great promise. And she’s like we can’t even give the clinical details of exactly what we expect, because you have to be cancer free for five years before you're free of cancer. And since it's only been in use for about three years, they don't have that number yet. But she’s like the recurrence rate is going to be around 10 to 15 percent, which is phenomenal. And so the oncologist was like, so you're going to have to put up with him for a lot longer. I mean, it’s stage 3 cancer, so it's not great, but not stage 4, so it’s a lot better than chemotherapy. So I would urge people that, you know, just go and do that, it's well worth it." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Well, I hope your treatment goes well. You are breaking up just a little bit here. It’s probably telling me that I'm taking too much of your time." }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "I am sure it will." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah, well, thanks for sharing your story with me, and I want to hear back from you, so let me know how everything is and if it’s okay. If you think of anything else, let me know and maybe we can schedule another call later." }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "Sure sounds good." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "All right, well, I will talk to you later. Enjoy the rest of your day." }, { "speaker": "Bob", "text": "All right, thanks. Bye bye." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. JONATHAN DICKEY", "text": "Good afternoon. My name is Jonathan Dickey. I’m an intern with the National Archives History Office. It’s 2:45 p.m. on February 16, 2016. This interview is being conducted for NARA’s Oral History Project in the Archives I Volunteer Office. Please state your full name for the record?" }, { "speaker": "MR. EUGENE L. BIALEK", "text": "Yes, Eugene Leonard Bialek." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "What is your affiliation with the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "I’m a volunteer staff aide in the Navy Maritime Unit." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "What exactly is a staff aide?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "It’s a little bit of everything. It’s mainly writing finding aids for files that the archivist I work with feels are used quite a bit. It helps locate something in a box very rapidly, without having to look through a box. It has a list of the contents. It’s labor-intensive, and it’s not the type of thing an archivist would do. It’s the type of thing a volunteer would do." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. So, before you started working with the Archives as a staff aide, what kind of work did you do? Was it a similar line of work?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "I was an oceanographer for the Navel Oceanographic Office at the Washington Navy Yard for about 25 years. I retired when the office moved to Mississippi. I went to work in private industry for a Navy contractor. I was a systems analyst for the Mark 46 Torpedo." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "That doesn’t sound similar to what you’re doing now. So, why did you start volunteering at the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "It’s a good question. I’ve always been interested in lighthouses, and I took a tour here many, many years ago, and it really piqued my interest. This is a very interesting place, and I figured I could do a lot of lighthouse research here, so I took the training course, but that’s not my thing. I wanted to be a staff aide, and it happened that they were looking for someone with a naval background. Incidentally, I was not in the Navy, I was a civilian. They were looking for someone with a naval background that worked with Operation Neptune, which was the Navy portion of Operation Overlord, the Invasion of Normandy. Working with those files was one of the most interesting things that I’ve ever done in my life. I spent three years all by myself on the top deck doing finding aids, and that was really fascinating. When that project finished, they wanted me to work on some naval files from the Civil War, but at the time, the Civil War was not my thing. I had an opportunity to go to the Naval Historical Center. They were doing a remote-sensing survey of the Normandy beaches, which was sort of right down my alley, and I spent almost three years writing a publication. I was one of the co-authors. Incidentally, the publication was never published. It was finished 100 percent, it’s ready to go. I wrote parts of it, including all of its mine-hunting chapter. When that wrapped up, I stayed at the Naval Historical Center, and did another very interesting project. People had been searching for World War II submarines that had been lost in the Pacific, and some had been located, by a television channel, the Discovery Channel, as you’ve probably heard. They located a sub, and had taken photographs or TV footage of it. It was down around 300 feet, which is pretty deep for a diver. The sub had to be identified. Meanwhile, I had switched over to underwater archaeology at the Historical Center, and I was the only one there who knew anything about World War II submarines. So, although I was a volunteer, they gave me the task of identifying these submarines. I did that for a couple of them by viewing the TV footage the divers had taken. I would look at that, then I would go back to any photographs of that particular sub, and try to pin down which sub it was. I used other information, too, like the log books, Navy inquiries. Whenever the Navy loses anything, the Board of Inquiry is to launch an investigation. The Navy’s Board of Inquiry performed an extensive investigation when the Submarine Flier was lost. I used that data and then photographs, very unique photographs, of the location of the radar in relation to the sail of the submarine, which was rather unique. By myself, I made a most-likely identification of the Flier. I shouldn’t say positive. I identified another sub, which was very easy. The Discovery Channel had an image of the sail of the submarine, in a frame of the TV footage, and it showed—what do you call the badge of the ship builder or whatever was launched? That was the snap. I did things like that for a while. I wasn’t happy there, and wanted to come back here, under one condition, that I could work for one particular archivist. And that was Mark Mollan. He’s a terrific guy. He’s willing to share his knowledge, which is important. Not everyone wants to do that. I’ve been working with him for maybe three, four years now. I returned here from the Historical Center. This is my second tour here." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "How long were you at the Historical Center?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "That’s a question for my wife. She keeps track of that. I’d say three years." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So you went over there for a few years, and you’ve come back?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "Right. I wanted to work for Mark. And number two, I was not interested in the modern Navy. I was interested in the old Navy. I’m very much interested in sail boats. I had my own boat. I raced sail boats. I’ve always been interested in sail boats, and that’s what Mark was doing. The Navy Maritime Unit here is old Navy. The modern Navy, World War II-onward, is in College Park. So this is old Navy and Merchant Marine." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "How does your current work with finding aids compare to your previous work here?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "Both times I worked on finding aids. My first tour here, three years, was all Operation Neptune. I did the complete file of Neptune, so I stuck with one project. Now, I’m working with JAG files, the Judge Advocate General at 1917 Naval Inquests. Like I mentioned before, any time something negative happens in the Navy, there’s an inquest, and that could lead to nothing, or it could lead to a Court Martial. I’m doing that right now, the 1917 JAG files, and I do finding aids. I describe each folder that’s in a box. I say what the case is, like a collision, who was the officer in command of the vessel, the code numbers for identification, and, if possible, the outcome of the inquest. Also, if anything special comes up, Mark might ask me to help him. For example, the Weather Bureau wanted some data in the Aleutians. The data were kind of scarce. During World War II, when the Japanese had captured two islands in the Aleutians, our ships were operating quite frequently there. The Weather Bureau wanted to know the names of those vessels, and the dates they were in the Aleutians, so the Weather Bureau could go to the log books to pick out the weather data. I did that. That was a special project. I’ve also done other special projects, like a really interesting one on lighthouses. The Coast Guard was coming up with a new class of cutters, fast response cutters. They wanted to name two of them after female lighthouse keepers. So I helped Mark in researching all 42 of the female lighthouse keepers. We turned that over to the Coast Guard, and they have named fast response cutters after two of the 42 that we submitted. As I mentioned, there were only 42 women. So, I do special projects, and I do the routine finding aids. Right now, it happens to be JAG files. But I’ve done custom files. That’s it, mainly." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "How does he decide what files you’re going to be doing the finding aids for?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "I think that he picks what I would call the most popular files, the files that are most in demand. For some reason there was a lot of demand for information from the JAG files. I would call the most popular files the most used, the most demanded, files he does. I don’t think anyone orders him to do it. He’s the type of person who has his finger on the operation of Navy Maritime. He serves in the reference room down here almost half a day, so he knows what people ask for. And that’s what he selects for me to do." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "When you say most in demand, it’s from the public coming in to do research, not the Navy or Coast Guard or some other branch of the U.S. Government?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "That’s mainly true in so far as getting weather data from the Aleutians demanded by a Weather Bureau. In so far as the female lighthouse keepers, that was a request from the Coast Guard. So it all depends. You can’t say it’s the most in-demand group of files. There’re also special projects, Coast Guard, the Weather Bureau, NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So do you work on Mark’s special projects or just Mark’s standard finding aids?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "I’d say finding aids. These special projects are infrequent." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So, how do these finding aids help the researchers who come in?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "They’re on a spreadsheet, or they’re written out by the box number. Mark makes copies of those things. He hands them out to the archivist in the Navy Maritime Unit, and they use it. My Normandy study, Operation Neptune, that I did when I first came here, is still being used at our Archives II. I was amazed, after all these years, they’re still using that." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "What is the file you brought?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "I just had an article published on one of the Coast Guard cutters named after one of the women, Kathleen Moore. I just submitted another article, about the grounding of an oil tanker off Cherbourg, France. Really interesting circumstances. I just submitted this one. It’s on the Battleship Maine, not the Maine, but Maine Two. Ran aground at the entrance to the Mississippi in South Pass. The mouth of the Mississippi has the three passes, one going straight down, one on the left, and one on the right. The ship ran aground, and the captain blamed the United States Coast Pilot, which is a publication telling navigators of dangers, of where to go or not go, like there’s a shallow ledge here, you know to avoid it, stay on the other side of the channel. Things like that. So, there was a little set-to between the captain and what he said was an error in the Coast Pilot. It sounds as if the captain was wrong, and the United States Coast Pilot was correct. So, I’m going to try to write that up." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "You’re writing on your own, or are you doing it for the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "No, it’s all myself." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "You just got the information from the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "Yes, right. You know, there’s an awful lot of information here. I mean, anybody who’s searching for a subject, to write about, this the place. In every box, there are at least two or three articles that can be written. It’s a goldmine if you’re interesting in writing. So, I’m going to take it home, and see if I can work something up." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Do you ever deal with the public, helping them look for information, or is it just doing the finding aids and that’s it." }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "No, I don’t have contact with the public. If there’s something really special that some person came in and asked about, Mark might ask me to sit in. Oh, incidentally, there’s another really interesting project. This is really good. There’s a Frenchman who believes that there were two French pilots who tried to fly across the Atlantic ten days before Lindbergh did. There’s evidence that they made it as far as Newfoundland, and then they crashed. No one has ever located anything about them. This Frenchman, who happens to be very wealthy and has a lot of contacts, is searching for their airplane. It’s called White Bird because it was painted white. I spent almost a year looking through the Coast Guard files, State Department files, all of those, looking for any information about that airplane. What we found was what appears to be the wing of that biplane. A small Coast Guard Patrol Craft, off the south coast of Newfoundland, near an island called Saint Pierre. The wing was floating in the water, and the Coast Guard went out to pick it up, and they evidently did pick it up, but the trail stops, period. Like I said, I spent almost a year trying to locate what happened to that wing, and there is no information. You can make your own guess as to what happened. It was the week before Lindbergh, the first person to cross the Atlantic in an airplane. If they would have found the White Bird, I don’t know what that would have done to Lindbergh’s reputation. Also, an oil tanker off the Virginia Capes spotted what he says was the wing of an airplane, or both wings of the biplane seemed to be mashed together. He reported it to the Naval Hydrographic Office as a danger to navigation. At first, it seemed just a little bit far-fetched if the plane went down off Saint Pierre and it went all the way down to the Virginia Capes. Being an oceanographer, I knew that there’s a current inside the Gulf Stream, called the Labrador Current, which goes all the way down to Hatteras, North Carolina before it peters out. We did a little math about the speed of the Labrador Current, and the time frame, and it fit. It could have gone down the Labrador Current to the Capes. Again, nobody followed up on that danger to navigation. It was really interesting, but toward the end, it got kind of boring. I wasn’t finding anything. Like I say, we went to the State Department files because we knew the French Government had notified our State Department that there was going to be a flight across the Atlantic, and the French government wanted our help, they wanted the Coast Guard to be alert for an airplane. So, all these files with zero results, other than the Coast Guard spotting a wing. It was spotted off the northern tip of Long Island, Montauk Point. So, that was interesting." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "What sort of training did you have to be able to start working as a Staff Aide?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "My training, zero. I don’t see how you could train anybody as a staff aide. You have to come in, yes, hopefully, with a little background, which I had. Like the Normandy study, I spent a couple years writing finding aids. I had a pretty good handle on that issue. Among the papers in the Normandy study, was the master plan for Operation Overlord. A big folder. It had “Top Secret”—big. I mean, I knew a little bit about Normandy, but I had no training." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So you’re saying your background as oceanographer helped you to be able to do a good job with the finding aids?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "Yes, I had a feel for the Navy portion. I was not a novice looking through the Normandy files. I was not a novice in the Aleutians. I knew a little bit about them. So background does help. I can do a much better job than a history major could. They would pick it up eventually, but I can come in running." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay, is there anything we have not discussed that you’d like to talk about from your time here?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "I think I’ve covered everything. But I can say that when I did the Normandy study, I did that by myself. I would go for months without seeing the archivist that I worked for. With Mark Mollan, it’s a little different. Every Tuesday when I come in, I talk with him, and I ask any questions I have, and he asks any questions he has. Like today, on the JAG study, he wanted information about two Army nurses, who were on a transport vessel going to Europe and somehow died. He wanted to know if I had seen that in the JAG files. Questions like that. So it’s on a spreadsheet, and we can do a search for army nurses, etcetera. That’s the contact that I have with him almost daily." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "But during your previous time, did they just give you a box of files and say, “Here you go?”" }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "Not a box. I was in a room up on the 12th deck, and the entire room was Neptune boxes. It took me three years. I was coming in twice a week then. I had a really good handle on it. One part of it dealt with mine warfare. I did a lot of work with mines. I mean I could tell you… when a folder was withdrawn, because it was classified, I could come pretty close to telling you what was in that folder, just from my background. Maybe not the details, but I could tell you about the general subject matter. You know, the first files are very similar to the middle one and to the last one. All the classified mines work had to do with mathematics, in probability in mines. I knew something about that, so that was a big help. When I write it up, I could maybe put in a little extra that I knew about. So definitely, I think background helps. It’s not essential. The archivist has somewhat of a handle on it, compared to what a novice would write. I might have put an extra sentence in there. That’s about it." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. Thank you for your time. That’ll be the end of our interview. Thank you." }, { "speaker": "MR. BIALEK", "text": "You’re welcome." } ]

[ { "speaker": "Daria Labinsky", "text": "This is Daria Labinsky, and I am doing an oral history for the NARA [National Archives and Records Administration] oral history project with Rick Blondo. Today is April 26, 2021. Good afternoon, Rick. How are you today?" }, { "speaker": "Rick Blondo", "text": "Good afternoon. I'm well. Thank you for the opportunity." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Oh, sure. My pleasure. Let's start at the beginning. And could you please just talk a little bit about your background before you got to the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Part of this will segue into how I was exposed to archives, too. Do you want to emphasize that or just general stuff?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Either." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Okay. In the 4th grade, I wrote a poem as a class assignment. This is in Brooklyn, New York. And the teacher liked it so much that she told me she was going to place it in the school archives. I had no idea what that was. We hadn't learned about that. She took me up to her room, had a special place for it, and she said, \"This is where things are kept forever.\" And I was really impressed by that, so much so that once I was at the National Archives for 15+ years, I tried to reach out to her. And fortunately she was still alive and in a nursing home. And needless to say, she was thrilled. This was a Catholic school, and that turns out to be the only year she was a nun and teaching. So, I think it's providence that that happened. So then, my background was, I went to college near Chattanooga, Tennessee, and got a degree in religion, with a minor in behavioral science and a minor in history. It was almost a second major in history. But I needed to graduate. I was married by then, and we needed to move on. So, I got a job in Maryland to teach at a local church school, grades 7 through 10. That lasted two years, and they had a severe student drop off, and they didn't have enough money to pay all the teachers, so I was let go. And I was always interested in libraries. In high school in North Bergen, New Jersey, I volunteered to be a student librarian. When I moved to West Palm Beach, Florida, in the junior year of high school, I did the same thing there. They had just moved to a brand new building, so I was involved with the movement from the original building to the new, and setting it all up. Park that for a moment, and you'll see how things just came together. So, now I'm in college and now, as a student there, I got a job at the library. Surprise. And it was a great, great experience. Upon graduation, I was a school teacher. And then after I lost my job, I said, “You know, I think I'm going to get a master's degree in library science and become a librarian, because there's libraries in every county in the country, and if I ever lose a job again, it's going to be easy.” University of Maryland, College Park. So I enrolled in the program and learned about a joint master's program in history and in library science, which I wasn't aware of. And so I said, \"Why, that sounds perfect.\" So I enrolled in that. My history mentor was Dr. Walter Rundell, who was a former president at the Society of American Archivists. And he was" }, { "speaker": "my mentor. And the whole concept of mentorship is huge to me", "text": "that 4th-grade teacher; Mrs. Kominek, the librarian in the first high school library I worked in. I tried to reach her, too, but she had passed away at that time. So, I enrolled. And he said, \"You know, you should consider applying for a paid internship this summer at the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis.\" \"Sounds great,\" because we have a lot of money [JOKING]. And so I did that, and was accepted for an interview. And they distributed a Xerox copy of an archival record that they had. And that was the first time I had ever seen an archival record, except for my 4th-grade poem, of course. It was handwritten. It was old. I didn't understand some things. So I went to Dr. Rundell for advice, and I said, \"Here's two dates that are mentioned. And it was like the \"10th inst.\" and the \"5th ult.\" I said, \"What does that mean?\" He said, \"That's 'instant' and 'ultimo.'\" It means the date in this month and the next month. I may have that backwards now, but that's what it meant. And I said, \"Well, what about the signatures here at the bottom?,\" because they had shortened forms of first names. One was \"Chas.\" He said, \"That's Charles.\" One was \"Jere.\" He said, \"That's Jeremiah.\" \"Okay, great.\" So, I arrived for my interview. I was the first one to be interviewed that morning, and I had a nightmare about it the night before and worried. And so in preparation to be interviewed, they actually gave me and the others, eventually—interviewees—the original of that record. And my mouth fell open. That's the first time I held a real archival record. And when I read the Xerox, I was trying to make sense out of it. This is weeks before. It's talking about surveying; putting up markers; what the Indians were like in the area, friendly or not; and it was signed \"Jere.\" Dixon and Chas. Mason. And I looked at that, and I said, \"Dixon. Mason. Mason. Dixon.\" And then the light bulb went off, and I said, \"Holy cow.\" And so it was time for me to go in for the interview. I'm holding the original record. The first questioner was Dr. Rundell. And I was still very nervous. He said, \"Mr. Blondo, I wonder if you can tell us what that 'ult' and 'inst' stand for.\" And I went blank. I thought, \"Oh, my gosh. He's on my side. He knows I know the answer to that question. This isn’t an adversarial situation.\" And it seemed like a minute of speechlessness; it was probably two or three seconds. And I exclaimed, “Thank you very much!” And then it went on, and I got the job. So I was an intern there as of 1982. I became a full-time archivist until 1990. By then, we began having children, so I needed more income. I worked at the State Law Library two nights a week, across the street from the Maryland State Archives. During that time, I was at the original building. It was called the “Hall of Records,” H-A-L-L. We moved to a brand-new building—and I kind of like having fun with words—and so I created a—I was a publications director—and I went to my designer, and I said, \"Look, can you make something up, ‘Haul of Records’.\" And here it is. [HOLDS UP \"HAUL OF RECORDS\" T-SHIRT] So that got put on the side of the truck going up and down Annapolis. The move took place. We physically moved the records, because the archivist didn't want to risk it to contractors. And that high school experience came in handy, because I was prepped for it. But then, I needed to get a higher-paying job. So I applied at the Library of Congress and the National Archives. I got an interview at the Library of Congress and was probably going to get hired in their manuscript division, but they worked seven days a week, and by that time, I was—and am—a Seventh-day Adventist, and Saturday is the Sabbath; you don't work. And I said, \"Well, I'm not going to be able to work on Saturdays.\" And they said, \"Well, you'll just have to get staff members to volunteer to shift with you. So you'll work Sundays,\" which I was fine with. But he said, \"You'd be working 14 out of every 16 Sundays,\" so that was a burden. So, the National Archives wound up with a job Monday through Friday. And I started as an appraisal archivist. I then became an education specialist. From there—I am looking at my notes here, hang on a second—I became a consultant archivist when the National Archives in College Park first opened. Another example of dealing with a brand-new facility that was ramping up. It took several years for all the records to transfer, and I was the face that researchers met to register and to get an orientation. The first records that were there were the Nixon Presidential materials. I registered the very first researcher who came to that building, who was doing Nixon research. That was very cool. It was in 1994 when that happened. _Rick Blondo in a still from an audiovisual production created by NARA not long after the National_ _Archives at College Park, MD, opened in 1994._ I then was tapped to be working with the renovation of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC. And there's that theme again. I'm not a construction person. I'm not an engineer. I thought, \"This isn't for me.\" So I didn't apply. The day before the application period ended, Michelle Pacifico, who played that same role when the College Park building opened, asked if I was going to apply. She came into the office and asked cold-turkey. I said, \"No,\" and I explained just like I did to you. She said simply, one word, \"Apply.\" And that was a message received. [LAUGHS] So I was on the radar screen of Adrienne Thomas, who recently passed away last month. She was a bigwig then and eventually became the Acting Archivist of the United States. And she wanted me for that job. I didn't need to be an engineer. I didn't need to be an architect. My job was to interface with the staff, because the building stayed open throughout the entire renovation. And I had to move them. I had to re-furnish and work on the layouts for their new spaces, get the furnishings in, all that. And that was fabulous. During that time, the movie _National Treasure_ was being prepared, and the Rotunda was going to close in July 2001 for renovation. And that's where the Declaration of Independence is on permanent display. So I remember hearing that Nicolas Cage was going to be coming in to look at the actual Declaration before it went off exhibit. I have my little camera. He appeared with a photographer from Walt Disney Pictures. The photographer looked at me and did one of these [HANDS WAVING \"NO\" SIGN]—no pictures. Okay, so we're in the Rotunda, and I'll never forget this: He was staring for a long time at the Declaration, just absorbing. And there's a scene in the movie where he's at Independence Hall holding a copy of the stolen Declaration, and he paused that same way he did in the Rotunda. He says, \"This is the first time this has been here since it was signed in this building.\" And that taught me about acting, you know, what it takes to draw on. So, I also met Jon Turteltaub, who was the director. And I was asked to do this role, and tour him through the building, and be his initial interface by the public affairs director, Susan Cooper. And she said, “Just be forewarned: They want to steal the Declaration.” And she actually told him, \"Are you sure you want to do that? Because for the next 30 years, the guards are going to be asked, 'Are you really that stupid, where you allowed it to be stolen?'\" Well, I came prepared, and I had a photograph of the interior courtyard of the Archives building that had the outside wall of the Rotunda. _The Rotunda enclosure at the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, during construction, August_ _2, 1935. (NAID 79443979_ _[https://catalog.archives.gov/id/79443979](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/79443979)_ _)_ __ _[](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/79443979)_ __ And eventually, soon after the building was completed, it was then filled with more stack space. At the top of that was a room with an air-handling duct one could crawl into and look down at the Rotunda. And you can go up there and literally look down into the Rotunda. And I said, \"You know, why don't you consider this: You know that _Mission Impossible_ thing where the guy drops down from the ceiling on cables and sees that? We can have an exhibit of the Declaration, first time out from the display case where you see the back.\" And he thought for about five seconds. He said, \"No, we're going to carry it from place to place.” So that was that. So a few weeks later, he came back with about 15 people to tour the whole building, because we would not let them film in the Rotunda. It was going to reopen in September of '03, and they were filming in August of '03. So we didn't want scratches on the marble and all that. So they built a soundstage and a mockup in California. So that was an educational experience. So after the renovation, which was a six- or seven-year process for me, it was over. But I had all this training for furniture buying, and outfitting spaces, and that kind of brass tacks stuff. So I was asked to train other staff members on how to do that, because any time one of our buildings needed some new office space or—not a full renovation, but a tweak—they would learn how to do that. So I did that. And then during that time, I was detailed to serve as a member of the staff of the Archivist of the United States. That lasted three months. Ultimately, I wound up my final years of the career, from, oh, roughly 2009 or 2010 through 2019, working with record storage standards and how records are stored—another brass tacks archival thing. So, although I wasn't working with the public anymore, I was working with federal records officers across the country. I have people skills. My mom used to say I have the gift of gab. You've probably seen that already. So that helped. And that led to a very fulfilling career. I was able to travel three or four times a year with Ron Noll, who's the technical architect person, and we would inspect facilities, both NARA's and federal agencies'. And it was fantastic being in the places I thought I'd never get the chance to visit, obviously, with that. And so, I got my degrees in history and library science and went to NARA." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So when did you leave?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "When did I leave? Yeah, I ended in March 2019, because of a medical condition. To get into the weeds, I was diagnosed in 2013 with NASH—nonalcoholic and, in Latin words, liver cirrhosis. I've never done drugs. I don't drink. It just happened. So, that requires, eventually, a liver transplant. So, I've been on the transplant list since 2013 and taking a bunch of meds. It affects your cognitive ability. So as I was still working toward the end, I noticed my personality changed. I was kind of curt, short with people, and that's not me. So the medicine has helped, and things are pretty much holding steady. But I had planned to work another three or four years at least." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So I'm going to talk you through sort of the different jobs you have had at the National Archives. What kind of things did you do when you were an education specialist? I think you mentioned one time about doing tours." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Yeah, well, the tours were when I was an archivist at College Park. I was the main tour guide. And then that segued into Archives I, as well, the National Archives Building. But, as an education specialist, because of my teaching credentials and background, I–we have an annual summer institute called Primarily Teaching. And the boss of the program, Elsie Freeman, pioneered the concept of teaching with documents. It was 1977 when that started. So, there I was, in 1992, and I was preparing document presentation packages. I wrote a regular column for _Social Education_ , which is the Journal of the National Council of the Social Studies. It was a" }, { "speaker": "regularly featured NARA column", "text": "document and then a write-up–a facsimile of it, and then a write up about the background, etc. I wrote about eight or nine of those. I remember the date of the presentation of the Statue of Liberty. That was my New York coming out—which was from France—it was in French. I did one on D-Day. And the document—this I'll never forget: I've been to West Point leading tour groups—non-NARA—and I always used it there that Eisenhower gave a report about D-Day to his higher officials, and it had just begun. Things were looking good, but he didn't have details. And there were others. I did one on Yosemite National Park, which John Muir was involved with. And I thought it was the first national park but it may have been Yellowstone. I can't remember. So that was a lot of fun to write. But most importantly, we had a one-week institute called Primarily Teaching, and I was one of the two leaders in that; the other was Wynell Schamel, a long-time teacher from Alabama. And her Alabama accent, and my, then still very noticeable, Northeastern accent was a nice counterplay. She taught me tons. I talk about mentorship again. No matter what job I've had, I've connected with a mentor, and it uplifts, it builds confidence, and helps you become the same type of person to mentor others. So I did that." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Really interesting. So who are some of the other mentors you've had at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Adrienne Thomas. When I started giving tours of the College Park building—some of these were international tours, you know—other national archives, et cetera, and school groups, and everything. And after about a half a year, everybody is just gushing about what that building looks like. It was so advanced, and I thought, \"You know, she's responsible for the building.\" So I thought, \"I need to make an appointment and talk with her to share this with her.\" So I cold- called. She saw me the next day, I think. And I now realize—I still see the look on her face. She was so pleased to hear this from the front lines that I think that left a really big impression on her. So this sharing accolades with others is a positive, positive thing. Pat Alexander, during the renovation—he was a Naval Academy grad, served in the Navy, eventually became an engineer who worked for a federal agency. I think it may be GSA [General Services Administration]. I can't remember now. [](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd7ek_6gwxE) And here I am in a work zone renovating a historic building, and I had no idea what to do in that circumstance. I had to buy work boots. I never had that before. And I'll never forget: there's a groundbreaking photograph of the National Archives building from 1932 or so, and it's a shot of somebody putting a ceremonial shovel in the ground. And I've given a talk, which is on the NARA YouTube page called _[If These Walls Could Talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd7ek_6gwxE)_ . It's about the history of the Archives building, and we got a letter from a genealogist based on that photograph wanting to know about us. \"I thought the Library of Congress had all that stuff. What do you have?\" And that was just fabulous. So you never know the impact of a photograph or outreach. So, here I was during the renovation, and it was the equivalent of groundbreaking. They had a front end—something that pounds concrete and breaks it up—and it was 4:30 a.m. And this was the moat surrounding the building part of the footprint. And we had to break that up to begin putting in a cavity for an electrical closet, which will be underground. The guy at my side was a contractor; his name is John Weiler, another mentor, who worked for Heery International and long retired. And I said, \"John, I've never been on a worksite. You know that. Don't leave me alone, okay?\" And he stayed nearby. So I raised my camera up to take a picture of, in effect, the groundbreaking. It was still dark. The flash went off. The guy stopped his pounding for a few moments. John comes up to me, says, \"You know, you just made that man crap his pants.\" I said, \"Excuse me?\" He said, \"Although we have drawings, we have no idea for sure what's underneath that. And if he hits an electrical wire, that's the last thing he'll see in this life.\" I was mortified. About four hours later, I'm walking through the building, and I pass the guy, and he sees me and he points [POINTS FINGER] and he says, \"You're the guy!\" I'm noticeable because I'm like 5 feet 3-1/2 inches and easy to, kind of, stand out in a crowd. So John Weiler's another. And then another huge one is Marv Shenkler, Marvin Shenkler. He worked for GSA. He was like the coordinator, the onsite guy, for the building of the College Park building. He was the onsite guy with Pat for the renovation. He's from Brooklyn. He grew up about five blocks north of where I did, but one generation earlier than me. So that's another one. And I can go on and on with—professionally—oh, heck, Ed Papenfuse, the Maryland State Archivist—huge mentor. So those were the main ones." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Do you remember the name of the first researcher you gave that first card to?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "I have it. They put a time capsule in, in 1994, to commemorate the official dedication of the building, and they had a contest, and I entered the contest, and I sent a copy of the registration card of that researcher, and it won. It was one of the things they put in there. So I used to have it in mind. He was just a regular—he was in California, and he was a scholar. And I don't remember his name, but it's known to the National Archives. Well, I can text you later with the name if you want that. [Note: The name is not available for this transcript due to the Privacy Act.]" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Sure, if you find it. And how did the research room change, like the research room protocols and stuff change while you were working as the research orientation specialist?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Well. It's a great question. The exposure I had to this whole orientation/introduction world was from the Maryland State Archives, and it's all about personableness, listening, zeroing in on what they need, not necessarily exactly what they're saying. So it was one-on-one, very personal. So, then, I never did research at the National Archives Building, because my jobs didn't involve the public. But the guy whose radar screen I wound up on—another name, mentor Bob Coren, Robert Coren, C-O-R-E-N—he heard about me, and he said, \"I want you to be the guy when College Park [Archives II] opens.\" So over time, we had a staff of three consultant archivists. But initially, it was just one. So we just learned by doing it, because it was a whole different environment. The office was in the main lobby. So you didn't have to traverse an 1100 foot-long building, which is as long as an aircraft carrier, by the way, and it was well-marked. And people would come in, and the thing that struck me the most was foreign visitors. They were amazed by the physical structure, just by walking in the building, and the fact that they had access to these records concerning their own homelands that were not available in their own homelands. And that's America right there, you know. So you do a reference interview. And I believe I sent you a _Washington Post_ article, and that's a nice summary that was done in 1994 about life there, where people come in, they present a need. There was a student from the University of Maryland, College Park, who said the teacher assigned her to listen to Watergate tapes. And so I inquired, you know, I can just say, \"Well, register, and you go up to the fourth floor. Have a good day.\" So I inquired, I said, \"What's the purpose of your research?\" She said, \"Well,\" she said, \"to find out if he's guilty.\" And I said, \"Guilty of...\" And she had no idea. And so it's like, okay, \"It sounds like you need exposure to primary sources, and go ahead and have at it.\" And, of course, there's experts up there that guide you through. The huge sadness in all of that is that, as time has gone on, that's all gone—in that research orientation room in the lobby. It's solely a perfunctory registration. And to get the in-depth help and TLC [tender loving care], you have to go to a research room and talk to an archivist. And there was a computerized registration system from day one. But over time, beginning about 2010, security became the coin of the realm. And they revamped the registration process, so it's about three or four times as long as it used to be. And most of it deals with security of the records. And it's like, if you're that lady in awe looking around, and she just wants to—and you have to go through that first, that just sucks the air out of you. And I have longed—and when you walk up to the front doors of the Archives in College Park, you see a security notice, which is from GSA, I think, small print, and on and on. Then you walk into the lobby, which is where they x-ray things and all. And the first thing you see is there's no— spray aerosol...I forget now what it is—but it says you can't carry this into the building. It's like, \"What the heck. Who's going to carry that anyhow.\" And you're just treated like a criminal from the first moment you walk in. And then when you get to that new registration scenario, it's like you're another passing through and \"go away, you bother me,\" that kind of thing. We need to get back to that caring of and listening right from the beginning, not later on. So what originally happened, the Archives does publications, handouts, including how to do research in an archive. Well, the building was brand new. I belong to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. And when we opened the new “Hall of Records” building, which is now named after Ed Papenfuse, by the way, we needed a flier on how to do research there and what's available. And as more records came that changed. So I was able to develop a [Microsoft] Word document, a trifold thing. And when College Park happened, I said, \"Well, let's do this again.\" And I did about, I don't know, 10 of them over a period of years to keep it current until, eventually, it settled. And now it's a printed–what do you call them?–\"GILs,\" Government Information Leaflets or something. So that was considerate of meeting people's needs. We also had a fax machine in 1994, which was brand new back then, and people can fax their requests to us or fax things back out. It's like, \"Wow, this is the future.\" And then the internet happened, and another gobsmacked moment that I thought, \"Oh, what's this all about?\" And they asked me to work with the design of, like the research portal portion of the thing, and particularly the Archives I building, regarding its renovation and, you know, play that all up. We did a lengthy design, but it didn't fly. They did something else. I think I answered the question." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Yeah, I think so. Tell me some more about the renovation. I think you said somewhere that the building didn't close. So how does that work?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "The only part that closed was the Rotunda to the public from July 5, 2001, until Constitution Day [September 17], 2003. The building renovation, which was all formulated by Pat Alexander—it was just magic—was in quadrants. And so we had to demolish parts of the stacks to make space for new areas that were going to be public outreach space, and so staff members who were in a given quadrant had to relocate so work could happen there. And then the other three quadrants were still occupied per normal. So that just rotated through all the time. And many of them got reassigned to temporary space in the building. Some went to College Park temporarily. It was disruptive with a capital \"D.\" And my job was—I think there's probably about a dozen people that were really ticked by the whole thing. \"You know, you've ruined my life,\" basically, and I was point for that. But most of the people couldn't wait to see what it was going to look like because College Park, I mean, we did that wonderfully. You know, we had to keep the historic look of the building, which we did, but it was an experience to go through. There was smoke, there were smells, there was sound. The very first person I had to relocate was an elderly archivist—his name escapes me at the moment. I'm going to make myself a note so I can tell you that later. Hang on a second. I want to say John Taylor; it may have been him. It wasn't him. His specialty was Nazi records, and his office \"de facto\" [MAKES AIR QUOTES] was actually a part of the stack, because records were all around him, and that's all he did. And I'll never forget the day I walked in and I said, \"You know, I'm sorry, Bob Matchette.” That’s his name! “You're the first to be relocated.\" He knew it was going to happen, but it was like crestfallen. Okay, so needless to say, when it was all said and done, that worked great. I remember talking with other staff members. Part of their office space was also in the stacks, and they had a coat rack, a wooden coat rack, there with hooks on it. And there was a sweater hanging on it. And I said, \"No, all this is going to have to go. That's your personal stuff, that coat rack, for instance. Okay, so whose sweater is that?\" They said they didn't remember the name. The guy left the Archives about 11 years before. They just kept it there as a memento or if anybody was particularly cold, put that on. So there was a culture, a definite culture in the National Archives Building that was changed for the good. I would say that it came from that whole experience." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Cindy Fox, when I did an interview with her, she mentioned that she thought it didn't change for the better when Archives II opened. She thought that she preferred the culture in Archives I. There was a lot more, well, for one thing, you're a lot more likely to run into somebody and just be able to talk, because of the size. And then the other thing was because the commute was so bad to College Park, a lot of people came in really early and just left early. So there wasn't much time to sit around and talk in the break rooms or whatever." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "That's true of College Park, because it's an enormous building. But at Archives I, I don't think that changed at all. Was she saying that the culture at Archives I changed?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "She was comparing Archives I camaraderie to Archives II." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Cindy Fox is an unforgettable person. I'd like to see her oral history sometime or read it. I think the world of her, but she has a very unique personality and you understand her view of things very clearly. And I admire her for that. Did that answer your question?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Do you agree though, the camaraderie–[CROSS TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "We had to close–we were going to seal all the windows of the Archives building in Washington for energy savings, which we did. But she wanted her window to still be openable, because she enjoyed the breeze. Still in that building were artifacts from the original building from 1935, when it opened, including paperweights, which were government-issued because that's what you did. The Archives building was the first of 12 buildings in DC to actually have air- conditioning, but the air-conditioning was only for the stacks. So in the staff offices, it was not uncommon to be 85 degrees. So you needed windows open. Not that Cindy was there in 1935, but it still gets hot in Washington. And even though the air conditioning improved over the years, it's still nice to have the breeze. And I said, “We're not going to be able to do that.” And I'm sorry about that. Did that answer your question? I've lost track." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Yeah, that's interesting. No, my question was still, did you think that the camaraderie, the feeling of community was different from College Park [AII] to AI? And I think you basically said yes." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Yes, I think without qualification, it's a different thing. I do remember that staff members started coming out to populate Archives II. I'm in the lobby. That's where my office is. I rarely walked into the main staff part of the building, because my office was in the lobby. The cafeteria was right down the hall. Downstairs off the lobby were the theater and locker rooms. I had to show researchers where the locker rooms were. I remember there was a guy from New York City, which I can relate to. He didn't want to put anything in the locker, because he assumed it would be stolen. And I said, \"No, no.\" I walked him down there and I said, \"See, there's two cameras here, and it's, you know...\" That's what he needed to hear. You know, it's College Park, Maryland. It's not Brooklyn. So on the other side of the window wall, off the lobby, was the building and where the culture is. And it's so huge that it tended to be within a given office where that camaraderie was. But outside of that office was a different universe. And so it didn't have that interplay. And same with the research rooms, because at Archives I, it was the central research room, and everything happened through there. And in Archives II, we had six different research rooms by format, and so you had specialists in each and never the twain shall meet. So your point is valid." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So, why do you think they wanted you to be on the building renovation? It just doesn't sound like you thought it was something you wanted to do." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "I'm convinced it's my people skills—they knew going in that I was able to mollify people. I mentioned about a dozen people, ultimately, who were not happy. I don't want to say cajole, convince people that this was all for the good, and show them what it was going to look like afterwards. The huge majority saw that once it was done. But again, granted, it was a change. And so in the new public spaces, we put in accessible entrances on Constitution Avenue, because of ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] requirements, and that included elevators. So you walk in from street level, and you can take an elevator up to the Rotunda. That part was a whole different culture, too, because it used to be you'd walk up the steps to enter the Rotunda. One thing I didn't mention in my background was when John Carlin became Archivist he established a program to set a new vision for the Archives. It was like an eight-year thing, two different cycles. And we went to every NARA facility and interviewed staff. And I'm trying to remember the years for that—it was pre-renovation, if I remember correctly—and again, I was hand-selected to be part of that because of people skills and, you know, non-threatening to walk into a room when you're 5 feet 3 inches and 115 pounds. So that got on Adrienne’s radar screen as well. And I think that's what led to that. So I was selected because I had experience in hearing people's needs, addressing them. I will never forget, we were part of a group of three, each team. Mary Evans, who was an education specialist at Hoover Library, and Jerry George, who was the head of the NHPRC [National Historical Publications and Records Commission], a former journalist, somebody like in that world. I'm misremembering that a little bit. So Mary came once to DC. We were walking up the steps together, and I was just booking it, going up to where the top was. And she was slowing down, slowing down, stopped. I turned around, and I said, \"Mary, are you okay?\" And she was awed. She said, \"I can't believe I'm at the National Archives Building.\" Well, that's the awesomeness of that physical structure. The College Park building is wonderful, but it's because of its size, and it's mired in modern look, not John Russell Pope's desire to make it a temple to history, which he was greatly successful at. [See [https://www.c-span.org/video/?292357-1/national-archives-building](https://www.c-span.org/video/?292357-1/national-archives-building) ] So going to the staff and doing these interviews, I'll never forget, we were in California at a records center, and there was a mother and daughter who were employees. The mother had been there a long, long time. Her daughter was relatively new. And she broke down and started crying, the mother, because they were contract workers, and the way NARA did it back then, they were called \"intermittents\" back then, and you didn't work a full year, because you can't work a full year—you had to get benefits. So they work 51 weeks a year. It was use and abuse. I'm going to say it bluntly. And she said she doesn't want her daughter to follow the same track in life that she has, because they didn't have much education, but their jobs there were perfectly suited to their skills. And when we reported that back to John Carlin, I believe the very first thing he did was get rid of intermittents, that whole program, and hired them as staff. Carlin used to be the Governor of Kansas before he came. He's still alive. I was concerned, because he wasn't an archivist. We had a history of archivists there, historians. And what I learned from that was he was a manager. He was an administrator. And he largely left it to Adrienne Thomas to be the “Archivist” [USING AIR QUOTES] at the helm. It was a dual thing. And it worked spectacularly well." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So, when you did the detail, I think you said it was a detail, right, as the assistant to the Archivist. Was that to Adrienne?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "No, that was—let me think of the name—the last name began with a \"W.\"" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Weinstein?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Allen Weinstein. Yeah, thank you." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So, what kind of things did you do with that?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Some of it was public interface. When people were needing the attention of the Archivist, they would channel through either his secretary or people who understood the Archives better. I got to know Sam Anthony very well. Sam was responsible for identifying documents that can be copied and then used as giveaways, the copies, as needs arose. Sam headed the author lecture series. I'm glad we brought this up, because in my job as an education specialist, we had a colleague there, Cynthia Hightower, whose interest was theater, and the Archives building stage used to have dramatic performances and musicals and things like that. She was responsible for that. When we designed the new theater at College Park, we purposely designed it so it can be both a movie theater and a stage. The screen retracts to clear the entire stage. The lighting has special stage lighting. You can dim the lighting. She retired. Things change. We got Marvin Pinkert, who came in to run the education public interface, I should say, the visitor experience program. And he had no interest in live theater. And so, that's some of the most memorable things I remember seeing, because they're all historically based presentations. So the lighting changed, and it all became fluorescent, full on/full off. It didn't dim. And the architect responsible for that theater, Scott Teixeira–Heery International, another contractor involved with the renovation, interviewed him and us and others as well, about the whole project. And he was explaining the color scheme of the theater at Archives I, which is subtle reds and golden hues and yellows. And this floored me, because it's what an architect is. He said he wanted to replicate a sunset. I said, \"Excuse me?\" He said, \"If you look at the color palette, it's sunset colors in sequence.\" And it was. And so the idea of dimming the lights [LAUGHS] went out the window, because you either have an appreciation for that or you don't. Did I answer your question? Tell me if I did or didn't." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "I think. I just asked what your duties were as assistant to the Archivist, you know." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "So, I was involved with giving tours sometimes. I now realize in hindsight that it may well have been a trial to field test me in that environment. Deb Wall was the one who put me up for it. We go way back from when I was an education specialist. She was a CIDS person. What does that stand for? Do you remember?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "I believe it's Career Intern Development System, but I've seen another one, too." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "That's it, because she was like an intern, and she rotated through the education unit. So I've known her since 1992. And so I think she put me forth to be in that position. But, for whatever reason, it didn't germinate, but it did germinate into the final career I had, which was very rewarding." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Now, I really want to know more about that, you called it standards, records standards, records storage standards...?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Federal records facility storage standards. There's a part of the Code of Federal Regulations [CFR] that details to the nth degree all of that: temperature, humidity, on and on and on. This part of my liver thing, it affects my memory, and so things come and go. I used to be able to cite that without blinking an eye, and now sometimes they are, sometimes not. Oh, 36 CFR 1234. That’s it. Jennifer Noell and I developed a toolkit to explain the whole process to these people who are out there just trying to do the best they could as records officers. And that helped enormously. And then eventually, we put it online, and you can do a checklist, make sure that everything is kosher. And periodically they'd have to recertify that their storage facility is complying with the standards. And then we would spot check, do these visits three or four times a year at our discretion, who we wanted to go visit. So I interfaced with, really, all the federal records officers. They developed a blog through the appraisal archivist program. I'm forgetting the name of that office now. Do you happen to remember what it is? But, it's the first office I worked in for the Archives, and Laurence Brewer is the head of it. And so, they still do that. Those colleagues still do that job. And it's not uncommon for them to eventually leave and become records officers for federal agencies, often paying better than being an appraisal archivist. So it's highly specific skills. And you're dealing with esoteric details. But if you're into archives, you need to follow those things so that the records live, at least live in the best conditions they can. And so it's a back-of-house effort. The public is little aware or not aware of it at all, but it's part of the panoply of the glory of what the National Archives is." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Is that the Records Management Oversight and Reporting Division?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "That term doesn't resonate with me. They could have renamed it. You never know. But I know that there's another part of the building at Archives II, where people are involved with records outreach. But that's not the appraisal archivists. It's something else. And that might be what you're talking about." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So when you were an appraisal archivist, did that mean that you were getting in collections that were already determined to be archival, or did you work with records that you needed to decide whether they were permanent?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "That's a good question. The whole reason to have appraisal archivists is to render a professional judgment whether a series of records is permanently valuable or not. It's not document by document. It's series by series, like the Correspondence Files of the Director of the Peace Corps—highest level, permanent records. They don't care what's in it. Another example is the Correspondence Files of the President of the United States. It's a separate entity. It's the Presidential Records Act. But there's records managers at the White House complex whose job it is to make sure that's all being followed. So, if you're ripping up a document and throwing it on the floor, that's not kosher. And those folks actually Scotch-taped some of those things back together. It's like, okay, so that the sanctity of records is why the Archives is there. So you're involved with safeguarding the records for posterity. I need you to pose your question again." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "I think you answered it. I asked whether you were looking at records that were coming in to see [CROSS-TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "What crossed my mind was two things. I had about a dozen agencies. The Peace Corps was one of them I worked with. That was my first NARA job, my first federal job. It was a whole different culture than being a teacher or working for the state government. And I will never forget, the records officer bucked me up to his supervisor to explain why I was there and what I was doing. And he needed to loop in his boss. So I'm sitting in this guy's very nice office, and he's on the phone with his boss, and he's beginning to do the introductions and why they're calling him. And he puts his hand over the mouthpiece, and he says, \"Rick, he wants to know what grade you are.\" And I was incredulous, and from that I learned, if you're not a certain grade, you don't get to talk to some people in some agencies, which I thought was beyond ludicrous. Well, the appraisal archivists were GS-11s back then, eventually the starting became GS-12. As far as I know, it's still that. So, for records that haven't been appraised already—and the Peace Corps didn't have any appraised yet—I was going through their files with their records officer. And it turns out that they have a series of records for their Peace Corps advisory board. The Peace Corps started in 1966, I believe it was, through Sergeant Shriver, a President John F. Kennedy colleague. And I'm going through these documents, and it was the oath that they swear to take to serve the federal government. It's pro forma. Every federal employee reads the same oath. And it was 1967, I think. I forget the year, '66 or '67. And one of the people on the board was Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali was risking going to jail for not taking that oath, because his religious beliefs forbade him from serving in the military. Yet, he took that oath for the Peace Corps. It's a very powerful thing, when you think about that. And so I showed it to the records officer. He had no idea. I said you need to Xerox this, because the signatures are on it, so you need to Xerox it and put that into the file. Keep this in a secure place, which he did immediately. And I tried to find out, before this interview, if all of that did come to College Park. But because of COVID-19, it's just hard to get through and get people. As a kid, I was born in 1956, and I was a kid when the Peace Corps began. And I remember their ad campaign: \"The toughest job you'll ever love.\" That's memorable. I showed you \"Haul of Records.\" I like to play with words, and had I stayed in New York, I probably would have been in the advertising business. When I worked at the Maryland State Archives—can you see this mug? [HOLDS UP MUG] I came up with a phrase, \"Maryland State Archives—Where the past is present for the future.\" And \"present\" has two meanings: physically present [through the records], but also the past becomes real because you're exposed to it. So to have that awareness is almost sacred to pass that on. Bill Moyers has a quote which resonated with me about history, and let me read it to you. It's brief. This is Bill Moyers, PBS [Public Broadcasting Service], long-retired—he's 83-years old now—but he did documentaries. He was a journalist. He worked for public broadcasting" }, { "speaker": "television. So he says this", "text": "\"The past is no row of bare facts waiting to be memorized by schoolchildren. Nor does it stand in our backyard like an old picket fence, slowly and silently rotting. The past is a real world inhabited by villains and heroes and regular folk passing this way on swift journeys. Their story is our story, the tie that binds each generation to all the others.\" And that is a motto that hit me squarely in the heart, because my religious side of being a servant to God and to mankind segued into civil service for the state government and then the federal government. And to me, it's all outreach and service. And if you lose track about why you're even there, if you're drawing a paycheck and you're not there to serve records officers or the public or whatever, students, you're in the wrong job. And there are staff members who don't necessarily abide by that credo. And I think it's telling." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "You talked about Native Americans who came to visit. Can you tell that story?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Yeah. One of the people, a teacher who came from Primarily Teaching, his name is John Lawler, L-A-W-L-E-R. He worked at Reading Area Community College in Reading, Pennsylvania, and he was very interested in Native Americans. And after he retired from teaching—I can't figure it out, but all these people I know have retired. Something's going on. [LAUGHS] So, he would regularly visit a Navajo tribe in Arizona. And he also volunteered, I believe, still does, pre- COVID, on Saturdays to be a volunteer tour person and outreach person to the public on the public side of Archives I. And he travels from Reading, Pennsylvania, area. It's in his blood. He loves it. He had an amazing experience from that Primarily Teaching thing. It changed how he approached teaching. There's power in the records. So, he was interfacing with these Navajo [tribal members] and, by and by, some years later, they toured Washington [DC] with him, and he asked if they could come and look at some treaties. So I arranged with Trevor Howard [determined later to be Trevor Plante] to go into the vault where all the treaties were. And this was another \"I'll never forget moment.\" They listened attentively. And Trevor had some things laid out in advance of their visit so they could see, including Navajo treaties, which they were intimately aware of but had never seen the originals. And what caught me was the Indian signatures for—petrographs? They were symbols. I forget the word. Petroglyphs? Because they didn't write English. Running Bear was a running bear or something like that. So, this particular individual was amazed. It's the impact of the original record. It goes back to Lewis and Clark. I mean, Mason and Dixon. So, he looked at Trevor and said, \"You have _all_ the treaties here?\" Trevor said, \"Yes, we do.\" To which he replied, \"Even the ones that were broken?\" My mouth dropped open. My eyes popped. Trevor didn't miss a beat. He said simply, \"We have all the treaties here.\" So, I'm glad you went that way, because it shows the value of touring with people, because some people, that's the interface they have with the Archives is to see these records. And the way it is now, you can't bring people into the stacks. I think that's heinous, and I hope, in time, that will change, because the power is the record. I remember at the Maryland Archives, I would give tours there, and we had a document written by George Washington. It was, you know, a George Washington–signed letter. It was a letter from Washington to the Maryland Senate President and the House Speaker thanking them for the vote of praise he received from the Maryland General Assembly for his Revolutionary War services, November 1781. And I was cautioned, and I would use that regularly on tours, hold it up, but I wouldn't pass the record out for people to look at, because on the back, 100+ years later, somebody had written in a cartoon-like thing—not suitable for families—depiction of something going on. I'm thinking, my gosh, again, the sacredness of the record. I said, \"Dude, you did this to George Washington's letter? Come on!\" But it just shows, you either get it or you don't. So the fact that you can't—and so that's the power of doing in-person research as opposed to online research. You get information, but you're also seeing the record. When I was working on my thesis in Annapolis, the State Archivist allowed me to stay after hours to conduct my research. Only me and the guard were in the building. So talk about “security” [USING AIR QUOTES] protocols in an archives building. The agency head trusted me. It was a different era. And there were thousands of pages of unprocessed records sent to the Governor of Maryland over the years, and I was looking for records from a time period that pertained to the subject of my thesis. I found two or three that were germane, which was helpful. You know, sure, I went through 4,000 pages, but I found two or three, so it was great. And so, going through that, one night, I'm turning the pages. They are unorganized, just by year, they're roughly organized by year, and I see this document, and it took me a moment to realize it was a transmittal letter for the 13th Amendment. And by the way, I just saw the movie _Lincoln_ for the first time a few weeks ago. Daniel Day-Lewis walks on water, and I had no idea that the thrust of that whole movie was the 13th Amendment. It floored me. So I'm looking at this—and I've had the DVD for several years. I just never viewed it till last week. So I'm looking at this transmittal document, and it's transmitting the amendment to the Governor of Maryland. The proposed amendment, I should say, because I learned from the movie, it wasn't passed until half a year or more later, and at the bottom is Abraham Lincoln's signature. Again, my mouth dropped. I put my hand where he would have had his hand, when he signed that letter. Seeing a digital copy, great. Handling the original? It's a privilege of being an archivist, and in most cases, researchers are handling original records. Well, this was intrinsically valuable, to say the least. So the next morning, I brought it up to the State Archivist, who was overwhelmed, and he had, like, a vault area adjacent to his office, and that's where it went, and then a Xerox copy got put in its place. So, I just saw a video on the NARA YouTube page, which was done about eight or nine years ago, and I saw part of it and it was talking about the new online catalog. And Deb Wall was involved with that originally...NAIL—National Archives Information Locator—and then another iteration, ARC, I think it was called—Archival Research Catalog. And now it's whatever it goes by. And this young person, I don't know what her job is or was, but she was involved with creating the new catalog. And she said, \"The old way of doing this was you had to go through three steps to access the record.\" And they showed the stacks, and, you know, it's like identify it, retrieve it, bring it to a researcher... And my eyes roll, because the old way is still done, thank you very much. Not everything is online. And she was gushing, saying the new ways and to just be able to sit at a computer and punch keys and \"Voilà,\" there it is. Well, last I saw, we have less than one percent of our records digitized. Most of it was involved through volunteers, not systematic, and is no longer employed by NARA archivists at the New York City National Archives facility, whose name escapes me. It was a female. And she wrote an ICN, the internal Facebook page kind-of-like thing for the Archives Internal Collaboration Network. She wrote a thing about _Titanic_ records in the National Archives regional facility in New York, because that National Archives facility has _Titanic_ records from a court case. And she said, you know, “A few things are online,” but her task, her job, and I think it was self-motivated, was to try to create or recreate the original order, systematically scan everything, put everything out there, and then you're conducting research, thank you very much. And that got pooh-poohed to a fare-thee-well on the ICN, and she didn't stay there much longer. And I find that heinous, because that's what an archives is at its heart. It's not \"Oh, gee, look at this.\" Poof, now move on and buy a pizza. I mean, it's not research. It's exposure to records, but it's not research. And I came to realize that conducting research is in my DNA, and helping people to conduct research is in my DNA. Now I'm not dismissing the value of having things online. It's just that, in my humble opinion, as was hers, you need to systematically copy records series, and then have at it. And I'd say, even worse, it's volunteer transcription with very little oversight. This is a story from the Maryland State Archives. Like I had trouble reading the original document I was looking at, the Xerox of the Mason-Dixon letter, one day, I was in the research room with my colleague, and somebody was having trouble reading handwriting from the 1600s. Maryland was founded in 1634. It's hard; it's different words, different handwriting. And their family name was Moron [pronounced Ma-rone], with an \"M.\" Moron. And they asked what they were looking for. They were doing genealogy. So they were reading this document. They weren't sure if it's the name. And my colleague went over there, and I can hear them right out in front of the control desk. And they said, \"We can't quite read that name.\" And he looked, and then he looked at them and said, it's \"Moron\" [pronounced More-on], because it's \"M-O-R­ O-N.\" And they took great offense. And this person said, \"It's Moron\" [pronounced Ma-rone]. And my colleague looked again and says, \"It looks like \"Moron\" [pronounced More-on] to me!\" [LAUGHS] But that was the truth! It's true. So even if you put things online, it's going to be hard to read sometimes. And if you're leaving it to unsupervised transcribers, it's a free-for-all. That is not useful. But again, I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I understand digitization, but it needs to be done systematically." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "I think there are series that are being scanned systematically, but there's just a limited number." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Yeah, because the volume is enormous. I think the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs] is involved with the project right now with doing that for access to veterans records. Heck, my uncle served on a PT [Patrol, Torpedo] boat in World War II, in the Radio Corps, and I found his deck logs from his ship. Have you ever looked at a deck log before? So you open up, the inside front cover has names and addresses of the mothers, and there's my grandmother's name, Martina Jorge, J-O-R-G-E, from Puerto Rico, Jorge. \"Jorge\" [SAYS IN SPANISH], I'm sure, but we pronounced it \"George\" in Brooklyn. And I thought, \"What the heck?\" And then it dawned on me. Oh man, if one of these people gets killed, that's who they notify. Wow. And he was involved with the Philippine action in 1944, I think it was World War II. So seeing that was fabulous. And an uncle on my father's side served in the OSS [Office of Strategic Services], the precursor to the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency]. His parents, my grandparents, were born in Italy. My mom's side was born in Puerto Rico, and they all spoke Italian, and he was tapped to be involved with the war effort in Italy. And part of what his record showed was that he guarded Italian prisoners. But somehow he wound up—that's what the words [USING AIR QUOTES] were, that he was OSS. So I think it must have been more than guarding. I think there must have been some mining of information going on as well. They never talked about that when I was a kid. I guess I was too little. My father was one of 12. So most of them are deceased now, including my parents. But, what a time that must have been to live. Heck, I was in Paris for three weeks visiting a friend of mine I went to college with. He was working at the American Embassy in Paris. And we made three day trips. One of them was the cemetery at Normandy. Life-changing experience. The archives part of this...I walked into the visitor's center, and they had a brand new one built around 2008—not brand new anymore— but dedicated space. This was more just like a lobby. And framed on the wall was a letter from President Dwight Eisenhower with his signature on it. It was the original letter they received. And it opened—and this is on the occasion of dedicating the cemetery in 1956, and it opened up with: \"Twelve years ago on D-Day...\" Another mouth drop. I was born in 1956, just 12 years before the world was saved. And my relatives played a role in that. Talk about the past is present. Wow! And so I contacted them after I retired. I said, \"I'd like to get a copy of that,\" and I couldn't easily communicate with them. And they didn't have it online, which they should have. So I contacted the Eisenhower Library, and they sent me the archival record of that, which doesn't have his signature. It's got his stamp. But I do have it. And it's like, again, the power of the record, and how it can affect people differently. Myriad examples of that. Alex Haley, when he did his _Roots_ research at the Maryland State Archives, he only knew that Kunta Kinte had arrived at a port called \"Napolis,\" which he correctly assumed was Annapolis. There's now a plaque at the waterfront there to commemorate that. And we had an event some years after the book and miniseries. I was in college when that happened. I haven't seen it to this day. I can't wait to see the miniseries. I guess you have time when you're retired, but it's technology; I don't know how to access it. [LAUGHS] So, I met him and another mentor, my gosh, Phebe Jacobsen, Maryland State Archives archivist, who was responsible for Quaker records and all church records coming to the Maryland Archives, because those were sources of information before government records became coherent. So they have this voluntary program of churches, having us microfilm the records and giving them the microfilm, and we keep the original for posterity. And she was an expert in African American history. She's the one who told me about Samuel Green, who was the topic of my thesis. And I had hoped one day to write a book and maybe a screenplay. But this mental thing [POINTS TO HEAD] has its moments. I can do research, but because of COVID-19, it's all been shut down. So we'll see what happens. But Phebe, without her, I wouldn't have had that passion enhanced for doing historical research. And by the way, in the joint master's program, you had an option whether to do a thesis or not. And I decided I wanted to, because I have a knack for writing, and I thought I wanted to learn how to do that. And it went very well with the three advisers I had, one of whom, I think, was Dr. Rundell. I'm going on memory there." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So who was Samuel Green?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Samuel Green was a free Black man from Dorchester County, Maryland, near Cambridge, Maryland, who was born on the Eastern Shore around 1802, and he purchased his freedom from his master, and then he purchased his two children and his wife shortly thereafter. And he opened up a business in East New Market, which is a suburb of Cambridge. And when I hear suburb, I think Brooklyn and, no, this is Eastern Shore, Maryland. It's nothing. And not to be indelicate, but I went out there once for a luncheon with a local and other friends, and he asked me about the thesis. These were all White people, and as soon as I explained briefly who he was, conversation changed. They had no interest at all. Wow. I'm sorry, but wow. Growing up in East New York, Brooklyn, it was a mixed-race, integrated community. And I think that helped me. He was a free Black man, and he established a blacksmith shop. And Phebe heard about this guy from a guy named John Creighton, who was in the East New Market area. So she advised me to go tour with him, and he'll show me the sights, which was beyond helpful. It's all recorded on a cassette tape. I'm pretty sure I can't play that anymore. No cassette audio recorder. We spent a couple of hours driving around, and so I saw, likely, the location of his house, the location of his blacksmith shop because of the road structure. It was where two roads split right there. And he told me the story of Green as far as he was able to take it. So, I took it much further than he did. Apparently, his children became slaves again in Cambridge, for a doctor. His name was \"Muse,\" M-U-S-E. And his daughter was sold into slavery to Missouri, and they never heard from her again. And the son didn't want that experience for himself, so he fled, and Harriet Tubman was involved with that. I've yet to see the movie, _Harriet_ , but Samuel Green has a role in it. I've actually Googled it, and saw the cast, because we've had the movie cast about my book for decades, from the Maryland Archives. It's a fascinating story. So he was suspected of aiding and abetting runaway slaves, and I didn't believe that to be the case, based on my research. But over the years, I've come to realize, \"Oh, yeah.\" And what happened was, his son fled to Canada. And so at one point, Green and his wife went to Canada to see his son, and then they came back. And he had in his home railroad schedules from Maryland to Canada, and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ , the book, which when it was first published, was two volumes and somehow, the locals heard about it. One of the locals eventually became the Governor of Maryland, Thomas Holliday Hicks. And Green was arrested, charged with abetting slaves, and also having in his possession incendiary literature, which would foment discontent in the African American community. Do you know what that literature was? _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ , the book. So, the courthouse in Cambridge was built just like a year or two before he was tried. The courthouse is there. A great setting for the movie, and now unoccupied. It's a historic site. So he decided he needed to flee. And so he left, went to Philadelphia, connected with William Still, who wrote a famous book called _The Underground Railroad_ , which was his accounts of slaves he had helped escape. Well, Green's son was one of those. And in talking to William Still, he was there long enough where somebody did a sketch of Samuel Green. So there's actually an image of him in that book, and good for the makeup artist for the movie. And so he decided that, you know, I jumped ahead here. He was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in the Maryland State Penitentiary. The first charge was dropped. The second charge was having the book. The penitentiary in Baltimore is still there [NOTE: It was demolished shortly after this interview], including the original portion of it—movie set [USES AIR QUOTES]. So he served 5 years of a 10-year sentence. Hicks became Governor. That's what I was looking for in the Maryland State papers to the Governor. Did anybody communicate with him about a pardon? And two or three letters did just that. And his response was, \"I can't.\" He knows Green personally, and he can't commute the sentence because he, Governor Hicks, would basically be killed if he did that. And so he left office. The new Governor, Augustus, I can't remember if that was his first or last name—Augustus Bradford, or I may have that backwards. One of the very first things he did was pardon Samuel Green on the condition that he leave Maryland and not return. This was 1863 or so. So he and his wife traveled north to go to Canada, to join up with his son. And I was able to track his progress through research at Peabody Library and other places (including Canada). And at one point, I'm going through Harriet Beecher Stowe's information about her, and there was a newspaper column that she regularly wrote for a New York newspaper. And buried in the article was a paragraph, and I can't quote it exactly, but it was: \"There came a man one day named Samuel Green, from Maryland.\" He explained his story, and she summarized it, and then he said, \"He had but one request to make. Since he wasn't able to finish reading the book, could he have a copy?\" And her answer was, \"This, we were glad to do.\" And so my hope is that there's an autographed copy to Samuel Green from Harriet Tubman of that book. I gave a talk once in the downtown Archives building about this. And there were people in the audience who were Green descendants. They didn't let on to me if they had such a book or not, but they stayed close to the vest. For one thing, it's a Black-culture story. And who am I, I mean, to say it bluntly. But so he moved to Canada, and I lost track of them. So Phebe Jacobsen said, \"You know, he probably came back to Maryland.\" I said, \"What? Why?\" She said, \"Well, there's a love for the land.\" And that's why she encouraged me to go to Dorchester County and experience it, which I did with John Creighton. You grow up in Brooklyn...it's nice, but, you know, it ain't home; it's transient. If you're embedded in a rural area, it's the love of the land. So, I never checked. The Civil War ended. She said, \"Go check the 1870 census.\" There he was. He and his wife. Dorchester County. They came back. And then he helped start Morgan State University. It went by a different name at the beginning. He and his wife moved to Baltimore. In his obituary, which is 1878, if I remember correctly, there's a write-up about the address he lived at. And I actually traveled that street, which is still there, but different. And it said that it was the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore. He was buried at Mount Zion Cemetery, which was the African American cemetery south of Baltimore City, in South Baltimore City. And that's where he was. And my thesis ended, you know. I lost track of him. He's known but to God, you know, that kind of thing. But now I know where he's buried. So I went out there looking for the grave site, and it was explained to me that prisoners from the Maryland State Penitentiary in Baltimore regularly went out there and weeded, because it became severely overgrown over the decades. But they didn't fully do the entire thing. So I didn't find it in the prim and proper part. But there's still that overgrown thing, and I haven't been there in about, oh, 15 years. So I'd like to go back and see if that's now trimmed, and maybe I can find his grave marker, and that would be a closure to me. And there was a parade. That's not the word for a funeral but there was a procession from that church, the Sharp Street AME Church, to that cemetery. And it made the news, and his story was well known. So now I know where he's buried. And as it turns out, that cemetery is about 15 minutes from where I used to live. And it's like, wow. Just wow. So that's an unspoken and unmet need to locate where he's at, because it's just proper to do that. So that's Samuel Green. People only know about the story from my thesis, because I developed it. I had a college professor who contacted me years later when I was at the National Archives who had read it, and wanted to pursue it further, and, ideally, wanted to find a court transcript, which of course, I was looking for myself, but they didn't have it. I suspect they purposely didn't keep that one in Cambridge, Maryland. And I said, \"You know, I've looked, and you're not likely to find it.\" And I never heard back from her. But I remember I have her name written, and she has written about the time, the place, the topic. But she didn't do a Green story. And then I heard about the movie, _Harriet_ , and I can't remember now, but she may have been an adviser to that movie, so it's not like I'm in contention with this college professor to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, because that's history. You know, more power to you if you get resolution. More power to you." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "That's a great story. That's a fascinating guy. It's pretty amazing. Okay, I'm going to stop right now. [END RECORDING PART ONE] [BEGIN RECORDING PART TWO - April 29, 2021]" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "We are recording. My name is Daria Labinsky, and I am doing a NARA oral history with Rick Blondo, and the date is April 29, 2021. And this is part two of an interview. Okay. Hi, Rick." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Hi. I'm glad for the opportunity to continue. What I wanted to do, at least initially here, is to speak to some of the points that I raised in the video interview. First off, I had mentioned recalling the first person that I had to relocate during the renovation of the National Archives building and, to the best of my knowledge, that gentleman's name is...Bob Matchette. That's M-A-T-C-H-E-T-T-E. Bob was a very long-time member of the staff and retired some years ago. And I'm seeking ultimate confirmation from somebody, from him personally, or who can communicate. And if I get that, I will coordinate with whomever is shepherding the interview in the near future, you know, this oral history in the near future, and augment that as well. But I'm 95-percent sure it was Bob Matchette. Secondly, the question had come up about who was the first member of the public to register as a researcher at the National Archives at College Park. I haven't been able to quickly find what I had seen a month or so ago here at home, mementos from my work. So I don't have that" }, { "speaker": "name handy. Two suggestions would be", "text": "it may not be available because of privacy concerning researcher identity. But, if the person was amenable to being interviewed about it, that would have come out during the 1994 planning for the time capsule that got put in when the formal dedication took place in May 1994 of the building in College Park. And I would think [NARA Historian] Jessie Kratz may have access to information as far as you know, copies of what's in the time capsule, so the person's name can be seen there. My recollection was he was a historian from California. I think, maybe a college professor. And Daria, you have to remind me, the first thing we were talking about before we went live with the recording. It was the third point. Oh, documents that I had made reference to regarding Eisenhower during World War II. In my brain, I had merged two documents, both inadvertently. Both of these are available on the National Archives web page. I don't know if there's a way to include a link to that in the transcript of this, but that might be helpful. The documents in play were his first report regarding the progress of D-Day. It was very early in the invasion, and it was his view to share as much as what was known to the powers that be above him. And in my brain, I had recalled incorrectly, as it happens. In that same document, he made reference to taking full responsibility, if the invasion failed. So, in reality, that \"I take full responsibility\"-type-document was a [handwritten note](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/186470) , which was apparently done the day before D-Day. Again, it's also on our web page. It's dated July 5, 1944. And I suspect he purposely put July instead of June 5th when he wrote it, so if the note fell into enemy hands, you know, it would not give away the plan. And the powerful, poignant thing at the end of that was if any blame attends to the attempt, this is in the context of if it failed, he's personally responsible. \"If any blame attends, it's mine alone for accepting the responsibility,\" which I thought was jaw-dropping. But it speaks to the character of the man. So that's the point I wanted to relay just to kind of tie up the earlier interview. So my next question would be, do you have anything that you want to further discuss while we're still connected?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "I don't remember. Did we talk about the records management oversight?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "You mean my work with that? Yeah, we did." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "We did, okay. And I had one question: You mentioned when you were talking about [some]one being in AI, you mentioned–did you mean to say Trevor Plante?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "I did say Trevor Plante, didn't I?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "You said Trevor Howard, I think." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Oh my gosh. You know, I didn't get into the weeds, but my medical condition involves a liver issue, and that can affect your memory. And that clearly was going on. I think Trevor Howard is an actor. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "No, that's why I was like, \"I don't think that was the guy's name.\" I didn't have any more questions, but yeah. Go on. If you have other stories, that's good." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Okay. Thank you for calling that to mind. By all means, Trevor Plante is fantastic. Let me think if there's anything else. Oh, you know, in the interim, since we last talked, I went through a really fat file I have at home of \"thank-you\" letters and cards and notes that I had received throughout my entire NARA career. But many of them had to do with the opening of College Park. And we had, I think, this may have been at the end of it all, Daria. I can't remember if the recording was on then or not. But it had to do with the difference between when the building first opened and the connection to researchers that took place in Room 1000, the consultant Archivist's office, and how, over these decades now, things have changed. And I would clearly say for the far worse, because those letters that I got were from regular people who were overwhelmed to walk into that palatial building and assume, correctly, that it was filled to the gills with records or would be in the near future. And they had no idea. They just had a research need, and they were hoping to find something useful. And what happens in Room 1000 is attentive listening, the idea of valuing their research topic, no matter how mundane or really, to use the word neutrally, silly it may be, compared to, you know, an esoteric treatise on something deep and profound. If it's their research need, it's something that they're trying to connect with. And that rapport that was established really was valued by people. In effect, they felt intimidated. And in short order, they realized they had a friend. They had an ally. They had somebody who was listening. Many of those letters that I got were just on that point, that the federal government has this rap where you can't get information, and people are disinterested, and blah, blah, blah. And that was the exact opposite that they found there. And that goes back to what I was saying, that the whole concept of service is in my DNA. You value people, and you connect with them in a way that shows that you care. And if you have the information, you provide it right away. If you don't, you find it, and you share it in short order. I did not mention that when the building first opened, the whole idea of the internet was brand new. And Bob Coren, C-O-R-E-N, who was my supervisor above me. He wasn't physically in the office, but he oversaw the program. He's the guy that personally had me in mind to be the first person that would come over to that building and then augmented, over the years, with two others. And Bob created this thing where if you got an email, and the question was on Point A, he has written, like, several sentences or a short paragraph that speaks to Point A and, you know, replicate that 30 times. So if you're calling about World War II service records, or emailing about World War II service records, or any other specific thing, you can literally, in your response, press a code number and then that paragraph appears in your response. And I was flabbergasted to be able to see that. And that resulted in some truly pro forma language on our end. But the recipient didn't know that, and it spoke to their specific need, and they were deeply impressed by that. Literally, you know, if the timing worked out, the same day that their message came in, we'd be able to respond, if not in very short order, thereafter. And that generated so much comment about how thrilling it was and reassuring to have civil servants working for the federal government truly connecting with their needs and them personally. The equivalent to that is the State of Maryland. I had mentioned I was a state archivist, not _the_ State Archivist. I worked for the State Archives a total of about eight years. That included an initial internship. And a lot of people, their only connection to the state government was the Department of Motor Vehicles. And, invariably, that was a horrible experience. You know, a huge waiting room, \"Next,\" go up, and you get this kind of bored response. The person has been on their feet for hours behind the desk, and it's like, you know, it's a hassle. And when people came to the Maryland State Archives, same thing. They were amazed at the TLC, and the personal care and attention that they got. So what's currently in play in the initial connection to researchers at Archives II in College Park is not that any longer. Those specialists are up in the research rooms, and their job in Room 1000 is just get them registered, show them where the lockers are, and send them on their way. And I think that first opportunity to connect and reassure is lost. And it shouldn't be. I have no idea what it's like in our facilities across the country, but it's obviously on a much smaller scale. And I've always assumed that one-on-one connection was always what was done at the various facilities." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "How do you think it compares to AI?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Well, Archives I...let me think about that for a second. The difficulty is I had never done research myself at the Archives I building, and so I didn't wear the shoes of the brand-new researcher. And the first things that are coming to my mind are the whole new scenario of what the renovation put in, which is the research center is right behind the front desk in the lobby, when you went there. So first off, when the building opened, what was called the central research room was several floors up from the lobby. You had to take an elevator to get up there. So you connected directly with archival staff members who were up there. But there is an information desk in the main lobby, and there's always been a concern about bringing things in that could pose a threat to the records. So, I don't recall, or I should say, I don't know how they handled that, things like coats and what have you. I know during the renovation, NARA put in a locker room at the building in Washington, just like Archives II was designed with one. So that post-renovation of Archives I took care of all that. So speaking to that point, you walked through the security area and, in your line of sight, right behind the guard's desk, is where you want to go, and the door is open, so you can see right into it. So you can easily walk in. You're greeted by people right there at an information desk, which is like the equivalent of Room 1000 in the College Park building. That was, I think, the concept that came into play. And then from that point, you're directed to the lockers, which are all part of the suite there, and then you're directed to where you want to go. There's a microfilm research room. There was a research room for other certain types of records. It's escaping me right now what that specialty room was for. But still, you had to go up to the central research room on the second floor to access the lion's share of the holdings of that building. And that was what's called a \"clean environment.\" By then, you've dropped off your attaché case and coat and umbrella. It's all in the locker. So when you walked into that room, same scenario. You walk right in. There's a central information desk there, and you're connected with people who know what they're doing and connect with the researchers. I don't know. It's a people skill as far as putting people at ease. So, I think it depends on the person who's there on any given day. But I know by matter of—and I would hope and assume that it's all, you know, a positive experience for everybody involved. But I know when Archives II was conceptualized, the people who were selected to staff Room 1000, the initial people who were selected, had people skills and had deep knowledge. And, you know, it's just like you can hit the ground running with whatever question comes up. And if you didn't know, if you needed to get some more information right then, you knew who to call. And it worked very, very well about who to call within the building, you know, a staff member. You know, actually, every once in a while I'd get a telephone call or somebody comes in and they don't need the National Archives at all. They need something else entirely. And that calls to mind something that just came to my memory. Once it became known by word of mouth that there were informed, knowledgeable people, that this magic phone number that you can call and talk to a human, which is the main line of Room 1000, there were regulars who called. And one of them was CBS News. And I grew up in New York. And, you know, I'm well acquainted with the national news media. And, you know, at least a dozen times over several years, they called and they needed a reference. They were looking for blah, who should they contact? On and on and on. And throughout those conversations—most federal agencies had a history office. It's not just public affairs, the office that they want to talk to is very often the history office. And so that was great. And then I remembered when things started getting in the hot water for Dan Rather, who was their lead anchor in the evening news after Walter Cronkite passed away. And he did a story on the CBS Evening News pooh-poohing the concept of federal history programs. And I saw that, and my mouth dropped. I said, \"Wow.\" They use that stuff, so why in the world would you throw it under the rug, and sweep it away? And then it dawned on me, or maybe they were trying to fact-find and, you know, all those calls about who to refer to and blah, blah, blah, many of them were history related, again over several years, and not every experience goes well. So I silently wondered whether that was not what it appeared to be, but possibly a setup to get fodder to feed a storyline that they had in mind." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Yeah, that's not uncommon." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Yeah, yeah. It's a tool that's used. And so I was not pleased when I saw that. So again, I ultimately came to the conclusion that maybe all those calls were not what they appeared to be. Even though if you were looking for the kind of answers they were trying to get, that's what you would have done, you know." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Right. Yeah, I have a feeling the pandemic is going to make things even harder for researchers. There's going to be more regulations and things, because even if people are vaccinated, you don't know if people are really vaccinated. And, you know, there's still, I don't know, I just think they might have more rules that might make it even harder, especially for, like, walk-ins and stuff off of Pennsylvania Avenue. Well, the other avenue, not Pennsylvania. The one behind it. Constitution Avenue. Yeah. Walking in." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Well, the thing that comes to my mind on that is there are these, you know, I got my second Moderna vaccine last week, and you get a card. But now I've learned that there's phony cards out there that you can get. And so maybe that isn't the answer. At the very least, they can do a forehead temperature scan. But that's not foolproof either. I see your point. And the first thing I thought of was spacing for researchers. And at College Park, there's plenty of space to do that, assuming the research numbers are controlled. At the building in Washington, the central research room, those researcher desks are relatively close together, but you can always skip every other one, that kind of thing. So I think there is a way to address that to a degree. But you raise a very valid point. Now, you got me wondering if there's any concerted effort going on within the government as a whole, because I would hope for any federal building that people want to come into, especially buildings that the public comes in for, looking at exhibits like the Smithsonian buildings, et cetera—." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Yes, I agree. I actually went to the Smithsonian in November right before they shut down again. It was timed tickets, very few people inside. But the other day, I went to a museum in Georgia that had timed tickets, and it was, you know—and I've been vaccinated, but it was really crowded. It was uncomfortably crowded. So, you know, they have to do a better job of crowd control, I think." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Well, in the Archives's favor, we have an ample guard force to help control that. But as you've seen from the media, if you start, in effect, countering people, in other words, getting in their face with details, that can explode. And so you raise a very intriguing question I have to think about." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Okay, is there anything else you'd like to talk about?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Give me a moment to think. Just a moment." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Is there anyone in particular you want to talk about, like coworkers that you enjoyed working with or, you know, that kind of thing?" }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Well, I mentioned many of them in the earlier interview. There are so many archivists who specialize in different areas that I admire. If I name two or three, I don't, inadvertently, want to dis the 10 or 12 that are in the same league. You know, to say the Archives has a history of hiring intelligent, informed, friendly people, not everybody by any means, but, you know, a good number, and what strikes me right now is how that could be mitigated by a system change, and let me know if I've alluded to this in the earlier one, where a researcher came into the Still Picture Research Room and started complaining to the person at the control desk. And it turns out the person at the control desk was not an archivist. They were there simply to monitor how the records are being handled to prevent theft. Do you recall if I had mentioned that last time?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "No, that doesn't sound familiar." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Yeah. So this is told to me by a retired staff member who was there seeing or participating in it happening. I take it back. I was actually in the room doing some research on a personal thing. So I saw this happen. And the public researcher, the first time going to the person at the desk, was referred to this staff member who was an expert in still pictures, and she helped him nicely. And, you know, a half hour later, he had another question, and he went back to the control desk, and they told him the same thing, or you need to go see so-and-so in... The same person was on duty there, and he got ticked. It's like, you know, why are you here? You're sitting behind this desk and, you know, people would assume you're there to help, or they ask questions. And my colleague, now retired, went up to him and said, \"Sir, they're there to make sure you don't steal our records,\" which was true. It was part of a new motif of that, and it's painful to even think about it now. This happened many years ago, but that's the coin of the realm right now. And somehow there needs to be a return or a better balance between connection and safeguarding. So let's see. As far as other people that were, oh heck, I don't think I mentioned Wynell Schamel who was an education specialist at my second Archives job. My first Archives job was at the Patrick Henry Building, 601 D Street NW. My second was in leased space on Indiana Avenue, a block from the Archives building. And then I took the job in College Park. So I never actually worked in the National Archives Building until the renovation, which was, you know, fascinating to me. So, but I've always had an appreciation for the building, obviously. So, in the leased space was the Education Branch. And I took a job with an experienced classroom teacher/archives expert on education. Her name was Wynell Schamel, and she mentored me and was very friendly, from Alabama, and, you know, just wonderful. And the big boss, the head of the unit of the Education Branch, I think I did mention this, was Elsie Freeman, who started the whole idea of primary source research, primary source documents in the classroom. That was in 1977. And the job I took was in 1992, I think. And Elsie had her office, a very small office suite. She'd always keep her door open—there were only four or so other staff members—and partly that was just to hear what was going on, just to kind of stay connected. And then every once in a while, Elsie would come out and sit down with us to, basically, participate in the conversation. And how often do supervisors do that? You know what I mean? And so that spoiled me, because when I saw that connection, I assumed, incorrectly, that that was true everywhere else. And it's not, unfortunately. So Wynell Schamel. Elsie Freeman. There were other people who came after me, most notably Lee Ann Potter. Lee Ann worked with Wynell. Lee Ann's from Texas. So another Southern, how to phrase it, friendly person and very knowledgeable. And she wound up the acting head of the education unit, when the person who had that job had retired. But she was not offered the permanent job. They brought somebody in from outside. And now Lee Ann works at the Library of Congress, and she does beyond-superb work. She's in charge of their education outreach and related things. I think it's like two or three entities, not just the education thing. And she's simply fabulous. [](https://www.c-span.org/video/?204737-1/summers-lincoln) When she still worked at NARA–and you can find some of her things, her presentations on C­ SPAN. [One includes Jim Percoco](https://www.c-span.org/video/?204737-1/summers-lincoln) , who's a classroom teacher from Fairfax County, Virginia. And Jim went to Primarily Teaching, the annual summer, week-long workshop. It changed his life, just like I had mentioned John Lawler from Pennsylvania. And Percoco wound up becoming a Walt Disney Teacher of the Year thing. They did that for several years. So he got national recognition. And then, behold, it turns out that there is a National Teacher Hall of Fame in Kansas. I had no idea. And Jim is a Hall of Fame teacher. And what clicked was not just his knowledge, but his connection to primary sources. And that was fed further through his presence in our teaching institute. He also does a thing with teaching with sites, going to the actual historic sites with his classroom. He doesn't use a textbook. He uses primary source copies, visiting sites, and analyzing sculptures that are done to commemorate historical events. He's a history teacher, but he's unlike anybody else on the planet. He's still teaching and no longer for Fairfax County, but a private school in Virginia. And it's another name worth putting out there. [NOTE: Jim retired in 2023.]" }, { "speaker": "And then the current body of NARA people", "text": "a young lady named Dawn Powers, joined NARA in, I think, 2009, and our paths crossed. And over the years, that developed into, like a mutual appreciation society and informal mentorship. And then she wound up coming to the organizational entity that I worked with. So we got to know each other more. And there was a lot of learning going on, on her end, from the type of thing I've been sharing today and last time, and on my end. She's a younger person, and she exposed me to all the tech stuff. For instance, just the other day, my wife came across a list, a statement from the Maryland State Attorney General's office, where they were looking for a librarian, like an announcement. So Janet sent it to me and said, \"Do you know anyone who has a master's degree in library science and history that I can mention, you know, anybody you may want to share this with.\" So I shared it with Dawn, who is actually a teacher at Catholic University in Library Science in Library School, in addition to her NARA work. And within an hour, she texted me back. She said, \"Thanks. I put it on the listserv.\" It's like, okay, that was a foreign concept to me, how you can spread something immediately, far and wide, to all her students, you know? And so I replicated that times 100. There are so many things that I learned from her about new technology and, you know, everything else. So that's a current person. And pretty much everybody else that I knew well, have retired. And so my hope is that the torch has been carried by a new generation to connect with people and their research needs. I think I alluded to something last time about—maybe not with you. This was an item on our YouTube page, where it talked about the origin of our catalog, and this was done in 2009. Do you recall if I mentioned that to you, Daria?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "No, I don't think so." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Okay, so I only saw the beginning of it. By 2009, I was no longer working directly with records, you know, historical records in use by the public. And so it caught my eye, and I started to watch it. And, you know, I'm familiar with all the efforts over the decades now to make digitally available records. And the person was saying, \"The old way of finding your record was three steps.\" And they started going through them. It was, like, finding aid, talk to an archivist, they have to go to the stack, retrieve it, bring it to your desk, and blah blah blah. She categorized it as a three-step process. The new way is…and you start clicking away and voilà, there's the record in front of you. And it's like, well, no. [LAUGHS] It's not everything we have and not quite that easy. It's a start to put that out there. But I've looked at the NARA catalog repeatedly and compared it to the Library of Congress's online catalog and similar entities, and the Archives catalog is in need of help. Let's just put it that way. It's not intuitive, and if people go in with an expectation you're going to be able to find the record you're looking for, that's far from the case. So it's kind of sad when you think about that." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Yeah, I know. Well, it's been great talking to you, and I'm going to stop recording, okay? Thank you for talking." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "You're welcome. I'm happy to. [END RECORDING PART TWO] [BEGIN RECORDING PART THREE - April 29, 2021]" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Okay, we're back with Rick Blondo. It's still April 29, 2021. Go ahead, Rick." }, { "speaker": "Rick", "text": "Thanks. Another memory came to mind that I thought is worth sharing. During the renovation, I was involved, but not from the technical side as far as construction and architecture and all that. My job was to be an interface with regular people and the staff members, as well. And that latter point, I had communicated to us when we did the video. So, what I recall now is that NBC Television came out one day during the renovation as part of the _Today Show_ to do a story on what was going on. And it wasn't designed to air live. They were just putting together footage. And at that time, in the Rotunda, the murals were undergoing conservation work. There were a lot of workers present up on scaffolding, because the murals are highly elevated above floor level. _Rick Blondo in the National Archives Rotunda during renovations, circa 2002._ And a photograph was taken by our NARA staff photographer of that event. So what you see is me also standing up above. If I remember correctly, I may have been on ground level with the regular people, but I'm wearing my red construction helmet, because that's required in a work zone like that. And TV lights are on, and it's very bright. And I'm surrounded by people taller than me. I may have mentioned that I'm about 5 feet 4 inches, a little less than that. _Rick Blondo (wearing a red construction helmet) discussing the National Archives renovation project to_ _the press, circa 2002._ I assume it aired on the _Today Show_ , because they were asking questions, et cetera. I've never had the impetus to try to find out if you can even see that stuff years later, you know, access it. But that photograph of me, in that environment, with that helmet, and at that time and place, is an indelible image now, because every time I saw it—and that's why I framed it and put it in my office—it reminded me of those years involved with that renovation. It was a remarkable time to be there. So my hope is I can take a photograph of that picture and share it and maybe somehow get it connected to this oral history interview. ## [END RECORDING PART THREE] _Rick Blondo holding an award received from Archivist Allen Weinstein for work conducted during the_ _renovation of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC. (L to R: Archivist Allen Weinstein, Gary_ _Simmons, “Chip” Sandage, John Bartell, Tim Edwards, Rick Blondo, and Pat Alexander)_ _Rick Blondo at a staff preview for an exhibit marking the 75th anniversary of the National Archives,_ _March 12, 2009. (NAID 210371647_ _[https://catalog.archives.gov/id/210371647](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/210371647)_ _)_" } ]

[ { "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", "text": "Okay, I have the recording started now. Thank you again for participating in the National Archives Oral History Project. We're documenting the history of the agency by preserving firsthand accounts of events. My name is Stephanie Reynolds, and I'm based out of our National Archives facility in Denver, Colorado. I'm assisting the agency historian, Jessie Kratz, with this important project. Today is January 22nd, 2024. And I'm speaking with Mark A. Bradley, the former Director of the Information Security Oversight Office, or ISOO. Okay, Mark. Just to get us started, could you tell me a little bit about your background and your education?" }, { "speaker": "Mark A. Bradley", "text": "Sure. I am a graduate of Washington & Lee University here in Lexington, Virginia. After that, I was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and graduated with a master's degree in modern history. I then went to the University of Virginia and got a law degree. I'm a lawyer. I'm a member of the District of Columbia bar." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow! So you've got quite the background there. I know it's not easy to become a Rhodes Scholar, so congratulations on that. Wow. I know before you started with NARA [National Archives and Records Administration], you held positions at a few other agencies, other places. Could you give a brief summary of what you were doing before coming to NARA?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Sure. I started my federal service with the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and was an intelligence officer. I served both in Langley—in McLean, Virginia—and also overseas in Pakistan. After I left the CIA, I became a public defender in Washington, DC, for almost eight years, defending everything from indecent exposure on the Metro to first-degree murder. After that, I had had enough. I went up to Capitol Hill and became Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Judicial Advisor. We went through the Clinton impeachment trial together. Then I became his Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Advisor, and then I became his last Legislative Director. After he retired in 2000, I went to the United States Department of Justice and joined a small office called the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. We primarily practiced in front of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, i.e., the secret court—the one who signs off on surreptitious searches and electronic surveillances. I went through 9/11, all that. I became an SESer [Senior Executive Service] in 2003 and the Deputy Counsel for Intelligence Policy. After that, I held a host of positions at the department. I did everything from being their first Acting Chief of Intelligence Oversight, and the first head of the National Security Division's Freedom of Information Pre-Publication Review. And I ended it by being a voting member of what was called the Periodic Review Board, which determined which detainees could be released from Guantanamo Bay. So anyway, in 2016, I got a phone call from John Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick had been the Director of ISOO before me. John asked me if I would consider applying for the job of being the Director. I said no, I wasn't interested. I had enough on my hands, enough on my plate at the DOJ [Department of Justice]. It was fascinating work—again, the Guantanamo Bay cases, deciding who could be released safely from detention. Anyway, I said no. And then a couple weeks later, John called back and said, \"Look, we really would like for you to apply.\" So I thought to myself, “You know, all right. It's one thing I haven't done, and perhaps it's time for a change of scenery.” And so anyway, I applied and—you know, I had been the Department of Justice's representative on the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel and had also sat on plenty of intelligence policy committees with people from NARA on them. I knew Jay Bosanko. I knew Bill Leary, who then was at the NSC [National Security Council]. I knew Bill Carpenter from my work on the ISCAP [Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel]. So, you know, I was familiar enough with the agency. And also, too, I was familiar enough with some of the executive orders that ISOO was charged with, because I helped co-draft several of them as a Department of Justice representative on some of these intelligence policy committees." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "And so anyway, I applied and was selected and came over. I think my EOD [Entrance-on- Duty] date, strangely enough, is Christmas Day 2016. I was, I think, the very last national security appointment President Barack Obama approved. The ISOO Director has to be nominated by the Archivist of the United States—that was David Ferriero at the time—and then approved by the President of the United States, who was Barack Obama at the time. And so I became Director of ISOO and served in that until June 30th, 2023. I then retired and moved to Lexington [Virginia]." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "What was that nomination and the appointment process like?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "It took a while. It took a long while. You know, you think to yourself, \"Look, I've been vetted by the CIA, the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense.\" I mean, you know, every possible alphabet agency has looked into my background and past. It was interesting to go through the White House Office of Personnel to be vetted. I know my ex-wife had written a biography of [Former First Lady] Michelle Obama, and my guess is that it probably took a little while for them to read that and make sure [there was] nothing incendiary in that thing—and there wasn't. But anyway, it took a while to finally get the magic touch on the shoulders, to be approved as the Director of ISOO." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "When he approved that appointment, did you actually meet him [the President] at any point in time?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "In fact, I asked my staff when I was leaving ... I said, \"Look, the one thing I would like as a parting gift would be whatever President Obama signed to make me the ISOO Director.\" And apparently, what they found was a checkbox of some sort, just a [LAUGHS] ... . So I'm still waiting to get a copy of that checkbox. But no. I was expecting at least a letter or some type of something." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "It's a checkbox, you know [LAUGHS]. So it's funny sometimes the way that works. I mean, the bigger the appointment, the less the recognition for it!" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Very little fanfare. Yeah [LAUGHS]. Interesting. Did you have to go to the White House when you became an SESer?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "No, I was an SESer at the DOJ. That career appointment travels with you from agency to agency." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Interesting. Yeah, that's too bad. I would have liked that also, to have something from the President saying that you were approved." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Checkbox. [LAUGHING]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Interesting." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah. Right." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So when you first started at the National Archives, what were your first impressions?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Well, it was the smallest agency I'd ever worked for. And I have to admit, I was stunned by just looking at ISOO—this was the insider's view—of how little technology we had and how stretched we were. I mean, we were a relatively small office and all the responsibilities ... . It was funny, too. And I don't mean this to sound snarky at all, but when I got over there, we had to take a lot of training. And it's like, \"Look, most of this training is not germane to ISOO and what we do.\" But I understand the need to get assimilated and understand what the agency does. But I'm trying to figure out how an archivist double wraps something. It's like, you know, I don't ... . [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Mhm." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "“Okay. All right. Fine, fine.” [LAUGHS] So yeah. It was a bit of a culture shock. I mean, at DOJ, I had three computers on my desk that were classified. I had my own classified phone. At ISOO, we had one classified terminal up in the SCIF [sensitive compartmented information facility] for the whole staff and one classified phone for the entire staff. So I went from living in a Manhattan penthouse to more of, I guess, a regular government place. But yeah, I think the biggest adjustment was just like, whoa. I mean, we are a small agency, and our budget reflects that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Mhm. It must have been quite a shock." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Quite, yeah. Another thing, too ... I mean, at the DOJ, we had secure video conferencing in 2000. And after 9/11, we were using it extensively. We still don't have it at AI. We still don't have it at ISOO. Yeah. [THROWS HANDS UP] It's 2024 now! You know, I mean ... ." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you think [it's] because there's just not enough resources? Not enough ..." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "... money or something? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Exactly." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Well, before we get too far down the road, can you talk about what ISOO's mission is and why it's important?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "It's a fascinating office. Its origins go back to the Church Committee of the 1970s. The Church Committee, among other things, looked into all the abuses of the intelligence community, especially the way it had spied on American citizens without any legal authority at all. And so the genesis of the office was the idea that there should be an independent monitor of some kind of this activity. And interestingly enough, the office starts out in the White House. We had our 40th anniversary when I was at ISOO. It must be now close to 45 years old, maybe just slightly older than that. It started out in the White House, and then somebody said, \"You know what? This isn't probably such a good idea that it's in the White House, because what happens if the President does something?\" Well, we're not going to fast forward to now, but you can see the issues that can happen. And so anyway, it got moved to GSA [General Services Administration]. And then when NARA got taken out of GSA and moved into its own building, ISOO went with it. And so ISOO has been an integral part of NARA since, I guess, the mid-1980s. And so, anyway, it's got several basic functions. The most important, I think, is to oversee the executive order, which governs how the Executive Branch of the United States Government classifies and declassifies national security information. That was always kind of its crux. That's what it had oversight of. That mission grew over time. I became, or the ISOO Director became, the executive agent of what became the Controlled Unclassified Information [CUI] Program. It plays an integral role in the State, Local, Tribal, Private Sector Executive Order [Executive Order 13549-Classified National Security Information Program for State, Local, Tribal, and Private Sector Entities]. It plays an important role in the executive order governing national security [Executive Order 13526-Classified National Security Information]. And so it was always an office that was looked upon to do a lot. And part of it is because, again, people respected the office as a neutral umpire. The downside, though, was the more we got on our plates or the heavier the bar got, the fewer people we had to lift it, and the fewer resources we had to lift it with. There was always a tension and okay, yeah, it's great to be well-respected. It's great to be sought after, but we were stretched beyond being stretched." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Hmm. So how many people were working there when you started?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "It must have been ... I want to say probably in the mid-20s. And we dipped as low as probably in the mid-teens. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. And this is after the mission has been expanded to include these other things, and then your staffing has gone down." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Right. It was always a challenge. Now, again, I always thought when I got to ISOO, it was an interesting place. We had a small, small staff, but it was balkanized in a very unusual way. It was balkanized by the way it was set up. For instance, ... the controlled unclassified information people had very little to do with the classified people or had anything to do with the Public Interest Declassification Board. So ISOO was a small office that was almost three or four offices in one. And that created some friction among people, like, \"My work's more important than yours,\" or \"I need more resources than you do.\" And then, frankly, we had some people, I thought, who had been there too long. They were disgruntled. I would say, \"Well, okay, this is a big government. Why don't you go look for another job?\" \"Well, I'm too comfortable.\" \"But I mean, if you're going to chronically complain and not help to fix things, please go work somewhere else. We are too busy to constantly deal with your complaints. We can help you find something else.\" So it was necessary in a way, to have some attrition to get some people out. I always said I'd rather have 10 really good ones than I would 20 who are going to be a problem." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "And in 2020, we finally got 100 percent on the EVS, 100-percent job satisfaction." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Oh." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah. It worked [CROSS-TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's extremely hard to do." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah, but I don't miss that part of the job at all." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Always a fun time of year, right? [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So you said that the office was part of NARA beginning somewhere probably around the mid-1980s. Today, do you think that NARA is the appropriate agency for this office?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "That's a really tough question, and I know that question—at least it was when I left—was being discussed by the National Security Council as to where ISOO should be. And it's a mixed bag. On the one hand, it is extremely important to be neutral and not be seen as somebody who has a vested interest in the outcome beyond what's best for the United States and the American people, and being in a place like NARA allows for that. Even geographically, NARA is halfway in between the Capitol and the White House. So it's got that kind of neutrality. But the downside is the lack of resources and the lack of, frankly, muscle. Because you say, “Okay, I am from the National Archives.” I remember attending various national security courses and people would say, \"What in the hell are you doing here? I mean, you're from the National Archives.\" It's like, \"Look. Read the executive order, and you'll see how important we are.\" [LAUGHS] ... We had a low profile because of being in the National Archives. And when you sit down with people from the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] or the CIA or the FBI or wherever it is, when you say you're from the National Archives, I mean—but the Archives' profile has been raised a lot since I came over, and it's mixed, you know. [LAUGHS] Let's face it." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Mhm." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "We've gotten a lot of political blowback from things that, I think, we did because we had to do them. We did the right thing. But if it's going to be moved, it's got to be moved into a place that's got enough muscle behind it and enough firepower where it's listened to. But I think the White House doesn't make any sense. I mean, God knows the ISOO Director would have been fired multiple times under the administration before this one. I mean, I wouldn't have lasted five minutes. \"Mr. President, that classified document is not yours.” \"All right. You're fired.\" Right? So, I think the place it seems to make sense—again, I don't know all the ins and outs— would be somewhere like OMB [Office of Management and Budget] or somewhere where you had some clout and some, like, \"Look, your budget's going to depend on your following these rules,\" or \"You better write this up, or there's going to be some ramifications.\" I mean, the ISOO Director could write a letter; nobody liked to receive a letter from the ISOO Director. But my power was, you know, \"Okay, so I'm going to bark at you for a while, but, I mean, seriously, what do you think I'm going to do to you, right?\"" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "The biggest stick I had was my annual report to the President on the health of the classification/declassification system, and we could call people out in that report and say, \"Look, 25 of these agencies are doing the right thing. This one over here refuses even to pick up the phone.\" You know, so you're called out publicly. And that report actually was cited by the _Washington Post,_ the _LA [Los Angeles] Times._ I mean, it could get traction. But, you know, I think it would be better to have a more direct impact than having to go through reports cited by the press where you're publicly embarrassed. There should be an easier way to do that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you think that the office doesn't have enough authority, that it's not been given enough authority to really act upon these things?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "It's got authority. But the authority, again, it's mostly ... how can I put it? I had to go to the National Security Advisor or the President to actually get things if I really had an issue. That's the route I had to go. And the problem with that is just the bandwidth. If the National Security Advisor is over in Israel or somewhere else, is he really going to care that the DoD [Department of Defense], for instance, hypothetically, is not marking its documents correctly? I mean, it's too high up for me to have to go to." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's a very good point. Yeah. If they've got so many other things on their plate, then what does this one agency not doing something right, where does that fall within their priorities?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "You almost need that middle man." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "I could write a letter to the Secretary of Defense and hope he or she or they does what they're supposed to do. But again, I mean, I'm mostly left to the goodwill of people to do what they should do. As I think if we've seen anything over the last few years, it's that this system that we have here in the classified, declassified, and all the rest, relies a lot on people following the rules and doing the right thing. That doesn't mean that they necessarily will, you know. And if they don't, then where are we? ... I know when I left in June, the NSC was just getting back to beginning to reworking 13526, the executive order that governs classification and declassification. And among the topics were going to be exactly what we're talking about: where ISOO should be, what its authority should be, should some of its duties be scaled back? I mean, do you really need it to be in charge of this, or should it really focus on a few things that it can do really well? There are all sorts of philosophical, even existential questions in a way, about what this office should be. What happened over time was its responsibilities grew by accretion, like, \"We have a new program. Okay. Who are we going to put in charge of it? Oh, okay. ISOO!\" I mean, there wasn't a whole lot of thought sometimes given to what that meant in terms of resourcing and staffing." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Mhm." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "And that's the government. It's the nature of it. Things have to be done, and some of them are great, and some of them are like, \"Oh Christ.\"" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So it's just these new teams or councils or whatever. They create it, and they just throw it on ISOO's plate." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "That's right. And the worst thing you can have in the government is an unfunded mandate, where you get more responsibilities, but you're not given the money by Congress to carry it out." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Mhm." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "And that was a classic case. We were constantly afflicted by that where we'd get some congressman, you know ... God almighty! I mean, after having worked on the Hill and seen how legislation is done, I realized how dangerous it can be sometimes when some staffer does this. And it's like, \"Wait a minute. You just gave us this, and you didn't give us any funding at all to be able to implement this. And that means that we've got to rob Peter to pay Paul, or just not do some things that we're supposed to be doing, because now we have to do this.\" And so it's fascinating, really. I mean, now that I'm six, seven months away from it, you get more of a perspective on this stuff. And I have a hell of a lot of respect for ISOO and its people and also the National Archives for having all this stuff to do, and it's so poorly funded and, just, it's ridiculous. It's really absurd." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So what would you see as your primary responsibility that should be kept as ISOO's mission? And what else would you get rid of, I guess, in an ideal world?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Well, gosh. If I were the czar for a day, I think I would concentrate mostly on making sure the classified information system and declassification were working. Most importantly, I think that that goes to the very heart of who we are as a people. I mean, the worst thing that can happen, and we're beginning to see that now, is so many people have lost trust in their government, rightly or wrongly. All these damn conspiracy theories, and this is happening and this is happening. And the government, many times, is its own worst enemy by keeping things classified when it shouldn't be. It's like, \"Look. There are 25 books on this. I mean, this is over. This is over. We need to get the truth out.\" I remember working for Senator Moynihan, and he said, \"We have a hell of a problem if a majority of Americans believe the federal government put a bullet in John F. Kennedy's head. I mean, right from the get-go, we're done.\" And that was, again, this idea that we had to get all this information declassified and out. And, of course, the agencies fought it tooth and nail. And there's still, I think, 3,000 or so documents on Kennedy’s assassination that are classified. And again, many of them for good reasons—sources and methods and the like. But just the appearance of it undermines credibility. And so I would have ISOO concentrate mostly on classification and declassification. I also do not think ISOO should be the executive agent of the Controlled Unclassified Information Program. That was a role we never should have taken on. ISOO has oversight. It doesn't build programs, especially ones that are as large and complex as the CUI program. We don’t administer programs. We oversee them. That function is in our name. I would take the ISCAP, the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, and make that what we used to call in the CIA an \"Office of Common Concern\" and have it run by everybody who sits on it—DoD, DOJ, [Department of] State, NSC, ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence]—and make them responsible for staffing and funding it instead of having NARA and ISOO fund it. I mean, it's crazy. We don't have the technology for it anyway, and to do some of the stuff we could do over secure video conferencing or things like that ... . We tried to reform that. And Bill Carpenter, who used to work for me, has done a brilliant job trying to innovate. But it's still, I mean, it's when you have agencies who have so much money and so much technology that the ISCAP could take full advantage of ... The Public Interest Declassification Board, which I actually co-wrote the legislation for when I worked for Senator Moynihan ... I would get it out of ISOO. Again, we staff and pay for it, and it takes a lot of our people and money to do that. The PIDB needs its own staff and its own budget." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Mhm." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "I mean, quite frankly, I would strip away a lot of the responsibilities ISOO has and just focus on one or two and try to do them at the highest level we can. Just realize the facts of life are this, and this is what we have and this is what we have the people to staff, and that's it. I mean, this idea of trying to do a little bit of everything is not good—not good for the country, not good for us, not good for our people, not good for the agency." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "In terms of the classification and declassification, I know agencies are supposed to follow a process in doing those things. Can you talk about that a little bit? Was ISOO creating the policies on what agencies are supposed to do?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "It did. You have the executive order, and you have the implementing directives, and we have ISOO Notices which I would sign off on, which help to implement the directives. And, quite frankly, given ISOO's small staff, we had oversight over oversight, which meant you're relying a lot on agencies themselves to do the oversight, and then we check their oversight. I would have loved to have been able to send more teams out to X agency and Y agency and spend time out there or, you know, to have better technology where we could receive their classified information into our systems and be able to review it without going out. But because we were so hamstrung by the lack of resources—again, oversight was pretty much oversight over oversight—and so you're relying on the CIA, DoD, State, whatever, to do the right thing. And then they report to us, and I would report to the President in my annual report citing the statistics that they gave us. I think it was in 2017, 2018, I decided basically to blow up our annual report, because so much of the data was not right. It wasn't confirmed. We couldn't verify it. We're just taking things on the word of the agencies. And what was odd about it was it kept repeating itself and it's like, “Wait a minute. You said that two years ago. How the hell can that still be the same?” Right? It doesn't make any sense. And so we put a moratorium on a lot of the data we were collecting to be able to sort out what questions we needed to ask better, or why was this information coming in that way. And so we made a decision—I made a decision consciously that our collection was going to be organic, that it could never, ever be static again. We had to constantly be revising what we were asking or looking at what the data was telling us ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "... what we were getting in. I also made our annual report much more like a CIA assessment, where we would make key findings and key judgments. So if a policymaker only read one page of it, the first page, he or she or they would get the gist of the rest of the report. Some people, especially some of these openness groups, would read every word in the damn thing. But, you know, high-ranking [officials] like the National Security Advisor may only have five minutes to look at it. So you want him/she/they to be able to rip out one page. And so I think that was an innovation I'm the most proud of to try to get that report more accurate and make it much more readable and useful." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So you were sending agencies kind of like a survey where they were doing a self- assessment on where they stood?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Right. Exactly. And again, trying to tweak what we found. For instance, the executive order encourages classification challenges from agencies and/or from agency employees— meaning if I have a clearance and I have the right to have the information, then I also have the right to challenge this classification. If I think it's too high or even too low, I can question that. Well, it was fascinating to see. Well, some agencies, such as the CIA, would have no challenges at all. How's that possible? So the question would go back: What informal processes do you have to challenge information? How much is documented? How much is not documented? [We would ask] things trying to get to the actual truth of what was going on inside these places, because it looked bizarre. You've got this provision, yet it doesn't seem to be used at all. But that can't be true, because I worked at the CIA myself. I know the arguments you'd have because you'd say, \"Look, I want to send this to the British. Why is it classified this way when we could lower it down a bit?\" And so, constantly, those types of discussion would go on. So, yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you think that's a common problem—agencies over-classifying documents?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "I think it's not as much a problem as people think. I think the bigger problem is just the volume of classified information people have to contend with. It's just coming through so many different sources. And when I was writing assessments in the CIA, you didn't have a hell of a lot of time to write these things. And so I'm more concerned about getting the product out than I am arguing about whether or not this is over-classified or not. So there's a tension inside this stuff. But during my entire career—and I'll go back to the CIA up until NARA—I saw very little that I thought was over-classified. I mean, it wasn't the issue. The issue was just the sheer volume of the material we had to deal with. I think most original classification authorities act in good faith and try to do the right thing. It's not an easy job." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. And then is there a—I don't know if it's in an executive order or where it's at—but something where it's an automatic declassification after maybe a certain time period or something?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah, 25 years. That was one of the issues or one of the things we wanted to reform in the executive order. Automatic declassification was anything but. There were way too many exemptions to it. And again, because of staffing [issues], agencies and the National Declassification Center would apply what's called the \"pass-fail system.\" That means if I have this document here [HOLDS UP PIECE OF PAPER], and I've got 200 words on it, if one word is classified, the entire document [is] withheld. It is a pass-fail system. Back in the box it goes." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "And so it didn't take much to fail because of all the exemptions that were written into the executive order. I always thought they should be much more circumscribed. And also, too, there was a big argument that was going on when I left—and it's one that has to be held—is, okay, if we've got X number of people and X number of dollars devoted to this stuff, and that's all we're going to get, shouldn't we have prioritization? Shouldn't we prioritize which documents we think should be declassified first because they are the most important, whatever that is? The automatic declassification system is expensive, and it was also declassifying a lot of stuff that no one wants or certainly the public at large isn’t interested in." }, { "speaker": "But then the question became", "text": "If we're going to have a prioritization system, who should be the one prioritizing? Should it be the agencies? Should it be the public interest groups? Should it be the National Archives? The American Historical Society? So that was a question that, to my knowledge, is still left hanging. I don't know exactly what this administration, if any, is going to come up with. But I think the two ways out of this morass, it seems to me, is prioritization and then the application eventually of some type of artificial intelligence which can go through this stuff a lot faster than we can by hand. But I don't know given how much all this is likely going to cost whether applying AI [artificial intelligence] to this is realistic or not." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Some people think it's going to fix everything. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "We'll see. Right?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. Exactly. That's going to take a while. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yes it will." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So in terms of the executive order with the automatic declassification and some of these other executive orders, does ISOO work on these orders, on the language? Do they have input on the language?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Oh, yes. We have a lot of impact on it. In fact, when I was the Director—and I assume it's still going on now—we were invited to all the NSC’s meetings that were drafting these, redrafting these orders or reconsidering them. Ellen Knight, who I guess is still running the NSC's reformation processes, is an ISOO veteran. She worked for me for a while, and long before I got there, she worked at ISOO. So there's a very close working relationship between ISOO and the National Security Council on this." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Now, I know you said that ISOO doesn't really have a stick in terms of when you are trying to force agencies to implement some of these things." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "In an executive order, do you see that there's room for improvement there? Or is there something that would make that better, that would improve that process so that you would have a stick?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Sure. I mean, you could do it any number of ways. The first way, of course, would be to move it out and give it a completely different standing or status. The other way would be to give the ISOO Director more authority to be able to do what needs to be done. Now, exactly what that would be, whether you could refer agencies to the congressional committees or have some type of like, \"Look, I'm not going to argue with you. I'm telling you what you need to do. You're not going to do it. I'm done with it. I'm going to let X know about it, and then that's going to be the way it's going to be handled.\"" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Well, I mean there are different ways to go about it. When I left, there were a lot of bills circulating on the Hill. And one of them, again, had the ISOO Director being moved into the White House. I don't know. Again, that sounds like, \"Oh, what a great thing!\" And then the next thing you know, you're fired or you're out on the street because you disagree with the President about it, and then you are done. So, of all the things that the government does, meaning national security and especially classification/declassification, should be pretty much nonpolitical. It shouldn't be politicized at all. That's what these orders say. And I don't care whether you're a Democrat, Republican, neutral, no labels, whatever, whatever it is, you have to follow the rules. It's interesting to me—and I guess we're going to see some of this in the coming months in some of these legal things that are going on—I would like to see these executive orders written to be crystal clear that they apply to everyone who has access to classified information. I mean, there's an issue now about whether or not the President himself is bound by an executive order. Can he cede his Article II authority [in the Constitution]? This is an issue that needs to be settled once and for all. I believe, whether you're a GS-4 or President of the United States, you have to follow the order just like you do the speed limits on the highway. You can't go 100 miles an hour on Route 11 here in Rockbridge County, Virginia, no matter who you are. Right? But we need to make all this more explicit. And we can't rely anymore, I think, on the system that we had where we just expect people to do the right thing. I think they need to be told to do the right thing." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "So we'll see. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Yeah. I've learned just through doing our records management inspections of agency record management programs [that] they can say many things, but until you actually see what they're doing, you know ..." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Sure." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And it's hard to make them do something. Right? So ... very difficult to get that stick, I guess, in our field [too]." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Especially if you are from an underfunded agency. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yes, exactly." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So, let's see here. What was your role in the Public Interest Declassification Board? Can you talk about that a little bit?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "The ISOO Director is the Executive Secretary, and ISOO staffs the board. The unfortunate thing is the Board's budget comes out of ISOO's budget. So that was always an issue about, well, “Wait a minute. How many meetings a month can I have? How many meetings a year can we have? How much travel do we have to pay for? How much lodging do we have to pay for?” All that stuff. The idea of the Board when I co-wrote the legislation back when I was with Moynihan was to have the Board weigh in, in an advisory capacity, on what records should be prioritized for us to be declassified. Over time, the mission morphed into much bigger things where it can now advise the President on declassification policy. It can take requests from Congress and try to implement those. And so you had, again, the original idea was this and then all of a sudden it becomes this and that. There was no money given to ISOO beyond our budget to be able to staff and take care of this Board. In principle, I think the Board is a very good thing. I think it's made some very good recommendations about technology and about documents that should be prioritized and the like. But it's also frustrating. We just don't have the resources to do what really needs to be done to make the Board a really listened-to institution. Now, again, the Board often depends on who's on it, how active they want to be. Some boards have been very active. Some of them have not been so much. I dedicated at one point, I think, I had four or five people working on the Board’s business, and some of that was full time. And again, with the staff of 15 to 20, what about the executive order? What about the Control Unclassified Information Program? What about the State, Local, Tribal [and Private Sector Policy Advisory Committee]? Who's working on those things?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Were the Board members always in NARA or were they in other agencies as well?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Oh, no. They're in the private sector. You've got some people who had served in the government who now are with private industry. You've got academics. We had the Dean of NYU's [New York University] Law School [who] was a chair for a while. We had ... a person who was very high up in Google. We had former Congress people, I mean actual Congressmen and ­ women. So, no. The idea was these people had to have some type of standing outside but who were familiar enough with the intelligence community and the way that the U.S. Government handles and declassifies classified information, so you weren't putting somebody on training wheels. They were familiar with the way this works." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. Yeah. You weren't coming in completely new to that whole area." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah. So the Senate’s majority and minority leaders got to appoint X number. The Speaker of the House got to appoint X number. The minority leader got to appoint X number. And the President got to appoint X number. So the idea was a bipartisan, across-the-aisle board who put the interests of the United States first." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So, I know that you're very aware—and probably everyone is aware—that classified records were found at Trump's Mar-a-Lago and then President Biden's house. I think [at] Vice President Pence's [house also]. So, you know, there were classified records that were taken out [of the White House]. So I was just wondering ... did [ISOO] have a reaction, like a public or formal reaction, to these instances? Were there changes that were made in policy? Or what kind of reaction did you have?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "We, or the ISOO Director, oversees a program, whose goal or its mission is to retrieve classified documents from places. And I'm embarrassed to say I actually forgot the name of the program. I actually testified about it in front of Congress. But, you know, retirement being what it is, I mean, one forgets things. But anyway, it's in the implementing regulations of Executive Order 13526. And what would happen is—and this happened several times while I was Director—we would get a call from ... for instance, we got a call from Bates College in Maine and its librarian, and they had gotten in a bunch of papers from Ed Muskie, the former [Democratic Party's nominee for] Vice President of the United States, also former Secretary of State. Muskie graduated from Bates, and he had given his papers to Bates College. Well, lo and behold, in those papers were, I think, 70-some classified documents he just took. And so Bates called us. We retrieved the classified documents and brought them back to Washington and kept them. And then Bates College made a declassification request to see whether or not they could be declassified. So we got—I forgot how many instances that there were—probably somewhere up in the 80s, that we had 80-some different instances, such as this, where we have gone out and brought classified material back. And so, frankly, I wasn't that surprised to hear that classified information was taken. Part of the issue is training. And a lot of people, especially at a very high level, aren't trained on \"This is your stuff. This is the government's stuff, and you can't take the government's stuff.\" When I left NARA, I took my teacup. That was it. Gone. Right? And so it's a training issue. It's also an oversight issue. I mean, I remember trying to get more oversight into some of these White Houses and being told, \"No,\" that the White House will do its own oversight.” And that's the dumbest and worst kind of response. I mean, we're here to make sure they don't get into trouble. We're not here—I'm not the _Washington Post_ or the _New York Times_ —to blast them. Part of our job is to save them from themselves. But there's just inherent resistance sometimes to oversight, especially if you're sitting in the White House, no matter what you are: Republican, Democrat, whatever." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Mhm." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "I don't want to speak about President Trump’s legal case. But we are aware that this has been a problem in the government where high-ranking officials take government records they shouldn't. And, again, I think most of this could be solved by a robust training program, and also when people leave, going in and reminding them that \"you signed a non-disclosure agreement and that this stuff that's not yours stays here.\" But that's resources. You know, that's people going out and actually sitting down with these folks and going through it with them, and it's hands-on stuff." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. That's one thing that we always stress, too, in our records management inspections, doing 1: the training so everyone knows what their responsibilities are, and then 2: those exit briefings. So I wonder then if those aren't being conducted, say at the White House level, the EOP [Executive Office of the President] level, or what?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "I'd be damned surprised, but some White Houses are better at this than others. I mean, you get the sense of having junior staffers packing up a lot of stuff and this and that, and whether they know what they're doing or ... . One gets the sense it's kind of chaotic at the end of an administration." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "You know, but it's something that should be formalized, and it's something that should be stressed. And when people come in and go to something like the White House to work, no matter whether you're sitting in the Oval Office itself or whether you're a staffer far removed from the circles of power, as long as you have access to classified information, it comes with rules and with regulations. And, again, it goes back to what I was saying earlier about the executive orders. I mean, they apply to everybody, you know, or they don't apply at all." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. So when these things happen, when you get word that classified records were found in somebody's papers ... so that's not about necessarily changing policy that ISOO is putting out, because [the requirements are] already in policy. It's just they're not implementing them." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Well, the good news is we have had a robust training program in ISOO with librarians and archivists in various places, for instance, the Hoover Institution, Yale, places like that. They're very much aware of the implementing regulations and what they're supposed to do if they get things they shouldn't have. I mean, our best defense right now, until we can get a wider training program in place and people are going to actually attend the training and abide by it, is to alert the other side that, \"Hey, if classified material comes your way ...\" we can handle this. I mean, it's not the end of the world. We just want it back." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. Yeah. Just give it back to us." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "ISOO does have some sort of training out there?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Yeah. You said you just needed more robust training that people could attend?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "That would certainly be one important step. I don't know whether that's the only step." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "I mean, for instance, you know, when you're an original classification authority, you're supposed to have annual training... . I mean, you go back to the things like the Clinton emails and stuff. Did she have—I mean, that was before my time. But I mean, look, how many times have you heard somebody say, \"I'm either too important for the training or I don't have time for it? What are they going to do to me? I'm Secretary of X.\" So yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Or it could be something where, you know, they just have to keep hitting the next button through the training until they hit the [end] or something." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah. “You're done.” And that's the end of it. I mean, I suppose hope springs eternal. But if one good thing comes out of all the stuff that we've been through the last year or even two years, it's more of a spotlight on this issue. And perhaps there'll be a movement to take all this much more seriously than it has been heretofore, that new administrations coming in, that this type of responsibility and training will be integral to their operation. We can get away from some of this ambiguity—\"This doesn't apply to me,\" or \"I'm not going to get to this.\" No, no, you are going to do it. And it's just the way it is. So we'll see. I mean, you know, often the history lesson in all this is it's a big issue for a year or two, and then that's the end of it. You don't hear about it. It just drops off. Right?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Mhm." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "So we shall see." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, because there were three instances that were very high profile, right, with the Presidents, and the Vice President, having all three of them come out at once [indicating] essentially that this was an issue, I think people really understood that this was more widespread than they had thought. It wasn't just one person or one office or something like that. It was a bigger issue. So, we'll see if the training helps or ... yeah." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "We'll see. And, of course, the worry is that the people who've done this will try to minimize it and say, \"Well, it's over-classified or it never should've been classified in the first place.\" And again, you get back to one of the root problems of this system is how do you make it more credible where people will believe in it, that the government says something's classified and it truly is supposed to be? It will [cause] exceptionally grave damage to the United States if it's released... . I don't know. It's interesting to me now that I'm away from all this, how many people don't trust the government. I mean, even something like a COVID shot, for God's sakes, will turn you into a three-headed whatever, you know, and people believe that stuff! And especially down in these more rural areas, it's where the Colorado Supreme Court is [believed by some to be] a Democratic tool seeking to undermine the entire election. And this is the gospel... . You know, we really need to do a better job educating and trying to be more credible ourselves. But it's a difficult mission. It really is. I joke sometimes that if Senator Moynihan were to come back, it would probably take me about five minutes, maybe 10, to brief him on the progress we've made since 1990 on all this. I mean, it's glacial. It's glacial." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Hmm. Do you think there's really a fine line between maybe secrecy [USES AIR QUOTES]—keeping things classified—and transparency?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Sure, sure. There absolutely is. The thing is, we need both. And they both should be treated with the same deference and respect. And sometimes, you know, they aren't. And again, it just takes one or two examples to undermine people's beliefs in this stuff. It's difficult. I mean, the distrust of the government is so high just in basic things, like a vaccine, much less one [in which] 3,000 documents are still classified on X or Y even though it was 55 years ago or 60 years ago, whatever the time period is. \"Now, what are they hiding from me? What didn't you want me to know?\" And I don't even have a LinkedIn account. I don't have Facebook or any of that stuff, but the dark web and God knows what people are saying out there on different platforms about conspiracies that the government is supposed to be ginning up against them. I mean, something has gone off the rails, and we're going to have to try really hard to get it back on the tracks. And I'm not quite sure, beyond trying to be as transparent as we can about what we're doing and why we're doing it, whether it's going to make any difference or not. I hate to be so cynical." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. And like you said, it can just take one or two instances for everyone to just disbelieve everything you've ever said. Right?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Exactly right. Yeah. So it's frustrating. Sometimes I think that the intelligence services, in particular, don't understand it's in their own best interest to be more transparent. Why do you want to fight about something that took place in Italy in 1948, when every Italian citizen knows the CIA was interfering in the elections out there. Why do you still want to keep some of this information classified? What's wrong with you? I mean, some of it's cultural. Occasionally, with records that old, you still have sources and methods and questions, and there still could be a source alive that we don't want to identify—legitimate reasons to keep information classified. But beyond examples such as that, I mean, I would get rid of this stuff and just get it out and be done with it. It's too damn expensive to try to keep it classified anyway, just to keep it secure." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. And it sounds like ISOO doesn't really have much of a say. You can't really force any of these agencies to do these things to declassify." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "No... . If you read the order closely, there's some things where the ISOO Director can be appealed to, and then he can decide when something should be declassified. But the agency itself can contest it and [then] it goes to the National Security Advisor... . I wish the authority lines were a little stronger and a little clearer, but [CROSS-TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "In terms of its oversight role, it sounds like there were on-site inspections being conducted at times." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "There were. COVID ended those, but we had already cut back because of our lack of staffing. We still tried to do a few in the DC area that we could do in a day or so, not having to pay for lodging or travel or anything like that. And luckily for us, there are plenty of them in the DC area. But we still did a few others. For instance, we sent a person down to inspect the Tennessee Valley Authority. They had never been inspected before. I am glad we went. Some parts of it had developed their own classification system. It's like, what is this? What does this mean, this marking? And so it was imperative to send people out to some of these places. The problem is when you have a very small staff, and we have a travel budget that's $30,000 a year, and half of that goes to the PIDB, then what are you left with? Right?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And did you feel that when you were able to do the on-site inspections, were those beneficial?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Sometimes. It was good, if nothing else, to fly the flag and let people know that ISOO is out there, and this is what we do and how we do it. What we were trying to do, though, frankly, was to automate more of this stuff, too, to have them be able to send responses to us. We started out using SurveyMonkey, because we couldn't afford a more elaborate or secure tool. And, you know, agencies don't want to deal with SurveyMonkey. It looks like it's not—I don't want to say it's not professional—but it doesn't exactly give people confidence in the tool you're using. And so again, in an ideal world, we'd have several classified terminals and be able to have agencies send us stuff all the time, just data or their inspection reports, or whatever they're doing. And then we could sit there and say, \"Wait a minute. This answer doesn't make any sense at all. It's what you said 10 years ago. It's the same number. How's that possible?\" But yeah, I hate to keep harping on it... . And ISOO is really no different than other offices, probably including yours. It is frustrating. ISOO performs a really critical mission that continues to be undercut by too many members of Congress who do not want to properly fund what we do and who often want to keep slashing agency budgets or even shutting down the government. I had to contend with a couple of those. It's like, Christ. I mean, you put us out of business for 30 days. Do you know what you just did to our programs? I don't blame NARA. I blame its funders. That said, I do think that it would be of value for NARA to be a little more visible up on the Hill, especially with Maryland and Virginia delegations in Congress, because so many of our employees work and live there. For example, in Maryland, you've got Suitland and you've got AII. It would be useful to have the Virginia Senators and the Virginia House members and Maryland Senators and House members to be able to advocate for the agency and to be able to stand up for it and say, \"Their mission is a critical thing here. You can't slash this agency's budget.\" But, again, part of the pushback is that you always want to become nonpolitical as an agency. The problem is, this is Washington. I don't think you can really be nonpolitical all the time. You need to lobby a bit and push for things or you are forgotten." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. Getting in front of their face, telling them why it's important that we have to do these things, and you have to give us the resources. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Right. I mean, you wonder why bad things happen. Because you didn't pay for it. That's why it happened. But, I mean, you go up to the Hill and their oversight people will say, \"Well now, what is it you all do? I don't really understand.\" And here we go. We have to educate people from the ground up. Right. You'll be in front of an oversight committee, and the chair will say, \"I don't really understand what you all do.\" And it's like, wow. I mean, not only do we have to start from ground zero just on the basic mission, but just wait till we start asking for more money. And this may sound, I guess, rather elitist in a way, but we don't have the Pat Moynihans anymore on the Hill who really understand classification and declassification or who even care about it. And we need people who really understand the value of national security in a republic, which means that we've got the dual mission of protecting the United States, but also making sure the people believe what their government is telling them. And that requires a lot of effort and a lot of resources... . We were looking, oh, three or four years ago to overhaul and modernize the executive order. We looked into how agencies were staffing this classification and declassification. And what we found out is that the same person doing intelligence oversight was also answering all the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests, and was also answering FOIA court orders. So you had a very limited staff in each agency who were tasked with so many different responsibilities. And that staff was, you know, you'd get the same old answer, especially from something like the" }, { "speaker": "CIA", "text": "\"What do you want us to spend our money on, fighting the next terrorist attack or declassifying these documents?\" There was always a zero-sum game. There was no, like, “Well, wait a minute. Time out.” You know, if this guy over here believes that this is a huge conspiracy, then perhaps national security is being threatened by people believing that as much as they are about this, that there's no real difference in some of these threats. It may be more existential, but it's still a real threat. And, you know, I think it's coming home to roost now. Fake news [LAUGHS]. Stop." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I think sometimes it's how we turn it around and get them to realize that it's just as important. You know, when we're doing our inspections and we're talking to DoD agencies, and they say, \"Well, we don't have time for this inspection. We're too busy trying to keep our soldiers alive\" and whatever. But we're saying if they don't have the information that they need when they need it, you know, they could be in trouble as well. Right? So trying to make them understand in words that they understand." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Well said. It's not an easy task. I look back on my career, and I wouldn't change much of it, but I do leave with a sense of frustration and just kind of ... I'm not sure how this fight is going to end in terms of whether or not we can recapture some of the trust and faith that's been lost in the government and especially by trying to better educate our citizens and get this stuff out and just kind of, what they say, \"Sunlight is the best disinfectant,\" right? And so I don't know whether we're going to get there or not, especially the way so much classified information is being generated now. There is already so much out there. And I really worry that if the fight isn't already over, it's getting close to it, because we've neglected this system for so long." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, it's kind of scary to think about how far it's gone the other way." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah. Right. And so, again, there may be a magic bullet of some sort with AI or maybe things that we can't even think of now that we're going to use to revolutionize how we classify and declassify national security information. I hope so. But until it becomes part of these agencies' missions to educate people, I don't think we're going to reach it. I think a lot of it's just you need to have the will to do it. You need to even have a strong stomach for it, too. Some of this stuff may be quite unpleasant, quite embarrassing, things that you wish hadn't happened, but here it is. We did this. We did that, and shouldn't have done that, but we did this. This went really well. This one was awful. Let's just deal with it." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. I mean, it's not going away. So the sooner that you deal with it, you can move on, but ..." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Right, right. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I have a question about, and I know that you've mentioned this already, but just being the chair of the National Industrial Security Program Policy Advisory Committee." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Right. The NISPPAC." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I was wondering ... I'm sorry?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah. The NISPPAC." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "That's the acronym for it." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So I'm wondering, what is the national industrial base? What does that even mean?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Well, it means that the United States relies on core industries out there to provide for our defense needs. Think about building an aircraft carrier or building a fighter jet or a helicopter. The United States Government doesn't build these itself, but it pays people to build things for us. And that requires a lot of contractors out there. And in the private industry, they have security clearances to handle classified information." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "And so ... that order, by the way, that governs this goes back to 1994, I think. And one of the things that I constantly tried to harp on in my annual report was the need to reform that order, because it was written in a different time, a completely different time. And we have adversaries out there who have a very voracious appetite for our technology, i.e., they steal it, steal it with abandon. And so we were constantly trying to update the authorities. Again, I was the chair of the board that would meet about this and try to not only get the order rewritten, but to talk about security clearances, whether we were doing them in the right way. I mean, there was a big move afoot—in fact, I think I may have been the first person in NARA enrolled in it—what was called continuous vetting if you have a TS/SCI [Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information] clearance. You know, in the old days, you still had to fill out the SF-86 every five years. That's the original \"by my 18th birthday\" all the way up, and then you were reinvestigated every five years. The investigator would come to your office, and we would start over again. And that's now gone. But you're constantly being run through databases now... . And you know, part of the reason that came about was industry was putting a lot of pressure on Congress, because it was taking too long for them to get clearances for their key people to work on these projects. And if you think about it, that kind of cuts both ways. I mean, if we need a really sophisticated fighter jet with all sorts of technology on it, and we need somebody who can build that thing, a company can't afford to have that person tied up in a security clearance background check, taking a year for him/her/they to do it. On the other hand, I can't afford to cut corners, because if this person gives these plans to the Chinese or to the Iranians or the Russians or whomever else, we're done. Right? So you've got this constant tension in that, too, in how to protect the supply chain." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So the executive orders and any policy that ISOO might put out, it's not referring just to the government." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "It's also covering these private companies that are also doing business with the government?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "What it does is, it mostly is trying to help the Department of Defense, who was the executive agent, administer that Industrial Security Program. We were in an advisory capacity. And so we would say, \"Look, you need this, this, and this,\" or \"We think this could help you.\" They would come to us and say, \"Okay, we need you to issue an ISOO Notice on what kind of SCIFs or what kind of containers or things that they need to use” and stuff like that. But ... industrial security was becoming more and more important as time was going by. But again, it goes to show what you and I were talking about when we first started, about how many responsibilities ISOO has. I mean, I could spend a career on industrial security challenges, much less on the rest of it. Now, again, there's some overlap between the ... executive orders on national classification/declassification, industrial security. But there are also some nuances in that stuff that aren't. And so I had, I think, two people working on that. And then finally at the end—one. I mean, that's what we had. And so, it's another one of these questions. What should ISOO's role be in that? And so should it be taken away from us, because we can only dedicate X number of resources to it? Should it be expanded? Should that be one of our key missions? I don't know, but those are the kind of things that should be discussed." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "But when that order was written, ISOO was put in, but there was no real thought about resources or staff or what this means. And if that executive order is going to be overhauled, which in my view it must be, it's going to be a heavy lift to do that. How many people can we dedicate to help DoD and the White House rewrite that order?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. There's a lot that ISOO is responsible for and not near enough people and resources to do that mission, to do all of that." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "No, it doesn’t have enough people or money. ISOO has a lot of sticks of dynamite that are handed to it, that are lit, and as the Director, you just hope that, Christ, they don't go off. But given the breadth of responsibilities that office has, I mean, we have way too many serious things now, especially with the staffing and technology that we have. And again, that's no slight on NARA. That's no slight on leadership or anything like that. It's just the reality of the mission as we've had mission creep without the commensurate budget to keep up with it and the staffing. And I hope this executive order reform effort we talked about comes up with the right answer on what ISOO should be focusing on. I am much more in favor of restricting ISOO’s roles and having it go deep in a few certain areas, and focus on very specific missions, like the executive order governing classification and declassification. Right now, it has far too many missions. For example, I was the Chair of the State, Local Tribal, and Private Sector Policy Advisory Committee. We're talking about, okay, we got a dam in New York. And the people who administer that dam, are they getting enough classified information to be able to protect the dam? I mean, why aren't their security clearances being passed from X to Y? We spent days trying to figure out how to help if you're a state official somewhere, who's got your clearance. Where do you go if you have a meeting in a SCIF in New York City? Who holds your clearance? How do you get into the SCIF for the meeting? The number of things that we were involved in, it's stunning, really. I suppose, you know, if you really thought about it, the ISOO Director would get almost no sleep at all." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, maybe at that point you'd get more resources. Maybe not." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Well, one of the challenges the Archives has is there are no real differences in the way offices are viewed. Your office was as important as mine. Mine was as important as yours. And I had staff sometimes who would want to make the argument, \"Well, we do national security work; therefore, we're more important than the people who are stacking documents and warehouses.\" The National Archives has the mission of the warehouses, too. And so they can't cut that mission to be able to help my mission, because then they're failing in that part of their portfolio. Which, again, maybe begs or goes back to the question of perhaps, just perhaps, that ISOO would be better off somewhere else where the mission is strictly national security and not so many other responsibilities, from safeguarding the Constitution to, you know, holding naturalization days, to having people like yourself or people like Jessie, or whatever else it is tasked to do. I mean, so yeah, it's an interesting question." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you think mission creep and the lack of resources, like staffing and money, are the most significant challenges that ISOO faces going forward?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah, I would say those two in addition to probably revisiting some of the authorities. I would think that reexamining its roles in so many different things would probably, you know, get back to the creep just over time. For instance, again, you heard me say this earlier, the Controlled Unclassified Information Program—I don't think anybody knew what that was going to be. I euphemistically called it “ISOO's Vietnam,” that we got into it and we couldn't get out of it. That program dwarfs the classified program. There's much more controlled unclassified information than there is classified information. Nobody in the executive branch knew how much there was when the program started. Nobody knew the categories. Nobody knew how complex it was. It was being marked in many different ways. There was a need to do something with it, but I don't think it should have been ISOO who should have gotten the ticket to go ahead and build the program. Again, we oversee, we don't build. And that program took a lot of resources, especially during my tenure. And a lot of the time, many agencies just didn't want to do it, just refused to implement the program. Now, it's being reexamined to be simplified. And I pushed very hard for ISOO to get out of the role of the executive agent to be more in an oversight role, but not be the office charged with implementing the program. That never made any sense to me at all. Never. But that was, I think, because no one else wanted to do it. And so it was just, okay, who do you give it to? Well, of course, ISOO. Right? It does everything else! And it just killed us. It just killed us resource-wise." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, it sounds like each one of those things could have dedicated staff to it, and they could be their own programs... . Yeah, I don't know. It's very difficult." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah, it is. It's funny. And you know this yourself after being in government: you have very little time to be reflective on things and sit back and say, \"Okay, wait a minute. Does this really make sense?” Nobody says, \"Time out. I mean, this is a bridge too far.\" It's like a race car, you know. We designed it, but now that we actually took it out on the track and are driving it, the damn thing doesn't work or its wheels are wobbling ... not what we thought they were going to do. But it just takes a lot to push it off the track and say, \"You know what? This needs a serious overhaul.\"" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "So it just keeps going and going." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Instead of taking the off-ramp, you just keep going straight, even though you know it's not working, but ..." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Right. Somehow, some way, it'll fix itself, you know? [RAISES HANDS AND LAUGHS] It's not the way it works. Yeah. That's not the way it works." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "In terms of your last day, I think you said you retired June 30th of 2023?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "2023. Yeah. I've been retired for, what, six months now? Six-and-a-half months? Something like that. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. All right, so do you remember your last days there? Did they throw a party or do anything for you?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "I specifically did not want any of that stuff, you know?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "It's kind of like a cremation, you know [LAUGHS]. Just be done with it." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "[LAUGHS] Make a clean break." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "I always saw retirement ceremonies—and God knows I've been to plenty of them over time—that anybody who does this stuff knows that the word \"I\" doesn't really apply. It's “us” and “they.” And if you've done your job right as a chief, the idea is if you don't show up, the office will run perfectly without you. That's the real measure of leadership. And you know, I mean, my staff did some things for me, but I specifically did not want any type of thing. I just wanted to be seamless and just kind of fade away and be done with it ... . I mean, I wouldn't mind having that checkmark. I still haven't gotten that in that box, but [LAUGHS] beyond that, I have never, ever lain awake at night wishing I was back. And I don't mean that in a pejorative way or a mean way. I mean, it's time for new leadership, new blood, new ways of looking at things, and this job requires Presidential approval. And so I wanted to give the administration plenty of time to find somebody else or figure out what they were going to do with the office. And the longer I stayed there, it just seemed like—and besides, too, you know, in my career, there was very little I hadn't done. Okay, so you write another report to the President. All right, all right. Okay. Wouldn't you rather take a nice walk down Main Street in Lexington and look at the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge Mountains? I mean, life is short... . Some people are addicted to this stuff, and I luckily never was. I thank God I don't have a clearance anymore. I don't have classified information. It's liberating in a way. Yeah. So, I mean, I had a great time as the ISOO Director, and I really appreciated [that] I had worked for some very fine people: Jay Trainer, Jay Bosanko, David Ferriero, Deb Wall, and some wonderful civil servants at ISOO in particular and at NARA in general. No complaints whatsoever. But, when it's time to go, it's time to go... . I never wanted to die at my desk." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "No one does. No one plans for that." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "So, I'm working on a third book, and I go to the gym six days a week." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Oh really? Another one?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Good for you! Yeah. That's great!" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah. Yeah. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And what kind of book are you working on?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "This one is a double murder committed by the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana in 1922." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Ooh. That's gotta be interesting." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah. The one before was a triple murder in the coal fields of Pennsylvania in 1969. I got a master's at Oxford, and I have a law degree. I'm a lawyer. So I try to do books that have an interest in both fields." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow, that's really interesting. I'll have to look that up and get a copy." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "_Blood Runs Coal_ . C-O-A-L." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, that sounds really interesting." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "That's how I spend my days. I mean, now I'm fighting the FBI over FOIA stuff, you know? So it's like I'm part of the problem now, although none of this stuff is classified. [LAUGHS] Yeah. Right." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, it sounds like you're keeping yourself very busy, so that's good to hear." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah, again, I don't miss some of the inter-agency fighting and some of the bureaucratic stuff. I mean, I meant what I said if Moynihan were to come back today, it would take me about five minutes to brief him up since we were working on this same stuff in the late 90s. So ... [LAUGHS] Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, that's pretty sad to have the same issue that you've had for decades. So, yeah. Was there anything else that you wanted to talk about or bring up that we haven't covered so far?" }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "I think we pretty much covered it all. I hope this is somewhat useful. I don't know. It's important, you know, that an agency records its history and knows exactly what people faced at a certain time. To reiterate, I mean, we had some unique challenges. We had shutdowns. We had COVID, which was completely a game changer there for, how long? I was there for, what, six years, I guess? Six and a half? And so, I mean, COVID took two [years] at least. And the shutdown. So we had that one 30-day one. Then we were, you know, constantly preparing for shutdowns, continuing resolutions, no set budget. I mean, it's a hell of a way to run a railroad. And I mean, that doesn't even deal with the substantive stuff we were facing. And so that also impacts staff morale and things like that. \"What do you mean I can't travel?\" \"Well, because we're under a CR [continuing resolution]. That's why.\" I worry about attracting people to government service and who want to make a career out of it as it gets more and more difficult, this type of stuff. My son's in his second year of law school at UC Berkeley, and I was talking to him about government service. It's like, \"You know, I don't think so, dad.\" And then it's like, “You know what? I get it. I don't necessarily agree with it, [but] I understand. It's frustrating when you want to get things done and you just can't because of something totally out of your control.”" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Mhm." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "And you just have to live with it and you hope ... that at some point, somebody somewhere in a really senior position will say, \"Okay, yeah, let's go down that road.\" Like, again, the executive order for the Industrial Security Program, it definitely needs to be redone. Why is it 30 years on [that] we're using the same order?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "That's crazy. I mean, it's absolutely insane. It's dangerous to the country, and it just doesn't make any sense. But on we go. Now we're possibly expanding the war in the Middle East. We've got all sorts of other issues that supersede some of this stuff. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, priorities." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "It always gets put back on the back burner." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "And I don't know what it's going to take. I mean, perhaps some of this legal attention that's been focused on this system will highlight some of the things that need to be done, but I'll believe it when I see it. Yeah, let's just leave it at that. Right?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, people can say anything, but the actual implementation part is completely different." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "It's actually the money that it's going to take to overhaul this stuff and try to get it where it needs to be. But, you know, like I say, I'm just retired. You know? [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "[LAUGHS] You don't have to worry about it." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Yeah, yeah. That's right. Exactly. Yeah. I've got the _Shreveport Journal_ here from 1922. So that's what I'm working on today. So, you know [LAUGHS]." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Fun! [LAUGHS] Okay. Well, hey, I'm going to go ahead and stop the recording now. I just want to thank you for doing this interview with us today. Super interesting! I'm going to go ahead and stop the recording, and then if you could just hang on for one moment, I'll tell you about the rest of the process." }, { "speaker": "Mark", "text": "Sure." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Just a second." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Today is January 24, 2017. I am Jessie Kratz, Historian of the National Archives. I’m interviewing Philip Brooks, Jr. in the Adams Room of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC. I think what we’ll do is start from the very beginning. Your father worked at the National Archives, so what are your earliest impressions and memories of the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Well, both my father and my mother worked for the Archives for a while. They were two of the first 60 or so employees." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "What was your mother’s name?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Dorothy Hamilton Holland Brooks, and she was a secretary to an office full of special examiners. One of which was my father. The first day she showed up to work, at the end of the day, father and Neil Franklin, his great buddy who later became our neighbor, walked out of the door, and Uncle Neil said, what do you think of the new secretary? And my father said, I don’t like redheads. Well, that changed." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "There’s a lot of office marriages that came out of National Archives over the years." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I wasn’t aware of that one." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yeah, well, back then there was a lot of scandal about bosses marrying their secretaries, so when my parents got interested in each other, she went over to the Justice Department so they could get a little distance." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Which was a good idea. Yeah, since then, there’ve been a lot of marriages over the years. There really have. My earliest memories I guess were probably coming down here during the war to see some of the exhibits in the Rotunda, particularly the Mulberry harbor, which was the model of the Mulberry harbor that they did for the D-Day landing, and they exhibited it here in the Rotunda and then they sent it up to Hyde Park. It’s still there. I think it probably needs extensive restoration now. Things like that and coming down to see parades at the end of the war. I could even take you to the exact column on the Constitution Avenue porch at which I stood. And coming down to pick up my father at the end of the day, or mother and I would come in for shopping or doctor’s appointments or something like that and then come down and hitch a ride home with the car pool. We were living in Alexandria then, and, so those were my earliest memories. And just almost endless discussion at dinnertime about who was doing what at the Archives. We had a second, spare bedroom in our house that was supposedly my father’s office, but during the war housing was at such a premium that we had a constant stream of people coming to stay with us who had been assigned to Washington or were briefly here before going overseas or something, and we just had this constant flow. One of the people we had twice was Herman Friis, who was in cartography and a very close friend. Herman and Ilda and their two daughters Cynthia and Patsy, who were my age. At the beginning of the war Herman said to his wife we’ve got to get you and the kids out of Washington because it’s going to be bombed. So, he sent them back to Oakland, California, where her home was, and off he went to the Army and got his orders, and guess where he was posted? Washington. So, he came back and he stayed with us in this spare bedroom. Uncle Herman was an important formative person in my very young years. I learned a lot about geography and about the war because father was also interested in cartography. We had a big globe, and so they used to show me at the age of like, three, the earth really is round and this is where we are, and this is what’s going on there. There’s North Africa, there’s Italy and then later on, there’s Normandy and this is the way we’re going to go in, and I got all these fascinating lessons from these two guys from this bloody great globe. So, these are early memories. Then, later on after the war, we used to come down a lot, again for exhibit openings or other special events or for my allergy shots or to see parades, or just to come down and shop, then stop by and bum a ride home. Later, when we had moved to Chevy Chase and I was like 10, 11, and 12, I was old enough to come down on my own, and I’d come down on the bus and the streetcar and usually go to the Smithsonian and come over and go home with them. So, those are early memories. Then at the end of 1952 Wayne Grover appointed my father to be the Director of the Federal Records Center in San Francisco, so out we went. We lived in Palo Alto, which was a smallish town of 40,000 and the home of Stanford University. Silicon Valley didn't exist then—it was all orchards and cattle grazing land." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And then when your dad became the Director of the Truman Library, did you go with him?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "What were your experiences with the Truman Library when you were there?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Lots of experiences. We moved there after he came out, I guess it was February of ‘57 after Wayne Grover had appointed him, and he consulted with all kinds of people here and some of Mr. Truman’s associates who were still in town. He went up to New York to visit his sister in law. She gave him a crash course in what museums were all about, and he went to all of the museums in New York. Then he went out to Independence to work with the first guys that were handling the records there, J.R. Fuchs and Phil Lagerquist, who had been on that project for a couple of years already, and so they go things started, and then, as soon as school was out in Palo Alto where we lived, he came out and we drove back east. We arrived on probably about the fifth or sixth of June, somewhere in there, and it was absolutely frenetic work getting that building ready to open. Not the papers, the papers came later, but getting the exhibits ready and getting the building finished. Mr. Truman was doing a lot of work with the staff on planning the exhibits, figuring out what would go where, which was pretty neat. I wound up going up there a lot. I had been doing stage crew and sound crew work in high school, and so I went up and helped Cecil Schrepfer, who was the photographer who’d been appointed, and we sort of plugged together all the sound system, and then I was up there quite a lot. The first year was my senior year in high school. Then the next year was my freshman year in college, and I went out to Claremont Mens’ College in California, and then transferred back for my sophomore year to the University of Kansas. I was over at the Library a lot, and whenever somebody interesting was coming through father would usually call home and call me over at college to say come on over, and off I’d go. I got to meet a fascinating variety of people, many of whom became wonderful friends and mentor. Mr. Truman became a mentor of mine, and so, I practically lived up there." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Can you talk about your time in school leading up to your time here? I guess you were at the Smithsonian for a bit leading up to the Archives. Can you talk about your education for a little bit?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Okay. I was obviously imbued with history from the time I was born, so much so that I said, A. I don’t want to be an archivist, and B. I don’t want to be a historian. I know about this. I have been to OAH meetings. I have been to SAA meetings. So, I, majored in political science, took a lot of political science and international relations courses, and many other courses, too. I got my bachelor’s in political science at KU. Then I received a University of Kansas-University of Reading direct exchange graduate fellowship and went off to the University of Reading in England for a year, had a marvelous year, and came back. I had delayed entry into Stanford Law when I got the fellowship to Reading. Stanford Law School was very good about it. I went off to Stanford because I had always said I’m going to be a lawyer, you know, like my grandfather, like my uncle, like all these other people. After about four months of that, I figured, you know, this is not what I want to do at all, so I withdrew from Stanford and transferred back to KU and into a master’s in international relations, and cunningly contrived a thesis topic that would require me to go back to England to do thesis research. It was on British defense policy, so back I went to Reading to do research, and that’s when I met my wife Sue. She was a student there. Then I came back and finished up at KU. I was very much imbued with Jack Kennedy’s call to ask what you could do for your country, and I looked into all kind of possibilities, decided that the Peace Corps was not something that a political scientist could be very effective at, but there were undoubtedly very good jobs in Washington where I could do something. So, I filled out the forms and all that and came back to Washington as a program analyst with the embryonic food stamp program at USDA. This was the pilot project. We had eight and then 12 sites around the country, and I was in the retailer, wholesaler division looking over reports of violations, figuring out where they had broken the law and assessing penalties, and I got a very interesting look at nature in that. It was nothing that I hadn’t seen before in my summers as a park policeman while in graduate school out in Kansas City, but it was sort of eye opening sometimes. That was a way to get back to Washington, and this was a traditional route that a lot of people took, starting back, probably in the 20s, certainly in the 30s: come to Washington, get a job so you can look around for a better job, so I did. Within eight months, a job at the Smithsonian had opened up and Bert Rhoads, who was the Deputy Archivist at that point, was assembling the first classes of Presidential Libraries interns or National Archives interns or what have you. Bert tried like mad to recruit me to that program, and we had become great friends, actually, through my father. Father would come back and he would stay with us at our apartment in Riverdale, and Bert would bring us into town; I’d walk from here down to MHT, now the Museum of American History, where I was working at that point. But anyway, Bert tried to get me into the program, and I kept saying, no, that’s very kind, sir. I really appreciate it, but you see I’ve got this thing going over at the Smithsonian that looks really good. And I took the Smithsonian job which was in the Division of Political History at the new Museum of History and Technology, now the Museum of American History, and it was absolutely fascinating. I was a museum technician, then a museum specialist, which sort of got me up into the equivalent ranks of a lot of archive specialists here. After four and a half years, though, promotion opportunities sort of ceased, because the next step was to be a curator and you needed to have a vacancy for a curator, and they didn’t have any vacancies; and in fact, all the curators in political history were from 35 to 50. They weren’t going to go anywhere anytime soon, so I started looking around, and I had met and gotten to know Frank Burke fairly well. He was running the Educational Programs Division then, and I kept saying, got any jobs? Got any jobs? No, no, we don’t, I don’t have any vacancies, there's no money. But we became good buddies in any case, and eventually it was suggested to me, and I don’t remember whether it was Frank or whether it was Bert or whether it was my father, to call up Walt Robertson. He’s the Executive Director. Does he have anything going? So, I called and got his secretary, Betty Seemuller, who was a very interesting, very pleasant person, who ruled that office with an iron fist--a big, chain mail iron fist. There was no nonsense with Betty! I never could get through to Walt. I’d leave messages, you know, but I didn’t know what my inability to reach him was all about, but eventually he called and said, I haven’t wanted to call you until we had a vacancy, but now we have a vacancy. Come over and talk, so I came over to talk, and I thought I was coming over to do museum work, and I thought, well, you know, career game plan, I’ll be here five years doing museum work and then I’ll go somewhere else, and 25 years later, I retired from the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well, so you started in the internship program, or?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Or you never were part of the internship program at all?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "No, never was part of the internship program. Most people think I was, and all of the gang that were in it became very close associates, including Adrienne Thomas, with whom I shared an office for about three years, either in what is now this room or right over on the other side of that wall so that we looked out through those columns there." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So, what exactly was the internship program?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "The internship program? Well, there were two of them. One was for archivists and one was for Presidential library archivists. There are still archivist training programs. The idea was that you would do sort of a two or three-year program or rotating assignments around, doing papers and learning all about archiving." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay, are you familiar with the CIDS program? Was it similar to that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Early form of it." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yeah, early form of it, very much so, and then later on, they had internship programs for embryonic Records Center people. Same program, but they were slated to work in the Records Center system and move all around the country, unlike everybody else who would find a berth and stay put. These were good programs, and Bert was the one who really got them going. They lasted for a long time. Now, they’re gone into CIDS and all this kind of thing. I think they’ve produced an amazing crop of people. They really have awfully, awfully good folks. And no, I wasn’t part of it. I was doing my own internship program but in museology over at MHT, and I did some fascinating things there and had some wonderful assignments and got to meet an amazing number of fascinating people. (I shouldn’t say amazing. It sounds too much like that new guy down the street.)" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So then what year was it, your first year here was ‘71?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "‘71." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And can you describe your work when you first started? Your first job?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "My first job was in the program review group under John Scroggins up on the fourth floor. We reported to Walt, and it was, as I said in my interview, my other interview, it was boring, because John, who’s a very talented guy, had the uncanniest ability to make anything boring, and he did. And I thought I was going to go out of my tree because I had been doing much more interesting and exciting stuff over at the Smithsonian, you know, traveling all over Britain and looking for objects for revolutionary exhibits, all kinds of neat stuff like that, in and out of the White House all the time with Presidential materials, and now I’m up in the fourth floor reviewing program manuals. Well, it gave me a good look at how things happen and it gave me a very good look at how not to run an office. Finally, I went down to Walt one day and said, help. I need out of this. This is not working, and I was annoyed at John, and he was annoyed at me, and so it seemed like a good idea to move me down to work directly for Walt as an assistant, not be deputy executive director, not even be assistant director but the assistant to the director, and I worked up through that for some time, and that was really fun. That was fascinating because I wound up having an overview of what the institution is, how it operates, what the value systems are and who does what. I was looking at it from the highest level. One of the early things I did was to be the secretary of the program review group that Bert set up to go around and review the programs of every office in the place, and I went around with that group. I didn’t say much, I just took notes. You know, you learn a lot that way in about a year. You learn an awful lot, including where all the bodies are buried and who buried them and why. So, I did that. I was also the labor relations officer, did all kinds of things for Walt." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Do you remember what the big programs were at that time?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "One of the biggest programs was records declassification. We were just getting into that whole idea because Bert and Jim O’Neill and several others were simply appalled at how much was still classified. There were records from World War I that were classified. We even ran across, as I remember, one record from the Civil War that was still classified. There was lots of stuff from World War II, and nobody could see the sense of it, but the agencies had done it, and we were determined to overcome that, so we set up the whole records declassification program under Al Thompson, who had been under one of the interns, and it worked beautifully. Al and his staff were able to co-opt records officers from the different agencies to come over and work with the stuff and open it up as quickly as possible and as thoroughly as possible. One of the interesting results of all of that was we opened up this vast trove of World War II records and the Public Records Office in London got slightly embarrassed because they were still operating under the 50-year rule and here we were opening up all of their stuff, too. So, they had to change their rule and open it up, which is when the story of Bletchley Park came out, and all of that. And had we not had this program going and sort of forcing them to open it up, none of that would have come out for another 25 years. We might only now be hearing about Bletchley Park. So that was good. We also had a lot of other things going on because Bert was very, very interested in opening up the Archives, letting the public know more of what we were doing, being more of a public oriented institution, and this would increase in all forms of public outreach and public programs." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Was this the same time that the regional archives started to come into existence." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Did you have a lot to do with any of that? Did you oversee programs?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "I did not. The only thing I was doing was working for Walt in providing support for the Executive Director and the Office of the National Archives in setting up and staffing the regional archives program, so it was just support, and I really had nothing directly to do with it that you could put your finger on. It was just general levels of support, letting people know what was going on. I did a certain amount of speech writing for Walt and for Bert, particularly Bert’s testimonies on the Hill, or White House letter writing, this kind of thing. So, occasionally I would be doing something where we would be mentioning the regional archives program getting going in a big way, and of course that almost backfired on us because, at the end of the Carter administration when President Carter put in Admiral Freeman, Dr. Rowland G. Freeman, as Administrator of General Services. Admiral Freeman decided that the best thing to do, because we were having such space problems and we couldn’t get a building across the street, was to move everything out of the Archives and into the regional archives branches all over the country, which would have made research almost impossible. And I can tell you there was almost a guerilla action launched there—that was pretty spectacular." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I want to talk about that a little more. I have a question. You did mention the building across the street?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Do you, do you have more information about the potential for the Archives to have a building across the street?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Oh, yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Could you tell me a little about that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yes. FDR in 1942 had said when the war is over, that vast Pentagon building we’ll use for records for the Archives because they’ll need the space; and people were going, “oh really?” Including my father, who was sort of the liaison officer between the Archives and the military. He worked his tail off during the war and worked very closely with a lot of people who would become really important in Archives history, like his buddy Wayne Grover who was helping run the Navy program during the war and had been one of the young archivists before the war. Wayne came back and was Archivist for 17 years. But you know, everybody’d thought, oh, gee, all that lovely space, and of course that didn’t happen really quick, so we started to make do and build Records Centers and adopted the idea of Records Centers and started building them around the country. That took quite some time. That’s why we went to California, so father could run the Federal Records Center in San Francisco. Wayne said to him one day, “Well, you’re the one who wrote the article about records to be preserved and you thought up the idea of the records centers, you and your buddies. You want to put your money where your mouth is?” Father, who was a graduate of Berkeley, said, \"Oh, yes, please!\" and off we went, but this still left the problem of this building exploding with records and where do you put them? Oh, well, we’ll make the records centers really big and we’ll put a lot out there in the records centers. Well, they filled up quickly. Every time you turned around, something filled up, so people started to cast covetous eyes on the blocks across the street, Seventh to Eighth to Ninth: \"Oh, maybe we could get an appropriation and put an annex there.\" And there was lots of talk, lots of speculation. There were some embryonic plans drawn up in maybe the early sixties, and it didn’t happen. There was then a really interesting plan drawn up in the seventies and going up to about ‘74, ‘75, for a building between Seventh St. and Eighth St. that would have been a pretty modernistic building and would have worked beautifully. Frank Burke had quite a hand in that one, and I remember seeing the plans. They drew up plans and they were good. I remember seeing the plans, and the concept was an interesting idea. We were going to have a tunnel under Pennsylvania Avenue, of course, and move records and people back and forth all the time. It was a good idea, but it didn’t happen. It certainly didn’t happen, because the FBI building was put there, but the idea of a second building never went away. In the eighties, after Frank had done NE and then was with the National Historical Publications and Records Commission doing various other things like that, he was one of the ones pushing the idea that maybe what we needed to do was to affiliate with one of the universities in the area, and when he became Acting Archivist, and I was working as an assistant for him, which was great fun, he went over and talked with Jim Moran about putting the branch in Alexandria, roughly where the Patent and Trademark Office is. Being a good little Alexandrian I thought this was a splendid idea, but maybe because Frank was an adjunct professor and teacher at Maryland, I’m not sure, but Frank got very imbued with latching on to the University of Maryland in order to have an affiliation with a university. They were very receptive to it, whereas there wasn’t any university affiliation in northern Virginia that was lapping up this idea because there weren’t that many universities there, and George Mason University was just an embryonic thing. So, Maryland said come hither and a very nice piece of space became available, and suddenly we got on this bandwagon building Archives II, and it worked. It worked beautifully. It’s out in the middle of bloody nowhere, as far as I’m concerned. You know you haven’t lived until you’ve commuted to Archives II from Alexandria for several years, in the snow and all that. That’s a long drive. But it’s a tremendous building, and I was really glad to be there for three years. So that’s how all that happened. It was a long and tortuous story, and I only hit a few of the highlights here, but somebody could write a hell of a good book about it and hopefully make it interesting. Maybe Adrienne Thomas, because she was the person in charge of getting Archives II built." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well, I want to come back to your time in Archives II, but I want to stay with the chronology—so we had last you were working for Walt and doing program review." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And then what was the next step in your Archives career?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "The next step was being spun off by Walt to do the Archivists Reception Room project." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "The Americana project." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "The Americana project. Fred Greenhut had started it and had got Joe Hennage to support it. Freddie was using, as his model, the State Department Diplomatic Reception Rooms program. Fred and Bart Cox and I were all great friends, about the same age, had much the same outlooks, and we were also car buddies, very, very close car buddies: old cars. Fred started off with this program and got Joe starting to work on it, working with NE and Frank Burke. Frank and Joe fell out: it was a couple of egos at work. Joe had the biggest ego of anybody that ever came to town until Donald Trump. But Joe was good. You just had to know how to work with him, how to use him. So this fallout then resulted in Fred getting highly annoyed with everything that was going on. He was going to let his uncle, who was a Congressman from Florida, know all about it, and Fred got caught Xeroxing some memos one day probably for his uncle, some internal staff memos that he shouldn’t have been Xeroxing, so Fred got moved out of the Americana Project, over to Diplomatic Records, which was his real home anyway. And Walt said to me, \"Okay, you wanted museum experience, and you’ve been saying that ever since you got here, and you say you have things to offer, and you’ve talked to Bert Rhoads about it and all that, now buddy boy, we have this opening and we want you to take over the Americana project.\" And I say, “Yeah!” So I did, and working with Joe we managed to do quite a lot and really make that room look good and build up a tremendous collection." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Can you explain, just because everyone is not going to be aware what the Americana Project is, exactly what that was and how it came into existence?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Okay, what it was, was an idea that we should have a room, a reception room that was a reflection in its furnishings of the culture of the Federal period that produced the founding documents. The model, as I said, was the Diplomatic Reception Rooms at State. The Archivist's Reception Room has always been the Archivist's Reception Room. When John Russell Pope designed it, it had a very strange marble mantelpiece that was neo-Egyptian. We never really were quite sure what it was. And it had three, I think it was, chandeliers hanging from the ceiling that were brass, and they were inverted bowls with candlesticks coming off of them. They looked like turtle shells, giant turtle shells. They were pretty hideous. To that was added good, government-issued furniture. Some conference tables, rather “eh” sofas, some equally “eh” chairs, all good government-issue stuff. They were really fairly uncomfortable and you know, there were classes and meetings and receptions and all kinds of things, retirement ceremonies, held in there and the room just never looked that good. Well, before I got involved in the project, they had set their eyes on redoing the room and Fred and Joe just really went to town on that. The mantelpiece that is in there now was designed and crafted by Samuel McIntire of Salem, Massachusetts. I hope the records about that are still around." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "We have all the records." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Good, good, good. That’s a very important, significant mantelpiece. The chandeliers are Waterford or Waterford-esque. They’re Irish from about 1810. And we were able to line up that big bookcase, which was a New York piece by Michael Allison, made somewhere between 1810 and 1820, as I recall, and we got various chairs, various tables, some really, really nice things. We borrowed --­ oriental rugs from the Johnson Library, because they had and probably still have the biggest collection within the Archives family, and Harry Middleton—the Johnson Library director and a good friend of both my father and mine—was very good about it. (I was distressed to see that Harry died. It was in the paper just the other day.) We were good friends, and he thought my father walked on water, which was very nice of him, but Harry was a really good guy, and he did a tremendous job running the Johnson Library for what? 30 years, I think it was. Outstanding. Anyway, we mentioned the idea of rugs. He said, “Oh, can we help you?” And here they came. The idea at one point was that we would rotate them every so often. I don’t know whether that’s going on now or not. I have no idea, probably not, but anyway, there they were. We needed to have a conference table and banquet table, and so, I started looking around, found a very, very nice Maryland Hepplewhite table, about 1825, was up at an antique shop near Frederick, and like other Hepplewhite pieces, there were legs that were very elegant, dainty tapering legs. When you have a table that’s 22 feet long and comes apart in sections, you’ve got legs all over the place. Bert Rhoads said, “I’m never going to be able to get my feet under all of that. Can you think of something else?” So, we wound up having Suter’s Furniture do a couple of tables for us that could be put together in combinations. I think they’re still in there. Suter’s is located down in the Valley of Virginia. It’s been going since about 1827, so it was, you know, a good organization with which to work in doing something like this. We were able to take one of their catalog item tables and say, “Well, let’s do this, let’s do this, let’s do this,” and they said “Fine,” and they were honored to do it, and similarly with the chairs that we got. They had some Hepplewhite chairs that were very nice and they were remarkably similar to the dining chairs at Mount Vernon, and we said, “Well now, can we take your catalog of chairs and do this and do this and do this and come out with something like Mount Vernon, just like the ones you did in Gadsby’s Tavern?” “Oh, yes, we can do that.” They’re in there, too. We had a sideboard on loan that was just a spectacularly beautiful piece. We hoped we were going to be able to get it. We were able to get the thing very gently conserved and restored, but the old boy who was going to leave it to us in his will died before he changed the will, so it went back up to Dartmouth where it is today in the Dartmouth Art Museum, so we are without a sideboard. And about the time I left was about where that stood, and I’m delighted to see that the room is still being used and it still looks so good. We were in there a couple of months ago for the Truman Library Institute reception and dinner and it was really fun being in the old stomping ground once again and not actually have to stand there as the curator and make sure nobody did anything too horrible to the furnishings. That’s the story with the Americana Project. It was a very good idea. It was one of the many build-ups to the Revolution Bicentennial, and when I moved on to other things, then, you know, it was maintained by NE [the Office of Public Programs, before that the Office of Educational Programs] for a long time. I don’t know who’s maintaining it now, but somebody obviously is doing a very nice job. And, I think a number of the things that were on loan went back and I had the impression that they wanted to make sure the furnishings that were in there not only worked but were rugged enough to last for another two or three generations, and I guess they are. Seems to work. Looks good. It was a good idea. It got very interesting from time to time because we were dealing with some interesting donors and some really significant dealers in New York and in Washington. I got to meet some very, very fun people doing all this and just loved it. I got to be a little bit of an expert on federal period furniture, which was an interesting change from what I was doing with you guys. And that got sandwiched in with my other duties in NE, because by this time I’d been moved down to NE permanently and was the Assistant to the Assistant Archivist. The new Assistant Archivist replacing Frank Burke was Albert Meisel, a fascinating man, absolutely fascinating. The most brilliant mind I’ve run across in years, and he was the kind of guy you loved working for him and with him when you didn’t want to break his damn neck, because he could really be a handful and he was, he was ephemeral. You always wonder, you know, where do we stand right at this moment with him, and then in an hour or two it may be different, so life was very interesting. Anyway, I was the administrative officer and did all the budgeting and oversaw the procurement and the personnel and provided all the administrative backup for every one of the rapidly expanding programs within what we got changed into the Office of Public Programs. In ‘77 I became the Acting Director of the Education Division, and Albert kept saying, “Oh, I want to find somebody who would be really good in that job and I need you doing what you do so well and no, I’m not going to make you the permanent head. I’m going to leave you as acting until I find somebody;” and he never found anybody. But then he finally left. Jim O’Neill, who at that point was Acting Archivist, very promptly made me the permanent director, which lasted about a year, until 1984. A little later, Frank Burke said to me that the great contribution I had made to Public Programs and the Education Division was to professionalize it with museum people. I felt that was a great compliment." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "What were the kinds of programs that the Education Division was doing?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "The Education Division at that time was in charge of all the exhibits. We did some outstanding exhibits in those years. That was our major function. We were also developing educational teaching materials. We had a very active group of people developing teaching units, and we did traveling teaching units. We did packaged teaching units that we could send out. And we did traveling exhibits. We developed an active program of speakers who would come and speak on what they had found in their researches on their newest book, and that got to be great fun." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Where would they speak normally? In the building?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "In the auditorium." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay, up there." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yeah, up there." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay, the old one." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "The old one, yes. Sometimes they would speak in the Reception Room, but not too often. Usually it was in the auditorium, and that was a big success. Once we had Nikolai Tolstoy come over. He had just done his book on the secret war and at that time the British government restricted you as to how much money you could bring out, so he really was more than willing to come over, but he didn’t have a place to stay and couldn’t afford a place to stay. So, he stayed with us for a week. And then he stayed with Jill Merrill, who was our PR officer for another week. He stayed with her and her family and we all had a great old time. He gave a superb lecture. He caused a fair amount of controversy because he maintained, publicly and in his book that Sir Patrick Dean was one of the principal Brits who had betrayed all of the Russians that fought on our side, but were fighting really against communism, too. Dean was the former British Ambassador to the U.S. when Nicolai spoke. But anyway, he stayed with us, and our family and Nikolai had a great time. His visit was an enormous success, and we kept up with him for a long time. We had a lot of other speakers. It was a good program. Another thing that we did, we decided we needed a “friends” organization for the Archives. Any major cultural institution ought to have a friends organization, so we started the Associates of the National Archives, and they provided docents. They provided a lot of support services for lectures and public events. It was a membership organization. We had an enormous amount of fun devising the different levels of membership and the different benefits you could get. One day Al Meisel and I were in Bert Rhoads’ office outlining all the different levels, and Albert said with a perfectly straight face that at the top level, if you gave so much money a year, among many other special benefits you would get to take a shower with the Archivist, and Bert got this ashen look on his face and Meisel and I just started rolling on the floor laughing. I don’t think Bert ever quite forgave him for that one. We pointed to the shower, you know, right off his office to the bathroom. Right in there, Bert, in there. It was beautiful. I guess I’m the only one left who would remember that incident. God! We offered trips for the Associates, field trips, charter trips. We even had a charter trip to Bermuda for a bunch of them in the winter one year, and it was really very good. It was instantly sold out. The problem with the program was that it wasn’t making a lot of money really quickly right from the beginning. It takes times to build these up, takes a long time, and as money got a little bit tighter under President Reagan, the program got axed. I was really sorry about that. The program came back. It certainly did come back later on. Bob Warner thought it was a good idea and he kept pushing it, and then others came along and pushed it even more and got Karl Rove involved, of all people. Karl seemed to know how to do it, because it’s a tremendous success now. It really is a good, good program. I’m delighted about that." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I came across some of the early Karl Rove letters from that." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Did you? Oh, that must have been great fun. Of all people to ask, Karl Rove? But he did it. He rallied around. Looking back, I am delighted with everything we were able to get started. Frank Burke was the one who really got it started, and then Albert developed it and made it possible for us to bring on some very good people to do all kinds of things. One of them was Elsie Freeman, who is now Elsie Finch, who headed up the educational outreach and the teaching programs and all that, and she had several good people with her, really good people; they did a wonderful job. They really did. One of the hardest things I ever had to do was, when we had a RIF [Reduction in Force] going on in the early Reagan days and everybody was assigned a quota and I had to let go one of the ladies in Elsie’s office. She was the last in. She was the first out. She knew it was coming even before I did. It was so hard." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I was going to say, it seems that there’s parallel to what’s going on now back to early Reagan years with RIFs. Can you explain a little bit of what it was like to work in the early days, Reagan and the cutback and…?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "I’d like to go back a little farther." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "And talk about what it was like working under the Nixon administration because the Nixonites wanted to populate the government with their people, at all levels. One of the things that Walt Robertson had me do was to review the applications that were sent over by the White House for jobs for young archivists, young historians, young whatever, and all we had then were vacancies in records declassification. We had, oh, you’ve got 100-some odd staff slots there? Oh, we can send over a lot of people. Okay, send over the applications. We’ll look at them. And I got extremely good about writing back the loveliest letters to the White House about what superb people these were and unfortunately they just didn’t have the qualifications that were absolutely vital to declassify these records. It worked every time, but I felt that we were doing almost an underground effort to stop these kinds of incursions. Well, the same sort of thing came along in the early Reagan years. We had the inaugural watch party, the parade watching party in Room 105, in the Reception Room, and I used to be in charge of those parties, too. And as Reagan was giving his inaugural address, he got to that very famous portion about “The government is your enemy,” and the deputy administrator of GSA (Ray Kline) and I looked at each other and said, “Oh, my God.” That guy’s face just fell, and he had been 30 years in the government already and was probably the best guy over at the main GSA building. He was a really good man. We all felt that way. All we could do was do the best we could in carrying on and try every way we could to make what we were doing look really good. It helped that, by this time, we had a really strong, active Office of Presidential Libraries and we had a very good presence at the White House in our archives unit over there that Marie Allen was running, Marie who lives about three miles from us in Williamsburg now. So, we were able to establish a little bit of a beachhead and avoid some things, but the grimness didn’t come from the White House as much as it came from GSA; and you know, we had a war with GSA from the moment in 1949 when we were dumped into GSA. I vividly remember as a kid having those discussions about the Archives’ placement in GSA, and feeling appalled that this was happening to the National Archives. I have to say that I was raised with this concern, so that when I had the opportunity to help Walt Robertson with his famous SAA speech, I could take what Dick Jacobs had done with the first draft that was very, very good, and then alter it enough to make it sing. That was one of my prouder achievements—to help Walt to stand up and tell the truth about what it was like with GSA and why we had to get out. It took another nine years to get loose after that speech, but we did it. Anyway, we were fighting rear guard actions with GSA. We’d already had an experience with Admiral Freeman, who wanted to move all the records out, and so we knew how the game was played. We didn’t have that much of a threat, but we had all of these little picky administrative grabs all the time, including a RIF. I guess it was the, probably the second RIF we’d ever had. There was one right after the war when the returning servicemen were coming home and people who’d occupied the jobs they left behind had to be let go. That was rough, but this one was a little rougher. Luckily in NE, we only had to lose one person, and Archives didn’t have it that rough, but we always felt under attack. And then, as time went on, Bob Warner came in and Ed Weldon came in as his Deputy. Warner and Weldon turned out to be pretty good at managing relations with the White House, better than some people thought they would have been, and they were able to stave off a lot. Bob Warner, to his everlasting credit, realized long before he became Archivist (which was sort of a surprise to everybody) that the Archives had to be free again, and he mounted this effort with the help of people like Dick Jacobs and Claudine Weiher and to some extent Dave Peterson, who came over from GSA and who had been a Nixon Republican appointee. They understood, even David, who had to be indoctrinated, as to why this was a good idea. He caught on very quickly, and they led this really fascinating effort to free the Archives, which Bob detailed in his very interesting book. And it worked. And then we had to reinvent the Archives, but it was a very tricky time in the early Reagan years because we kept being sniped at, just a little bit, here and there, here and there, here and there, but we all lived in a certain amount of fear because we knew we were the enemy. We were govvies. We were the enemy, and it was directly opposite the feeling we’d had in the Carter administration when not only were government employees looked upon fairly favorably, but thanks to Joan Mondale, the Archives was looked upon very favorably. I mean, we really blossomed under the Mondale’s pushing the Carters. This was good, and then to have that turn around instantly overnight, was a very big shock, not unlike what we’ve just been going through. What can I say? The wheels of government turn." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So, in the years leading up to, I guess not the early years of the Reagan administration but the years leading up to the independence of the Archives, what was your role here?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Personally, I felt under threat. Not from the Reaganites, but within, because Dave Peterson came in to head up NE for a little while. Then he got moved to NL. He didn’t like me from the beginning and I wound up not liking him, and it became a personal sort of thing. Bob came in. Bob Warner and Jane were good friends of my parents, and my father had always hoped that we would become equally good friends with the Warners because we were closer in age to them than my parents were, and I was really looking forward to that; but it turned out that Bob Warner had this idea that I was only here for a sinecure, trading on my father’s reputation. He made it very publicly clear to a number of people, including Dick Jacobs, that he did not want sons following in their father’s footsteps. Well, I hadn’t been there to follow in my father’s footsteps. I was recruited by Bert and Walt to do something very different and bring a whole different set of talents here, which I did. But Bob didn’t like what I was doing and saw me as only occupying a sinecure, and eventually I got reassigned away from the Education Division directorship to be a senior archives specialist at NC. It was not a happy time. It was not a happy time at all. Peterson and I never did really see eye to eye. We tended to keep our distance, but he kept disliking me all the time and isolating me where and when he could. In ‘88, Dick Jacobs was still Executive Director, and he sent me over to the 1989 Presidential Inaugural Committee for my second go-around. My first time was with the Nixon Inaugural Committee, the ‘69 Committee, so he sent me over to be the historian archivist for the ‘89 Committee. That was great fun because I was privileged to come back to run a program I had started 20 years earlier and see how it evolved and what needed to be improved, and I was happy to find that it was ticking along pretty well. That was great and one of the side benefits was Dick realized this when he reassigned me was that it got Peterson and myself apart. Well, all good things come to an end, and the Inaugural Committee came to an end. In fact, I came back to NC to do what I was supposed to be doing. One of the things that I was supposed to be doing was going out on the program reviews and writing them all up, as Evans Walker had done with that job for quite some years before I came. Peterson would never let me go out. Never. So, I did a lot of other things, particularly improving publications and communications within the records center system. But when I came back from the ‘89 Inaugural Committee, Peterson told Larry Hines, who by this time had my old slot and was my boss, he said, I want him out of here. I want to fire him. And Larry said, oh, better yet, let me send him out to Suitland because we need a review of some of the program activities out there to see how we can straighten some problems out, and Peterson grudgingly said fine, but get him out of my sight. And so off I went to Suitland for two years to do all of this and we made a few changes. I got a really good look at a records center, got pneumonia from all the dust, too, walking pneumonia. Not nice. Anyway, eventually David let up a little bit and I came back to the office and started to do even more with publications outreach, developing other things, including writing up the story of the lifecycle of records concept. That was to be an article that was to be in Prologue, and for some reason the guy who was in charge of Prologue, who was a friend of mine, didn’t want it. He wanted more public outreach things, rather than inward looking things, and so it was published in the internal newsletter in two parts. I presume there are copies of that still around because, if I dare say so, it was a pretty damn good analysis and write-up of how the whole theory came to be of lifecycle of records, and how the records center system evolved from that." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Do you know what year this was? Ish?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Ish. ‘92 and ‘93, maybe into early ‘94. In the meantime, we moved out to Archives II." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Oh, your office?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yes, the office moved out to Archives II, and I guess things with Peterson had gotten a little bit better because our wing had a whole bunch of nice offices with windows and sort of a bullpen; and there were two corner offices, and I got one of them while Peterson had the other. We were a long way apart from each other, but each one of us had an office. I never figured out just exactly what turned him around, but whatever. I took it and ran with it, and we did some really good things with NC, and they are a great bunch of people. NC is a really splendid organization that does work that nobody ever thinks about very much, unless they’re part of it, but they’re the ones that keep the system going until we’re ready to talk about permanently valuable records, and it’s amazing the things that they can accomplish. It really is. I wound up being fond of a lot of my experiences there, and all of the people there, or almost all of the people, and really being proud of all of the people, having been a part of it off and on 12 years, I guess." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And then, you left the agency finally in 1996? Is that correct?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Were you still in NC when you left the agency?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "I was. I was. There had been a lot of talk up on the Hill and other places about me maybe being the next Archivist of the United States, which came as a great shock to me. That was something I had never thought of, but there were people actively promoting this idea, and my name was submitted to President Clinton, along with about 36 others. I think there were 37 of us on the short list, Trudy Peterson being one, and Congressman Jim Moran wrote a personal note to Bill Clinton supporting my candidacy and sent me a copy of it, which I have. So, the idea of me becoming the Archivist was somewhat far-fetched, perhaps, but I thought it was pretty good; and I had all kinds of things I wanted to do to make it even more of a publicly-oriented agency, reaching out more and more with more public programs, just exactly the sort of things that the Archives is doing today. Just exactly these things, including getting involved more and more with electronic records and reaching out through the media and all that. We didn’t have Wikipedia in 1994, but we were sowing the groundwork for this kind of thing, and I’m blown away with what’s happening the Archives now. It is so good. Anyway. No, I didn’t get that job, and, I talked with John Carlin about maybe, what would I like to do. Run the Office of Presidential Libraries (NL) for instance. I thought running NL would be a very appropriate thing to do at this point. I certainly knew a lot about the libraries, although I had never worked in one of the libraries officially, but I’d been around the whole idea since 1957 and had provided a lot of support and a lot of interaction for exhibits and public programs and knew most of the people in the system very well. And John finally decided he didn’t want me in that job, or, he said, well, we’ve got to get the strategic plan done before I can figure out any assignments for anybody, which was not entirely true, but it was close enough. \"Close enough for government work, anyway,\" as the saying used to go. And, so, by mid-‘96 I realized that there probably really wasn’t anything more I had to offer without moving into a slot like NL and that was not going to happen, and I had a lot of other things I wanted to do with my life. If I retired at that point, you know, I was 55, had a lot of years left, and so I retired, very happily. So we had a lovely and very well-attended retirement ceremony, which Sue helped organize and at which Dave Peterson presided, very graciously, and I think we were both sort of dumb-founded at all of that. It was fine. I never saw him again. I’ve often wondered what happened to Dave Peterson. Interesting guy. Again, one of these people with a lot to offer. It’s a shame we never got on so well." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well I just want to go back to a couple other things." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yes, ma’am." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Sort of back in time, you mentioned it, but I’m not that familiar with the inaugural committee and the relationship with the Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Can you talk about how you got involved with that and what kind of things you were doing?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yeah. I got involved with it in a very strange way. There was an act of Congress passed about 1948 to establish the role of inaugural committees and how they were to be run and how the whole inauguration was to be done. This was an act passed right after the war, and the Truman inaugural was the first on after the war. Saw the establishment of a Presidential Inaugural Committee and the Joint Committee on swearing-in and ceremonies, which had been called something slightly different in previous years, who were to handle everything up on the Hill. The Inaugural Committee was to handle most of everything else on the civilian side, and then there was to be an Armed Forces support effort, which later grew into the Armed Forces Inaugural Committee, that is now a committee with even more people involved in it that the Presidential Inaugural Committee. The Presidential Inaugural Committee was created to be a non-partisan and bi-partisan organization, starting with ‘49, and sure enough, for 20 years and longer a lot of people in Washington would rally around and come down and volunteer to do an inaugural committee, and whether they were Democrats or Republicans didn’t make any difference. They just showed up and did it, and they frequently picked up right off where they left four years before doing the same thing and loving every second of it, and they became very, very professional at it. All these wonderful old society dames in Cathedral Heights were good. They were really good. In the summer of ‘68 when I was at the Smithsonian, I used to handle a lot of visitors coming in to see the collections, particularly the research collections in the Division of Political History where I worked. As an example, in the spring of ‘68 I had this young kid come in who was from Georgetown University, and he was one of the groups from Georgetown who was carrying food over to the Poor People’s Campaign. He was a graduating senior and he stopped by to talk with the people in Political History to see if we would like it if he were to grab some specimens, some exhibit-worthy material from the Poor People’s Campaign, budges, batons and flags, fence making, whatever, and he was shunted to me to start with because I was the low man on the totem pole in the office. I talked with him a good bit before I sent him off to the head curator, who was the one that was dealing with social movements, and they spent about a half hour talking. Then the kid came back and talked to me some more. He said he was very excited because he had recently heard he was going to be a Rhodes Scholar going to Oxford from Georgetown, and I said, “Well, that’s funny because my wife and I had been 35 miles down the road at the University of Reading a few years earlier. We used to go partying up in Oxford quite a lot.” And so we talked a lot about all that, and he said, \"Can you recommend any good pubs?\" And I did, several pubs in Oxford and one down in Wallingford that was sort of a favorite of ours that the Oxford rowers used to stop at, and he went on his merry way. I didn’t think anything more about that for 20 years, you know, what ever happened to that tall kid with the wavy dark hair and oozing charm and charisma and all that, never thought about him again until I watched the Democratic National Convention in 1988, and the keynote speaker, the Governor of Arkansas stood up to give the keynote address. That’s him! This was Bill Clinton, the young Bill Clinton. That was the sort of weird, wonderful thing that would happen with visitors coming in. Well, one day in the summer of ‘68 these two people came in. One was the Republican co-chair of the pre-inaugural committee, which was an informal group set up to help get things started, get the ball rolling. There was a Republican co-chair and a Democratic co-chair and the Republican came over with his assistant to see inaugural items, so I was pulling items out and all. We had a very interesting hour, maybe an hour and a half, and they called up with some other questions and all that. Well, that was fine, and I went off and did my merry thing. I was still busily working away on planning bicentennial exhibits and we actually went off to England that summer to look for specimens. Sue and I came back, and these people called up and said, “We want you to be the historian-archivist for the Inaugural Committee.” And I said, “Well, that’s great, but you’re supposed to get somebody from the Archives to do that. The Archives always sends somebody over, and they have since ‘49. They have all the records. They do this, not me.” And they said, “Well, yes, but the guy that they want to send over from the Archives, we can’t understand what he’s talking about and we can’t ever get a succinct answer out of him. In fact, when you ask him a question, he says, well, come back in a couple of days and I’ll have the answer for you. And we’ll go back and sit at his desk in the stacks and he will read out his answers, and this is fine, but you can’t run an inaugural committee that way. We want you.” And I said, “I’m a Democrat, non-partisan, of course, but I’m a Democrat.” “Well, that’s all right. It is a non-partisan organization.” “Eh?” say I. The next thing I know, I get a call from the office of the Secretary of the Smithsonian, S. Dillon Ripley, saying, “We’re going to send you over to the Inaugural Committee.” Oh. And right after that I got a call from my father out at the Truman Library and it seems that Charlie Murphy (Charles S. Murphy), one of President Johnson’s assistants, had been one of Truman’s assistants, was a close friend of my father’s, a big supporter of the Truman Library. He called up my father and said, “Phil, guess what I just did? I just signed some papers assigning your son to the Nixon Inaugural Committee, ha, ha, ha!” And father calls up and says, “What’s this?” I said, \"Eh?” And off I went. And it was pretty bi-partisan, and it did have a lot of people who’d been doing it for years before. It was chaired by J. Willard Marriott, who said, “Come work on my staff. We want to do this right,” and I came over here to the Archives to see Bert and say, “What do I do with all this?” He said, well we need to give you a crash course in archiving, so I went and talked with Ev Alldrich, talked to Bob Bahmer, and talked to various others who got me some readings. I started remembering everything I’d heard all my life and was able to put together an archives and records management program pretty quickly. What I did was to make the records of the previous inaugural committees available to these people to help plan, and then to advise on what had worked in past inaugurations and what had not. You know, try not to have it in the middle of a snowstorm, for instance. I would develop a lot of historical information on request from various members of the committee, very frequently the press people, and I would sometimes give press briefings and do various things like that. Then, at the end, I would be in charge of getting all the Inaugural Committee records and getting them transferred to the Archives to be kept for four years so the Archives staff could start doing arranging, and then they could make them available to the next committee. Then the Archives staff could make sure the records went off to the Presidential library, which by that time, there should be a Presidential library in good enough shape to receive records. So that’s what I did, and it was really, really interesting. I had a very rewarding time. We got to go to all the events, including the Inaugural Ball. I did a lecture the other night down in Williamsburg about inaugural history, and one of the things I mentioned was that at the ‘69 Inauguration, we were in the reviewing stand up behind the new President. We were up there with a lot of the other people on the committee. We looked across the street over toward Lafayette Park and all of a sudden there was smoke starting to rise, and we realized it was demonstrators over there raising absolute hell’s delight about the inauguration of Dick Nixon. They were so completely out of hand that the DC Police were firing tear gas at them, and the cloud of smoke we saw was the tear gas coming up toward the reviewing stands. It started to drift over toward the reviewing stands and we’re going, “Oh, this isn’t good,” but then luckily, the wind came along and blew the tear gas up Pennsylvania Avenue so we didn’t have any problems. It was a very interesting experience, and then lo and behold, Dick Jacobs sent me back 20 years later to do it all again, and then in ‘92, they sent me back a third time to do the Clinton Inauguration." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Was it pretty similar work every time?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yes, it was, except that in ‘92-‘93, I quickly realized, by this time, the committees had lost a lot of their non-partisan atmosphere and had become much more creatures of campaign workers coming in off the trail, or in the case of the ‘89 Committee, coming off the trail or people who’d worked for the Bushes in the White House and under Reagan, and the Bushies had no time for the Reaganites. It was very interesting. Fascinating. But the Clinton people came in and they quickly realized that I’d done this before and that I knew who Harry Truman was, all this kind of thing, and suddenly I found myself elevated to being one of the directors of the Inauguration, and a very frequent spokesman to the press, so much so that Mandy Grunwald christened me \"our historical spin doctor.” I did a lot of press work, both in ‘89 and ‘93, but I’d done some press interviews before in previous inaugurations. The Press would come around and somehow find my name and come over to the office off Lafayette Square or come down here and suddenly I’m talking with German Radio, you know, weird stuff, but fun. And in ‘93, it just blossomed and on inauguration day I did the Today Show. NBC picked us up at the house at somewhere well before dawn. We went over to NBC’s offices, so I did the Today Show, and then we got transported down here to the Labor Department building where CBS was set up, and I spent the day with Dan Rather broadcasting the parade and the speech and this kind of thing. This was a level that historian archivists haven’t reached before, and it was a delight. And then, when it was all over, I started to gather up the records again. This time something odd happened, and it was that the legal counsel for the inauguration went over to become the chief legal counsel at the White House starting on January 21, so one of her little assistants came in, and this woman decreed that all of the records of the inaugural committee were the committee’s to review and process and see what they wanted to turn over because they were a private organization and they didn’t have any responsibility to answer to the Archives. And I mentioned the Federal Records Act of 1950 and the Presidential Inaugurations Act, Nah, made no difference to them. So the records from the Clinton inauguration eventually came here and are now down in Little Rock, and that worked. I never did know how much the lawyers took out. They were very, very close to the chest in playing all that, and so we wrapped up my side of the work fairly early on and I came back to NC. That’s what the inaugural committees are like and that’s the sort of thing I did. I hope somebody’s still doing that. I don’t know if they even have that function now, and I don’t know how the records finally wind up here or whether an inaugural committee finally comes over here to look at previous committee’s records. I have no idea how it’s working today. I’d love to know, just for interest’s sake. I’m well out of it—I don’t want to be back in it, but I’d love to know how it works today. That would be very interesting." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well, I just have a couple more questions." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yes, ma’am?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "To go back the Archivists, because you knew a lot of Archivists, and I have two specific questions. One is related to the appointment process for the Archivists, who used to be appointed by the President and then under GSA it was the GSA administrator who got to pick and now the President gets to pick. Did the type of person who became Archivist change during those years? I know you weren’t really at the Archives, but you had some knowledge." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "I might as well have been." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "I might as well have been. Well, the first Archivist, Dr. Connor, was picked by the President, and a brilliant choice. The second Archivist, Dr. Buck, had been the Deputy and the President picked him, and Dr. Buck was you know, a good friend to everybody. He was also a very stuffy, conservative, penny-pinching, weird guy, so besides being a nice guy, he was odd. Very odd. He once got the professional staff into the Reception Room and lectured them for an hour on the necessity to conserve paper clips. Far different from the earlier days, and then, Dr. Buck, bless him, went off to become head of the Manuscripts Division at LC, which was a much better job for him. And Wayne Grover was picked to come in as the third Archivist, picked by Harry Truman to come in. Wayne had been one of the early archivists. He had run a lot of the Navy records management and archives program during World War II. He had come back to the Archives. He’d moved up on the ranks very, very quickly. He was, you know, the next logical person and Mr. Truman picked him, and that worked. Then GSA was formed in '49, and with that the GSA Administrator got to select the Archivist candidate of his choice and recommend that choice to the President. And Wayne stayed on and lasted until, you know 19, what was it? ‘65, I guess. Then Bob Bahmer came in, who had also been one of the first generation. It was all these first generation people, and Bob was again, a logical choice. At that time, the Administrator of GSA was Lawson Knott who had been a career man as well and thought very highly of career staffers, especially for the Archives, which a lot of GSA always regarded as quote, “the crown jewel” end quote of the General Service Administration. The GSA people were very serious about that, and they may have been right. We’ll say they were right. Lawson picked Bob Bahmer, again as the logical choice, imminently qualified. He’d provide good leadership, and he did for a couple of years. And then he retired, but actually he was brought in as a place holder, in some ways for Bert Rhoads, who was the up and coming young star, and Lawson was able to influence Johnson to pick Bert Rhoads. That was a fun little process, too. Nothing surreptitious about it. It was just sort of pushing the cause along a little bit, and I got a good look at it a little bit because my father was staying with us for about a month when he was brought back to set up NL as an office rather than just a little division and to write the first manual for how to run a Presidential library. He stayed with us out in Riverdale, and Bert would pick him up every morning, and pick me up too. Then I would walk from here over to the Smithsonian, and in the car I got a good look at how that whole game was played. [Short break]" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "All right. So, you were talking about Bert Rhoads." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yeah. What a great guy. He really was. He worked his way up through the system. He became manpower officer and did all kinds of things to help recruit new staff and develop programs, and then he became Deputy Archivist, and then he became Archivist and did an outstanding job. He pushed the libraries to develop more and more. He pushed what programs to develop more and more, the Public Papers of the Presidents series of publications, the National Historic Public Records Commission activities, the Educational Programs activities, and the Federal Records Center system; he recruited a lot of people for that system. Bert had his hand in everything. He had his finger on everything. He provided leadership that was somewhat laid back, and he’d give you enough room to do what you needed to do and enough support to do it. He’d want to know what you were doing and he would review things with you, and once in a while, he could crack a whip, but he didn’t often have to because he was one of those people that inspired other people to do it right. He was an inspired leader. And, finally, with the appointment of Doc Freeman as Administrator, Bert “I’ve broken in so many administrators of General Services and now here’s this one. There’s an opportunity for me to retire right now. I can’t break in another one. I just can’t do it.” And he filled out his papers and sent them in very quietly. The word came out that he decided to retire, and I went streaking into his office right at lunchtime. Here’s Bert, all six feet six of him, like this, feet up on his desk, peeling back a banana, and he said, “I’m going to be just fine, chomp.” And he went on to have a very good second career teaching archives. Jim O’Neill, who was his deputy, then became the Acting Archivist and I know that Jim wanted the Archivist’s job very, very much, and Jim would have been good. There was talk early on about Bob Warner because I think he was president of SAA at that point, and I think he knew a lot of people. There were those who thought, oh, maybe he’ll work. There were those who thought emphatically that he would not. Bert was one of them, interestingly enough. Bert and I used to have off the record candid conversations, always very polite, but nonetheless, and he expressed to me in no uncertain terms one day his belief the Bob was absolutely not up to the job, but Bob got the job. Republican connections with Reagan helped a lot for Bob. Bob appointed Ed Weldon to come in with him; Ed was very good, and they made it work. They had the professional staff at the top- level rallying around and helping and also looking for whatever opportunities they could to advance themselves, Claudine Weiher being one of those. But they made Bob’s appointment work. Dick Jacobs became the Executive Director and Dick I thought did an excellent job. Not like Walt, who you know ran the joint for 20 years, but Dick did a good job. Bob led this fairly quiet effort to free us, and it worked, amazingly enough, and he retired shortly after that. Jim O'Neill was made Acting Archivist, and at that time he made me the full Director of the Education Division, with no more of Al Meisel’s “acting director” nonsense after six long years! Frank Burke then came in as Acting Archivist, and Jim O’Neill went back to being head of Presidential Libraries. Jim had had heart problems, and one day he died at his desk right after lunch, and Frank and I watched him being carted off. That was really rough. Oof. Anyway, Frank became Acting Archivist. He wanted the job, needless to say, and John Fawcett was a guy we brought back to be head of NL. Frank and I had talked about who was good because I was working as his assistant and sort of little person in the background doing all kinds of strange and wonderful things, especially the Constitution Bicentennial and planning a little more decoration in the Archives and working with the public and being Development Director and this, that and the other. One of the things Frank and I worked on was when Dan Reed retired, Dan the “Silver Fox,” retired as head of NL. Dan was another one of those inspired people that Bert brought in, but when he retired, then, who do we get? Frank looked around at who all was available and he talked to various people about it. He talked to me one day and said what do you know about John Fawcett and I said, this, this and this and this, he’s a good man. John was running the Hoover Library and he’d worked his way up through the system, with a charming life. He was really talented, and Frank said, “Well, maybe I think I want him to come back.” And I said, “Well, okay, he's got a big family to move back.” Why not? If they’d like it, he’d probably do the job well, and they came back and he did it very well. He really did. And then he and his wife Sharon split. He teamed up with Claudine Weiher, who had split from her husband, and then John left the Archives and eventually Sharon came into the job of NL and did a superb job. I don’t know where either one of them are now. I’ve lost track with so many people, and I think it’s a shame that the Archives has never had any good way to keep the retired staff members connected or involved or knowing what’s going on or caring a damn thing about them, and so, for instance, I have no idea where John or Sharon are now. It was 14 months before Sue and I found out that Bert had died. We found out about 11 months after Frank Burke died and only by happenstance in both cases, and we’d been awfully close to both men, but the Archives has never had this sort of mechanism that’s been worth a damn that’s involved the alums. I wish that could be done." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Good idea." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "I really wish that could be done, because it would be important for a lot of people and it could be important for the agency (I always like to think of us as an institution, not an agency. There’s a subtle but important difference). Anyway, Frank really wanted the job of Archivist, and John Fawcett told me one day that Frank had been talked to over at the White House and he thought he was over there talking about something else. He was really being interviewed and the interview didn’t work. I don’t know that Frank ever knew that or heard the story, but it didn’t make a lot of difference and, so that was that. Then somehow or another they got a real dark horse in as Archivist of the United States. I said dark horse. It was somebody that I had known ever since his early days in Abilene, when he was at" }, { "speaker": "the Eisenhower Library", "text": "Don Wilson. He came in, and he too, was very strongly supported by Claudine, and that little group became quite close, and he did a pretty good job, I guess. I had been the development officer under Frank and Don decided he didn’t need a development officer, so back I went to NC at the great displeasure of David Peterson! But in later years, Don became director of the Wilson Presidential Library and Museum in Staunton, Virginia, and we’ve become quite close friends." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Oh." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "We’ve seen a lot of each other over the past six or seven years. Very funny twist of fate." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I went down there a year and a half ago to interview." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Did he talk to you?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Oh yeah…" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "He’s a nice guy, Don is, and he did a hell of a job down there, and he’s just retired from the Wilson Presidential Library and Museum. All in all, I think Don did a good job as Archivist. I wouldn’t say an outstanding job, but I think a good job. [Sirens] Oh, we have somebody going down the street yet again. That’s always the nice things about these windows inside. You can go down there and see what’s happening." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes, a lot of activity lately." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Somebody from the White House has gone down there. Okay. Maybe the President." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well, is there anything that we haven’t covered that you wanted to share?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "I could talk a little bit about John Carlin, and I’m going to." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "That would be great. I did interview John." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Did you?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "In the fall, yes, and his wife, Lynn." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Lynn, yeah. His former wife Diana has become a close friend of ours because she was at the University of Kansas for a long time and she headed up the graduate school and the international programs. She got me involved in international programs because I’d been one of the international graduate exchange students, at the University of Reading in England. I’m still on that advisory council. Sue and I saw a lot of Diana and her current husband, Judge Joe Pierron, and we’d stay with them sometimes when I went out to meetings out there. Diana started coming back to Washington to promote contacts with University of Kansas graduates in the area, and she built up quite a network and she always stayed with one of her friends who had been in the NL staff, even after she and John split, so she was always getting all the good information so many of the rest of us had, too, including stories of John and Lynn, his own deputy. Oh God, the way John and Lynn got together was like a soap opera. It really was. It was so bad. There were at least 37 names submitted to Clinton for consideration as Archivist of the United States. I don’t know who they all were. I know really well who two were, but there were others who were probably far more qualified. Trudy Peterson was one of them, of course, and at that point we had almost a civil war going on in the Archives, between the pure archiving people who were very inward looking and the more outward looking people who might have been in public programs or were certainly in Records Centers and Presidential libraries, and that took a much more expansive view of the role of the National Archives. And this became a really nasty bloody personal battle, for several years, and it just tore this place apart. I became involved with the outward looking people, and Trudy was very firmly in the camp of the inward-looking people. Trudy’s name was submitted for consideration, and so was my name along with at least 35 others. My name was evidently submitted by some pretty high- powered people with whom I had worked on the Clinton Inaugural Committee. And Bill Clinton very wisely chose neither side and put somebody else in there. John Carlin had delivered Kansas for Bill; and when he stepped down as governor, he turned his papers over to the Kansas Historical Society and worked with them for about 18 months working on those records, so he knew a little bit about what was going on in the world of archivy, and he was a pretty good guy. I was told by Joe, Diana’s husband, that he always thought Bill had picked John because John was his drinking and wenching buddy. I have no idea whether any of that is true. I report that as a totally unverified rumor. I want you to note that for the record!" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Was I supposed to keep a straight face? Oh, no. But anyway, John got the job and John’s great virtue of the job was that John was a Kansas Democratic politician and very well connected in politics with people who were very, very, very powerful on the Hill, like Bob Dole. John could go up and schmooze those people like nobody you ever saw, and he got everything he wanted, or damn near everything he wanted, even when he asked for the moon. He’d get at least a good slice of it, and we benefitted. We benefitted very well. He conducted a strategic review program that involved the whole staff, and everybody got a say. Whether everybody was happy with the results, I never was too sure. There were a lot of people who thought that the slogan he came up with was silly. But, you know, he set the course for things and he was here for what? 10 years?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah, 10 years, it was exactly 10 years." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Yeah, 10 years. He did a lot of things right. And now, David Ferriero is really doing it right. He is just excellent, and I am so impressed with where the Archives is now. It warms my soul to see how the Archives is doing now. Just where you guys are now is what so many of us were talking about for years. You’re there. Keep it up." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well thank you so much." }, { "speaker": "MR. BROOKS", "text": "Thank you." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. JONATHAN DICKEY", "text": "My name is Jonathan Dickey. I'm an intern with the National Archives" }, { "speaker": "and Records Administration History Office. It is 2", "text": "00 p.m. on the 16 of February 2016. This interview is being conducted for NARA's Oral History Project at Archives I Volunteers’ Office. Can you please state your full name for the record?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ARLENE A. BROWN", "text": "Arlene A. Brown." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. State your affiliation to the Archives." }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "I am a volunteer and have been for almost 25 years." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Tell me a little bit about what you did before you started volunteering at the Archives that kind of led to you ending up here." }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "Well, I retired from the federal government in 1988 and my last position was the Deputy Director of Contract Pricing at Headquarters NASA. Before that, I worked as a civilian in Air Force procurement, both here in Washington and for about 15 years before that at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. So those positions don't seem at all related to Archives." }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "What made you decide to come here and start doing volunteer work here?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "Well, to begin with, my major in college was political science with a minor in economics, so I was definitely interested in government and history even before this. When I retired, I was widowed and after a couple of years, I began to look for something to do. And as far as I remember, I think I contacted the Archives. I also contacted the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History and the reason I ended up volunteering here and not at the Smithsonian is their training class did not begin until January and ours here at the Archives began in October. So basically, because I liked the earlier, once I had made up my mind I wanted to do something, I chose the Archives because the training was faster and earlier. [LAUGHTER]" }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "How long was the training?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "At that time, I don't know what it would be today, but we spent five weeks, five hours a day on I believe every Tuesday and Thursday. I'm trying to remember, but I believe that was ten hours a week for five weeks. Specifically I was training as a docent. Interestingly, the man I married I met in training, although it was docent training, he has never done that volunteer duty as far as I know, but he was in that training class and it was directed at those of us who were interested in becoming docents." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So what kind of things did you learn in the docent class to prepare you for being a docent?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "Yeah. Well, I think I learned a little bit of history that I might not have known before, but we concentrated on the organization and administration of the National Archives, as I recall, plus a couple of human interest stories, believe it or not, that would help us keep the tourists interested and happy. So I think those were the principal things, at least I remember. It's a long time ago. I know you're supposed to remember in old age those things that happened a long time ago and forget what happened yesterday, but I find it works just the opposite. So the volunteer coordinator at the time led those classes. Her name was Pat Eames, a wonderful woman, very, very knowledgeable and a great teacher. So that's what I remember." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So do you remember what kind of human interest stories they told you at the time?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "Oh yes. I remember, and I cannot think of his name, but there was a gentleman who was the first Black doctor in one of the military services, I hope it was the army. I think it was the army, and his adventures. He was a very interesting man and I believe it was mainly in Civil War times and I found it [CHUCKLES] I don't remember all the details, but I remember thinking it was very, very interesting and that would be one example of sort of having a story up your sleeve to share with tourists if you, as I did, eventually become a docent." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "And did they give you this example because they had documents from this person?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "Yes. They did have documents. I remember another thing. They distributed, of course, copies, but the police reports from April of 1865 detailing from the police's viewpoint the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and I thought that was sort of exciting. I really was not that familiar with what was in the National Archives at the time, and so I found jeez, something like a police report from April of 1865, I found very interesting." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So as a docent, do you remember how things worked when you first started being a docent?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "It was a lot different than today. Basically, we worked from handouts. We really didn't tour the building that much. We went up to what was then the auditorium, located, as I recall, on the fourth or fifth floor, and outside of the auditorium, they always had some sort of examples of documents or something like that. They also had right off the lobby of what was the lobby, you know, this building has changed so from the time it was remodeled and renovated I guess some time in the 1990s, but at that time, right off the lobby, they had a group of volunteers that put together sort of a display of documents. And I think what I remember doing is taking tourists through that exhibit and then going upstairs and taking a look in the auditorium and the various examples of records and documents outside of the auditorium. And that was the tour. You know, within an hour, I'd be done and I guess I must have a reputation. I think I take more time than any other docent, but I loved it. I mean I'm so interested in it myself, but it was a relatively short tour and as I think back on it, I know it's much more interesting today. Have you been through the exhibit? You know what I mean, much more interesting today." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So when the museum area was remodeled, did you have to receive any additional training?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "Not formal training. I remember going through once it opened and really walking through it with someone, maybe the curator or whoever had assembled the exhibit, and that continues today. I presume we'll be doing about the same thing when _Amending America_ opens, I think March 12. Sometime around the 9th or 10th, all docents are being walked through and they talk about it. And that pretty much, when the new remodeling was completed, we didn't have any formal training the way we had back in 1991 when I started. It was formal training. I think there was something like 20-something people in my class. I believe Gene, my husband, and I and one other, Malcolm, are about the only people left after 25 years, still volunteering. I hope you're not one of them that come back and are still doing it after 25 years. I hope you're president of some big company by that time. Ah dear. But it's been, I think, to me, just wonderful. I always, even though my background, my working life was spent in Air Force acquisitions, procurement, my father used to joke that, \"My daughter is a procurist for the Air Force.\" In any event, but even though my career was not oriented towards certainly my majors, political science and economics, I always had this love of history and I think more than anything, once I decided I wanted to do something in retirement, outside of feed the cat and have a cup of coffee in the morning, that this was one of my first choices. As I say, the other choice was at the Smithsonian American History Museum, but this has really not much to do with what I did for a living for probably 30 years before I retired." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So the informal training that you receive monthly, is it monthly that you do training as a docent?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "Well, I don't know what they're doing today. When I started in 1991, I remember it as being twice a week for five hours, morning and afternoon with a break for lunch so that we had a total I guess of 50 hours of training. And it was formal training. We went into a room sort of off the auditorium, but it was a separate room, sat at desks, took notes, were handed out material, so it was formal training." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "But as a volunteer, do you still receive training now? So like you have one going next month?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "Oh. Well, by training, if what you mean is an introduction to new exhibits, yes. We are scheduled, for example, to have training on the new exhibit that's going to open in March. That's this one day. Maybe the curator will walk us through the new exhibit and explain and talk about it, but I don't know. I think there is still formal training for docents. I know the previous volunteer coordinator because so many had, like you, jobs. I think she was doing it after regular hours, that they would come in for a couple of hours. I do not know how long that training was. But I know there was training." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So compared to when you first started as a docent to after the museum was completely put together, how much different is that?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "Well, I think it certainly makes for a more interesting tour. First of all, they're on their feet and they're walking through the new exhibits and of course it's just such a big variation and some of them are real items. I think it's far more interesting. I've enjoyed it a lot, although like everything, doing it for all these years and now even the new exhibits are old in the sense they've been around about eight or ten years, it can get repetitious, but the fact there are different people on each tour, some of them extremely knowledgeable with American history, some of them, I say you could almost tell anything and everything. And a fellow docent who also does Rotunda work on weekends was telling me about the time someone questioned him about which came first, the Declaration or the Constitution. And so you can get people really up to and including college lecturers or professors, so some know a great deal and that's what makes it sort of interesting. I love to teach. It's very interesting to me. I guess I'm very enthused about the subject matter, so that's it." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "What would be the most interesting thing that a person that was on one of your tours said or did or asked about?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "Oh golly. Oh golly. Well, just today, I had two young men from Taiwan plus a couple and their grandchild from Alaska, believe it or not. And the mother, the woman from Alaska at one point said to me, \"Oh, I'm so glad we had the tour. I'm learning so much more than if I had just walked it myself.\" And that makes you feel good. It makes me feel very good." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So the best part is being able to get the feedback from the people?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "Yes, yes, and giving, I think. As I say, I am now remarried, but as sure, when I was living alone, it was nice to come to the Archives and meet people every week, and that's what I'm basically doing. And since I'm so excited and enthused about American history, to sort of pass on, if I can, that enthusiasm. Maybe I, who knows, go overboard, but I enjoy it." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. So as a docent, you deal pretty much always with the public." }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "Yes. That's pretty much what I have done. Now, when you talk to my husband, as a staff aide, and I think that's more Gene, more my husband, quiet and he can go off in the stacks and be so happy just researching. But I have always, for 25 years, been a docent and I think my two basic joys are really meeting the people and at least hopefully inspiring them, if that's a good word, and getting their enthusiasm up about American history, so." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So you see that museum as an important part of the Archives because it informs people." }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "Well, you know, I don't know. When we think about it there, really, when I started, I think we probably have tripled the number, if not more, the numbers of people who now visit as a tourist spot the National Archives because of the new exhibits and in fact, many people just come by themselves. I know you can spend hours just going. Usually, almost everything is well-discussed and you don't really need a guided tour to enjoy what's available now. And compared to what we had before, so much depended, I think, on the docent before to make it interesting and educational and fun. Now it's not so much the docent, although I'd like to think so [LAUGHS], that makes it an interesting experience." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Is there anything else that you'd like to say about your time here that we haven't gone over?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "No, I don't think so. I'm very happy, enjoyed it and I was just thinking today I met the new volunteer coordinator. I've been around so long, she is my third volunteer coordinator and I think the one before her was here at least a decade. And as I said, the woman originally here, Pat Eames, spelled, by the way, E-A-M-E-S, like the Eames chair. I think her husband was a journalist and she wrote some interesting books, but I really enjoyed it. I would miss it and I think, to be honest, I hope you're able to catch it from him. My husband is even more enthusiastic. He has had the fortune of researching some very interesting things and maybe he'll tell you about it, but I don't have anything else to say, but I obviously must enjoy it or I wouldn't be here all these years." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Yes. Well, thank you then." }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "Well, thank you." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "And that will be the end of the interview." }, { "speaker": "MS. BROWN", "text": "Well, thank you." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MS. JENNIFER JOHNSON", "text": "My name is Jennifer Johnson and I am conducting an oral history interview for the National Archives and Records Administration with Joyce Burner today. Today's date is February 20, 2020. Joyce was an archivist at the National Archives in Kansas City for nine years. Joyce, can you talk about what you were doing before you came to the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MS. JOYCE BURNER", "text": "Sure. I'm kind of a poster child for where a Master’s of Library Science degree might take you in life because I meandered through a number of different positions before I wound up at NARA. My undergrad degree was a Bachelor of Science in Education in social studies. I had a social studies comprehensive major with an emphasis in history. So I consider history as my undergrad major. I had a minor in journalism and I also took enough hours of library science for a certification because when you do an education degree in secondary ed, you want to be certified in as many areas as you can to teach. So I taught junior high social studies in Carrollton, Missouri, for one miserable year and knew that was not what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. At the end of that year I got married and relocated to Kansas City so I needed to look for a new job anyway. I was offered a middle school library position in Spring Hill, Kansas, which is one of the really outer ring suburbs of the Kansas City metro area. It's a little more rural than some of the other suburbs, but it has been a strong school district and is known for its technical prowess even now. It was a much better fit, which I knew immediately going into it and I really enjoyed it but I also realized I did not know what I was doing. I started right into graduate school taking night classes through Emporia State University towards a Master of Library Science degree. I took night classes and I did a couple of summers on campus. It took me about four and a half years to get through that degree, but it was a very practical degree. I came in every day after class and used what I learned the night before and it was a really good situation. It was a good program. I was the middle school librarian there for about seven years. I quit when I had my first child. I was actually a stay-at-home mom for 12 years. During that time I looked for things to do professionally so that my résumé would not just be a big black hole. I volunteered at the local elementary school library even when my kids were very small, before they were in school yet. I was very active in PTA once they were in school. I did things like I started a publishing program—a book publishing program and also a book discussion program at their elementary school. I also was asked to come in and work on the library in the church where we were attending. That library was kind of a disaster when we started but there was a person on staff who had a vision that it could be something better. So they gave me the authority to throw things away and buy things and also a team of people to work with. We really went in and renovated it and it became one of the hubs in the church that was very popular. We added different kinds of audio/visual media. We started a separate children's library as well. After I had been a volunteer in that position for, I think about eight years, we decided we wanted to open a bookstore in conjunction with it. So I learned book retail from the ground up all on my own. That was really interesting. It was a small book store. It was open to the public in conjunction with the library and we had a pretty good outreach into the community around us in the neighborhood and from other churches as well. I did that for, I think, 12 years. I was on staff there as a paid employee. During that time, I was very involved in a local professional organization, the Church and Synagogue Library Association, which is actually a national organization. I was president of the local chapter. I also won a national award as Outstanding Congregational Librarian from that organization. I chaired a national conference that was held here in Kansas City. So again looking for those professional kinds of things that related to library science or information management. I kind of hit a point after I was in that job for about 12 years where I just was ready to do something else. I was in my mid-fifties and I knew I had time for a final act in my career. I knew I did not want to go back and work in a school library again. I noticed on the Emporia University website for the library school that they had added a certificate in archive studies that was about 20-22 graduate hours. I called them up and just asked if I could do that certificate since I was an alum already and they said sure. You wouldn't have to redo anything. You can just do the certificate and by the way, if you want to start this fall, the application has to be in tomorrow. I got online and put in my application as a non-degree seeking student to start that fall and then I went down the hall and told my boss I was giving my year and a half notice on that job that I was in. I started back to school. They were weekend intensive classes and graduate school had certainly changed since I'd finished my MLS in 1982. But it was a great challenge. I met some fabulous people, made some friends—people I continue to be friends with now. It was just a lot of fun and it was very challenging. The job I was in, we hired my replacement and I actually trained her. She worked alongside me over about six months and I phased out as she increased her hours. So we had a very smooth transition there. It was just a great experience going back to school and earning that certificate. I think I did about 24 graduate hours. It included classes in just the introduction to archives, arrangement and description, doing archives reference, lots of preservation work, records management. There was a hands-on class. We actually got to go out to Estes Park, Colorado, and worked in the archives at Rocky Mountain National Park as well as in historical archives around Estes Park. It's a very historic community up there in Colorado. We got to do all kinds of preservation and it was just a very good experience and hands-on, plus what better place to go than Colorado to go to school, you know, up in the mountains." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "That's very interesting. How long was it?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "It was a week." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Do you remember what year you were doing your certificate?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "I went back to school—I think it was about 2008/2009." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I see. Okay. So then you worked as an intern, contractor, and volunteer before you worked full-time?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "Right. As part of the certificate, I did have to do at least one internship and I'm enough of an overachiever that I decided to do two. One of the classes, the intro to archives class, was taught by Mark Corriston, who was Director of Records Management here at NARA Kansas City at that time. I had a bit of an introduction to NARA through that experience because he taught a little bit of a NARA-centric class approach to that. We met at NARA when it was out at the old Bannister location in the Bannister Federal Complex before NARA moved downtown. I got to go through the stacks and spend some time out there and kind of got to know him a little bit. He talked about their internship program. I thought, well, this seems like a slam dunk that I should just do an internship or apply for an internship with NARA. I sent a letter to Steve Spence, who is an archives specialist here, and was the internship coordinator at that time. I sent a letter to Steve and he responded. He said, well, we're getting ready to move to our new facility in downtown Kansas City by Union Station. So, you can either do this now (and I think it was early 2009). He said you can do this now or you can wait until the summer after we move. I don't really know what you want to do, but he said, well, seeing an archives move is kind of like Haley's Comet. It's sort of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I said I think I want that. So they brought me in as an intern and it was at the old Bannister location. They were in the process of packing things up and organizing for the move. All of the oversized volumes were being shrink-wrapped by this crew of student employees. Packing things up, trying to plan strategically. There was a massive amount of overtime and comp time going on just to get this move done. It was really very interesting. About a week into my internship, which went over four weeks, they shut down the reference service because things were getting packed up and they couldn't answer reference requests anymore. My first week I did get to help with some reference requests and screening some Leavenworth files and re-boxing and just some of the different things that were going on. By the second week I was there, Lori Cox-Paul, who was the education specialist at that time, and is now the Director of Archival Operations at NARA Kansas City, and her officemate Mary Burtzloff, who was an archivist, realized, oh, we have a librarian in the house. We have all of these books because everybody's office had books that they'd accumulated that they wanted to put into one central reference library. Let's let her do her librarian thing. I organized all of these books and went through and weeded out the duplicates and questioned things that just looked too old or asked if these things could be weeded out. I organized them by subject and then when they moved into the building here at Union Station, they were just unpacked onto the shelves by those subject categories and they are still that way in the research room. So that's one of my lasting legacies here is the organization of everybody's cast-off books that's down there. Over time doing reference, doing processing, I've gone down and consulted those books time after time. It is really a very valuable resource." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Yes, I know the library. I use it myself a lot. How long did the move take?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "Well, the whole thing, I think, was months. I'm not sure exactly how long the physical move itself took because I wasn't on site during that. But it was months of planning just because you have to know where everything is to maintain physical and intellectual control of all your records at all times. They had the added challenge that there was some disorganization in the stacks at Bannister. So there was a lot of identification of “What is this?” going on at the same time that continued for a while after the move, I think. It was just a very interesting time. Lots of moving parts. Lori Cox-Paul and Jake Ersland were really in charge of it and they were off huddled in the stacks most of the time just trying to get control of what was going where because some things were also going to Lenexa and some things were going to Lee's Summit, I believe. Not everything came downtown because there's only 20,000 cubic feet here in the stacks. So even though the total holdings were maybe a third then of what they are now, you're still talking a massive amount of stuff. It was just a mind-boggling undertaking to do that kind of a move." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I can only imagine." }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "I was so glad that I came in as an intern at that point and really got to see that. I spent a lot of time putting volumes through the shrink wrap machine with the rest of the students and, you know, just doing all kinds of different things. They were still doing some kind of webinar education events and I got to sit in on some of those things. It was just a very interesting time to observe." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I bet. I saw you did a mix of archival and preservation work for NARA. Did that internship involve preservation work or was that later? Past your internship, can you walk through what your path was?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "Sure. Well, actually the following month I did an internship at the Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri. It was a very traditional internship. That is a manuscript collection. It's not an archives of federal records as such. Things are not organized by Record Group. It's much more of a traditional manuscript collection." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "What a nice variety for internships." }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "It was a big contrast and I was so happy I did that because I really made good friends over there. Those were our colleagues as well. Through these two internships I got to establish relationships with people at both major NARA facilities here in the Kansas City area. I got to do a different kind of processing and writing descriptions and different kinds of preservation work at the Truman Library. I got a tour of the Truman home one afternoon. The interesting thing there was that my tour guide was Elizabeth Burnes who later came here as an archivist. She was hired as an archivist here at NARA a few months before I was and it took me a while to figure out where I had seen her before. Finally, I had to put a Park Service hat on her head and I said were you at the Truman Library? She goes, yes, oh, that's where I've seen you before. So it was interesting that we kind of crossed paths. She was working for the Park Service over there before she came to NARA. Anyway, that was just a different kind of internship and it was really good. It balanced out the more chaotic one that I had at NARA. While I had been at NARA, there was a preservation contract position they had that was re-upped annually at that time. The person who was in that position—their contract was about up so they were getting ready to fill it again and this was doing oversize record preservation out in Lee's Summit, Missouri in the cave facility. While I was at NARA they encouraged me to apply for that job and so I did. I was awarded that contract. I had my NARA internship in February, Truman in March. I think starting in about April maybe—it was pretty quickly—or May maybe—I started this contract, which went for five months. I actually worked in the preservation room at Lee's Summit dealing with oversized records. I started out working through a lot of record groups, RG 30 Bureau of Roads. It was a project that had been started downtown. Then they moved the records to Lee's Summit. So I finished up with that. Mostly they just needed to be humidified and flattened, a little bit of encapsulation maybe. Then just created a database because it was pretty much an item-level database of what was in there. I finished that up and then they started bringing piles of things that were mostly Record Group 77, Army Corps of Engineer's records that had been on shelves at Bannister and were not too well identified. There were some old finding aids. A lot of it had just come in from the Corps and trying to figure out what these things were and they were huge and some of them were very old. That was more challenging because I really had to go through and identify what these things were and my knowledge of Corps of Engineers records was a little sketchy at that time. I had to talk with other people on staff and Jake would come out from time to time. Jennifer Audsley-Moore was on staff as an archives technician at that time and she was actually my supervisor because she was the preservation liaison at that time and would come out and help me figure out what some things were. But it was really interesting—just old maps mostly. Old maps and charts and one of the cool things that we did find in there was a set of Missouri River charts from 1870, 1880-something that were rolled up. They're mounted on linen, rolled up and had been rolled up for decades, more than a century probably, and could not even be eased open to see what they were without the paper cracking and they were huge. I mean they were, like, I don't know seven feet, six or seven feet wide. And maybe 20 to 30 feet long. They were enormous. So those were really one of the cool things that we found." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Did you have the space and equipment to be able to unroll them?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "Yeah, that preservation lab has really big humidification tanks. And lots of big counter space. Those maps had to humidify for about a week before they were pliant enough that they could be safely unrolled. Then it took two of us to unroll them and, you know, I had to kind of jigger some furniture around and extend my counter space so that there would be enough room. They were very exciting to find. We figured out what they were and it was just a set of charts of the Missouri River going across the entire State of Missouri. One of the cool things in there—my hometown where I finished high school is Boonville, Missouri, which is right on the Missouri River right in the middle of the state and it's a very historic, old town. Well, Boonville showed up on this map and it showed the streets and where churches were and things like that and it was very cool. I could see the church where I got married. It was marked on there and I could see where schools had been or other buildings that were there. It was just a very interesting personal find. That was an example I used when I was doing talks to the public about preserving things and what you could find in federal records—I used to pull up my picture of my hometown that I'd found on this ancient map and, you know, your history is here. Your personal stories are here. So anyway I worked as a contractor for about five months and at that point there were banks of map cabinets in the archival bay in Lee's Summit. Those were all moved up to the Subtropolis facility a couple of years ago now. But at that time I was going through this stuff and then putting it in the map drawers and keeping an item-level list of what was in the drawers." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Was HMS (Holdings Management System) in existence at this point?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "No. This was pre-HMS. This was still what was called the MLR. Master Location Register. Which was just a massive set of Excel spreadsheets. Actually, what I created was a database that was sort of parallel to that. It had the same kind of information. It was not really part of the MLR. At the offsite facilities these things were a little non-standard. We had our own set of databases that we knew that if you got a reference request you were going to have to spend some time looking, searching through Excel spreadsheets for this. I included as much physical detail and also intellectual detail about what was in the records. Very interesting work. Toward the end of that time, they also started having me come downtown and work in the afternoons on what was called the ARD or the At-Risk Database. It was a process of going through all of our records and determining what kind of physical condition they were in. What was at-risk? And I think this was all done kind of in preparation knowing that something like HMS would be coming. That wasn't actually rolled out for a few more years. But all of this data went into that in the end. It brought me downtown working with the staff side-by-side more and more. I finished that contract in September of 2009. And so I'd finished my certificate, I'd finished all my internships, I finished my contract. What do I do now? Now I was looking for a job. So I was applying for jobs and had some interviews for some different kinds of jobs, but I knew what I really wanted to do was work at NARA. I just kept coming in as a volunteer about 20 hours a week. I kept working for free, putting my eggs in that basket increasingly. I was getting plenty of encouragement to do so. Mary Burtzloff, who had been one of the senior archivists, left that fall and went to work at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas. Her backfill was coming open. Diana Duff who was the Director of Archival Operations and Reed Whittaker who was the Regional Administrator—the hierarchy was a little different then—were working on getting her backfill. They were hoping that I would be able to come into that position. You never know until you get the whole pool of applicants. It was written so that the job started at a GS-9 instead of a GS-11, which made it a little bit easier. They also started giving me archivist-level work to do as a volunteer. I wrote the descriptions for the Catalog for all of Record Group 75 Turtle Mountain Agency records. Barbara Larsen who was a technician here at that time had gone through and done the physical arrangement and re-boxing of those, and she had identified the series and she had made wonderful copious notes about what was in them, but she did not write descriptions herself. I am actually a good writer. I've written professionally for School Library Journal a lot and I had a journalism minor as an undergrad. That was one of the strengths that I brought. Lori had me start writing descriptions for the Turtle Mountain Agency records. There was a whole set of oversized volumes from Record Group 58, which is the Internal Revenue Service and those were actually the first descriptions that I wrote. It was a pretty big series of volumes of records that you might find information that was useful in. I always questioned why they were permanent records. They were on a form and writing the description was pretty easy because the headings on the columns going across the page pretty much gave you your scope and content. It was an easy thing to do as a first description assignment. Ever since that, after my whole nine years here, anytime anybody wanted anything out of those records, I was the one that had to go up and find the specific volume and answer that, but those requests are very rare. Then I did the Turtle Mountain descriptions. There was a lot of that. I was also being pulled in to do preservation work and also helping teach people how to do preservation work like humidification and flattening and encapsulation because once you've been the contractor out of the cave you know how to do that. You're kind of the onsite person. So I did a lot of that. I helped with special events. I just kept coming in for about 20 hours a week and kept my face in front of them, and did get through the interview pool. Then at the end of that year, 2009, Reed Whittaker, the Regional Administrator, John Allshouse, who was the Assistant Regional Administrator, and Diana Duff all retired on the same day at the end of the year. It was at the end of the year after the move in the spring of 2009. They all got us through the move and had completed their mission and moved on to retirement. Well, the whole interview process ground to a halt because there's nobody here who is a permanent director. Lori was named as interim director and so I just kept coming in knowing that my name was in the pool and I had a good shot at it and, actually that spring they said if you want to take a class some place you could be a student employee and you could actually get paid for being here however many hours a week. I went up to the junior college in Johnson County here, which is a very good one, and just took some classes in word processing, you know, something that had a transcript and actually worked as a student employee for about six weeks. I got to answer the phone and sit at the consult desk and it was just a little bit closer in the circle of contacts and responsibility. Finally, that spring Lori was named as permanent director and the first thing she did was start this interview process up because they really needed to fill the position. I got an interview in March and was offered the position. I started in April of 2010. It was in retrospect a little bit of an arduous process to actually get on staff, but I just worked the connections and the system that I had, and I was applying for and interviewing for other jobs and looking for things. This was such a better job that anything else that was coming up out there that it was worth waiting for and it worked." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "And you started having had so much variety and you were introduced already to the system." }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "Yeah. I did come in being pretty familiar with NARA, how records worked, how federal records worked. Which is different from anything else in the world, I've realized. Having some good connections and I really was able to pretty much hit the ground running." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "So speaking of that—I don't want to skip over anything—but I did notice you did several large processing projects. Can you talk …" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "Sure. Well, that was one of the things that Lori tasked me with pretty early on. Our Record Group 75, Bureau of Indian Affairs records are some of the most frequently requested records here, sometimes by individuals working on their own genealogy, more frequently by academics. There are so many professors and graduate students who are working on research in some level of Native American culture. We hold the records for the reservations in North and South Dakota, so Pine Ridge, Standing Rock, very significant—historically significant places where things—we have the Wounded Knee records. Also, in Nebraska and in Minnesota and there's one reservation out in Kansas, nothing in Iowa, nothing in Missouri. Most of those records were really not processed. At the time of the move into this building a lot of those agencies had not really been set up in a final form where the individual record series had been identified and housed together, described. The intellectual and physical control could be a little hazy on things. Some of them had, as I said, Barbara Larsen was a technician who did a lot of that processing. She was very knowledgeable and had gone through and kind of done the arrangement on a lot of things but had not written descriptions. The labels could be a little wonky sometimes. There was some variety. Some of those agencies' records had already been in DC and had been regionalized and sent out here. The Pine Ridge records for instance, the Rosebud Agency records, were in that situation where they actually had been described and were in pretty good shape. Then the requirements for description and labels once we got into HMS, the holdings management system, all these systems that have to match up and things didn't match up anymore. There was some retroactive processing that needed to go on and description updates and such that needed to go on with those. Then there were others where it was just a thousand boxes of folders, that in a single box, maybe the folders in this box related to each other and maybe they didn't. Maybe what was in the folder actually related to what the folder title was and maybe it didn't. I mean there was just some kind of random hodgepodge going on. There were a couple of different agencies that were really the worst. The Fort Berthold Agency records were bad and the Cheyenne River Agency records were bad. Each one of those, I just called it a thousand boxes of chaos when we started out because that's just kind of where it was. There were also lots of records that weren't even foldered. Tri-folded things that had never been, once the agency tied a string around them 100 years ago, they've never been touched since. They were just in a box. Some of the boxes weren't acid free. Finding anything was just a real adventure. As I said there's a lot of academic demand for those records. It can be very challenging when you're working with a professor who is on a grant and they're on limited time and they need to find specific things. There is going to be an awful lot of work just to try to help them find the specific thing they're looking for. It really was just a process of being organized in approach and over time we kind of learned. We streamlined our process and learned some things. I think the Winnebago Agency was the first one that we did and the Cheyenne River Agency was the last one that I finished about a month before I retired. Each one of them, if it was just a massive agency, a thousand boxes or so, it could easily take a year to get through it depending on how bad it was when you started out. Over time we really learned that just to go through and do an initial inventory of what was in the boxes really made all the difference in the world. I kind of got to where I was and on some of the agencies I actually just did that myself. When we did the Minneapolis Area Office agency records I went through about 500 or 600 boxes and just did that, made a massive spreadsheet of folder titles. And from there you can start to identify series. One thing that's helpful in all these BIA agencies is they all tend to have the same kinds of records. They all tended to have the same forms that showed up over and over, the same types of correspondence. In different time periods, the correspondence would be organized in a specific way. One of the big things was before 1925, there were a bunch of weird ways that they would organize their correspondence. Starting about 1925 they actually assigned what they called a decimal correspondence system, which as I always told people if you can find a book in the library using the Dewey Decimal system—it's the same kind of thing. A number is assigned to it, to a subject and everything with that number on it will be about the same subject. So all the land records will be 400 something. That was actually very helpful and it was something the Bureau of Indian Affairs did—the Office of Indian Affairs at that time—to try and get some consistency across their agencies. That ran from about 1925 to about 1960. Then local agencies would go through and put earlier things into that system. Or continue to use it afterwards. But before that also there were just massive runs of just chronological correspondence and they were in bound letterpress volumes. In one volume, you could have any subject in the world. You just needed to know what timeframe you were looking at and then you just had to sit and look for it. Anyway, over time, as I started to work with different agencies and seeing what tended to happen consistently between agencies, you see some patterns and you know what to look for. So, anyway, that just kind of helped. Knowing what I was likely to find. Every agency did their own thing to some extent. They took the systems that were given to them from the headquarters office, tweaked it for their own use. People will come in and out over time. There's not necessarily a lot of consistency. There's just all kinds of odd things that you can run across and uncover and you can't make any assumptions about what you'll find mostly." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Well, speaking of uncovering, do you have an example, like the Boonville. Are there memorable records that you remember just randomly discovering as part of your processing …" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "Yes, yes. You had to look for them. And, one of my things is that I like to find those personal stories in records. Sometimes, especially in the old correspondence, oh, you'd learn about all the personnel problems that they're having. There was one really memorable run of records we found in the Fort Berthold records that there was just a fight going on between the field matron and somebody else, who was in the administration of the agency and just calling each other names in these letters back and forth to the superintendent. It was, from our perspective now, pretty funny. I'm sure it was horrible to be stuck out there, you know, on the prairie in the late 1880's and life could be pretty miserable, but …" }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "And what's the name?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "That was Fort Berthold. It's in North Dakota by the Canadian border. There were just those kinds of things. But also I was interested to see the relationship that the superintendent of the local agency would have with the Indians on the reservation. We always say Indians and we say Indians in the descriptions because that's what it says in the records. I know that now we only say Native Americans. But, I'm sorry, we say Indians because that's what's in the record. They could be very warm and especially when there were young men who had gone off to war in World War I and World War II and were writing home. It was almost a paternal relationship a lot of the time. It was very nice. Then there would be other records where the attitude toward these “savages” and “we have to get rid of this Indian problem” was just blatant. I mean it spilled out there. So you really get both. Looking for those personal stories was cool. Sometimes the photographs could be very interesting. I didn't do the arrangement on the Haskell Institute student case files. Those were already done. I did a lot of reference work out of them and finding the individual stories in those files could be heartbreaking. It could be really encouraging. There's funny stuff, but again those are those personal stories. I've never made any pretense that I came to this work as a historian. I do have this history major as an undergrad. That was a really long time ago. My work is as a librarian and I came in as a librarian, and I never made any bones about that. It meant that I brought a lot of organizational skills and information management skills. When you're dealing with these massive amounts of records that really have to be processed down to sometimes an item level, that was very, very useful." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I bet. As an agency, my understanding is we've gone …" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "The other way." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Did you have specific Record Groups you were focused on throughout your nine years or was it a variety?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "Well, I could get reference on anything. I was in the general reference rotation. One day a week I got all the emails and all the phone calls and all the walk-ins no matter what they wanted. If it's a naturalization or a court record or BIA or whatever, that would be my responsibility to find or answer that request. There were also things that Lori would send requests to specific people on staff depending on their knowledge of a subject area. I frequently would get BIA requests that were from academics just because I had worked with those records so much. What happens just as practical fallout of the work is that if you're the one that's led a team of people processing a thousand boxes of chaos and so that you have discrete record series that you have written the descriptions and you've made sure the labels are right and match up with HMS and you handled all this stuff, you are by default the expert on what's in those boxes. So anything that I had processed I frequently got the reference requests on. Knowing that and knowing that I would not be here for 30 or 40 years, I really tried to make detailed folder lists and finding aids so that my colleagues, once I was gone, would be able to help people just as efficiently. From what I understand, that has really worked out well. There were some of those though, especially the Cheyenne River records we left for last mostly because we knew it was kind of the worst and I just put them off as long as I could. Finally, I had to do it. There actually were lots of records that I just had to go through stacks of correspondence and what is this about and do I have, have I identified the series that this would fit in logically. One problem with this, as archivists we try to maintain that original order as one of the bases. Original order so that you maintain that institutional evidence of how the records were created. Sometimes you just can't do it, because the original order is gone. The files and boxes or whatever have been cleaned out and dumped into boxes and brought here and make some sense out of it. So at that point what I always found was, well, you just have to think like a researcher. If I'm an academic and I'm working on a specific topic then the records have to be organized and the folders have to be identified in a way that would help me get to those specifics. It's a bit of an artificial arrangement compared to what the original would be. But at this point we have let people have access. So it's that “make access happen” thing." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "We had to gain intellectual control." }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "Exactly, exactly. So that's really what we went after. And, I would talk through that with Lori and she was always, like, you think like a researcher and so go for it. Because it just makes so much more sense that way and for chronological things, at least if somebody comes in and they've got a date span that they're looking through I can bring out less boxes for them to go through. So, you know, that's just kind of where you are. Because sometimes it is what it is but we can help identify as much detail as possible to give researchers a boost." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "You mentioned court records, naturalization records. Did you ever have much interaction or relationship with other federal agencies, that you would need to consult with them?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "Kind of limited. Occasionally, we had contacts at the local district courts. So there's one thing. People would call and want a copy of their own court records. And are they old enough that they've come to the National Archives yet or are they still in the Federal Records Center? So often to the public, it's just one big thing. To try and explain to them, well, they're still on the Federal Records Center side. We know that's part of our agency, but we don't, as Research Services, have access to them. We would have to call the Clerk of the Court or whoever the records managers were at the courts and just have them look in their system. Has this particular case been accessioned over or not yet? So we did that. I did that to some extent. More than that, I worked with the Alien files on research and reference a lot, which are USCIS, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service records. I'm sure it's only increased since I retired but they were the most frequently requested records. They have surpassed the Leavenworth inmate case files. Again, this is genealogists who are looking for their family history. We would have to call people at USCIS, which is located here in Lee's Summit, to try and help patrons sometimes who were just hitting a brick wall with USCIS on getting records that had not been accessioned over. Sometimes we tried to act as a liaison a little bit and find out what's going on over there that you're getting this automated response and you've paid money, but you're not getting anything. Again there were specific contacts we have over there that we had created relationships with and we know who is good to work with. Other than that, you know, people from agencies come to look at their own historic records that have been accessioned over. I had some researchers from the Army Corps of Engineers who would contact me directly because I guess I helped them on something and researchers will come back to the archivist that helped them in the first place and that was kind of good. They were more researchers but because they were from the agency we wouldn't have to get into screening their records as much and they were good to work with." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Do you want to speak to any challenges or issues that you faced, either on a project or …" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "Just as far as challenges go it was keeping up with the massive amount of stuff. Even since I've retired I've heard from my colleagues about tens of thousands of cubic feet of records that continue to come in, and as the bankruptcy records were all consolidated here. I know there's an ongoing project to get all of the appellate court records from the whole country. It's just because real estate costs less in Kansas City. I think it's really an economic move as much as anything. And we have so much cave storage in Kansas City. So it's a good locale for that. But just the sheer amount of stuff is overwhelming and to keep up with what's coming in was kind of overwhelming at times." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Would you say the staff here in Research Services have the amount of records exponentially increasing but maybe not staff levels increasing?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "Yes, exactly. When I retired they've not been able to backfill my position. When I started with NARA, there were three of us who were archivists downtown. Jake Ersland who is now deputy director, Elizabeth Burnes is still an archivist but also a subject matter expert, so she's really only halftime here as archivist, and me. There were three of us. Well, when Jake was promoted, which was needed because we have archivists at all three offsite facilities, we didn't get his backfill. Now we're down to two people downtown. I've retired. Now we're down to Elizabeth downtown. I know what that's like because I filled in for Elizabeth while she was on maternity leave twice. There were two stretches of five or six months where I was the only archivist downtown. It just really does become overwhelming and very stressful. It's hard to provide really good one-on-one service to individual researchers when you've got so many requests coming in. There were months that I had a hundred reference requests." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "It's a lot and when you're only on reference one day a week, it's a lot." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I know we can't even begin to cover everything, but is there anything else I haven't asked you about that you want to speak to?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "One thing that was interesting for the time that I was here, it was a time of local cultural shift because of the move to the new facility. When I started we had four to six student employees at any time who covered the phones and helped with processing. And we hit a point where we were no longer able to hire student employees. The union complained that the students were doing permanent work as temporary employees. So we gained more technicians but it was not a one-to-one replacement. We had non-student staff having to cover the phones. It was a real culture shift. Just in the way work was lined out and we had a couple of people downtown who were long-term, long-time employees. Jennifer Audsley-Moore was a technician. Jessica Hopkins was a specialist. Both were promoted to be archivists and work at Subtropolis. So people who have been here a long time that are out the door." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I see. Well, any anecdotes or words of wisdom? I think I've covered everything I wanted to ask you." }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "It really was a great place to work. It was very challenging. I really enjoyed my work a lot. I learned a lot. It was really kind of a cool thing to end my career in the hardest job that I had. It's taking that non-traditional student work in your mid-fifties and taking a real switch at the end is not the “ride it out into the sunset” sort of thing that some people think of. But it was really good. I really, really enjoyed it. I got some great benefits to take into retirement too. This is not to be sneezed at. And really made some great relationships and good friends and I just think it's worth it. If you think you can try something else; if you're not happy with what you're doing, you can take on a new challenge, you shouldn't let it stop you. Time keeps ticking. So you gotta do it." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I would say what an exciting last half. Well, I do appreciate your time very much. Thank you for doing this." }, { "speaker": "MS. BURNER", "text": "Sure." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. ERIC RHODES", "text": "Bruce, could you state your name and spell it out for, you know, posterity?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BRUCE BUSTARD", "text": "Sure, it’s Bruce Bustard, B-U-S-T-A-R-D. Bustard like mustard with a B." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "All right, and I’m Eric Rhodes, E-R-I-C R-H-O-D-E-S. I’m an intern at the History Office, it’s December 11, 2015, and we’re in the Basement 5 office conference room at the National Archives. Bruce, please tell us where you grew up, and a little bit about your childhood." }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "Well, I grew up in an area southwest of Cleveland, a little town called Olmsted Falls. I like to make a distinction that it was a small town, more than a suburb at that point, of Cleveland. I grew up in a family where my mom was a journalist, and my dad was a purchasing agent within an engineering firm. He also was an immigrant from Scotland, and he had lived through the Great Depression, and he had been in a tank battalion in World War II in Europe. When I was growing up, I heard all kinds of stories about all these kinds of things, and I kind of date my interest and love of history to my dad’s discussions of history with me. He loved to read history, too, so I think that’s probably how I got interested in history. Then, when I was about 15, he was transferred to New Jersey, and we moved there. I finished high school in New Jersey in a town called New Providence, and when it came time to look for colleges, I was interested in going back to college in Ohio. Eventually, I ended up at Hiram College in Ohio, and majored in history. After graduation, I got married, and we ended up in Iowa City, Iowa, where, after a year of selling clothes at Montgomery Ward, I applied to, and was accepted by, the History Department at the University of Iowa. I did my Master’s and my Ph.D. at the University of Iowa." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "It is one thing to have that sort of childhood nascent love of history, and it’s another to really make the decision that you’d like to make this your career. So during your time at Hiram, what made you decide that you wanted to major in history? And then, if you could speak a little bit about making the decision to go for the Ph.D. in history." }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "I think when I came to Hiram, I intended to major in history. But my idea was that I would major in history, and then be certified to teach, probably at the high school level, and then I was going to get a job teaching high school and probably do some coaching, too. That was kind of the only model I had for people who were interested in history. I’m not sure I really knew that there were people out there who were called historians. Then, when I went to Hiram, I had a series of wonderful teachers, and they not only kind of stoked my interest in history, but provided a new set of role models for me. In one of those classes, I had a professor by the name of John Strasburger, and he taught a course called “Interpreting the American Experience,” which was the basic American history course at Hiram. But it wasn’t the survey course, it was an introduction basically to historiography, and he introduced you to the idea that historians didn’t always agree, and that there were these changing interpretations of a lot of different events, and we read different interpretations—this just blew my mind. It turned history, which I was interested in, into this much livelier kind of subject that allowed me to really engage with the sort of debates. One of the first things we read was Charles Beard’s _An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,_ which is a horribly dry, dull book, and there’s no question about that. But John Strasburger compared it to a lot of other interpretations of how the Constitution was formed, and I think that was at least one of the big moments—the light turned on, and I began to think that I was interested in following history as a career path. Also, I just got a lot of encouragement from him and the other professors for things like my writing. I wasn’t really a very good writer, but they saw something in me, and encouraged me, and helped me with that, and got me thinking that maybe I was a little bit better scholar than I had been in high school, where I was a decidedly mediocre student." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "What was the initial thrust in your moving to Iowa City?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "My wife Tori and I had just gotten married. We graduated in June, we got married in August, and we packed up the back of our yellow Pinto station wagon—" }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "[interposing] What year was the Pinto?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "This was 1976. The Pinto was 1974. The Pinto was, of course, the famous exploding car. But obviously, we managed to survive two Pintos, actually. We put all our earthly belongings in the back of the Pinto station wagon, and drove out to Iowa City, where we lived for the next eight years. Initially, my wife was pursuing a Master’s degree in statistics there, and I got a job selling men’s clothing at a Montgomery Ward department store for a year. Then, I applied to graduate school, and got into several graduate schools. But in the end, we really liked Iowa City, and decided to stay there." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "That’s great. So Iowa City in 1977. What was the town like?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "It was a terrific place to go—" }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "[interposing] Master’s or Ph.D.?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "I started within the Master’s program, and then basically there was what they called your Master’s essay, and then they kind of evaluated you, and said yes, you could go on for the Ph.D. It was a terrific place to go to graduate school. It was not a huge department, which was nice for somebody coming from a very small school. The graduate students were a pretty close-knit group. That was helpful. My professors were terrific, and it was in a very nice town. We found a community of people there that we enjoyed. We lived in married student housing for, I believe, $97 a month for a one-bedroom apartment, and I can’t remember what percentage rebate on our electricity. So we were able to kind of thrive there with friends in an enjoyable community. The winters were horribly harsh, just harder than anything we had ever experienced before, especially the first two winters, 1977 and 1978, were terribly hard winters. But we survived, and after the first one, I think we were ready to move, initially, but then I think we decided we liked the town and didn’t really want to pick up and move all over again. So we spent eight years there total. I finished my degree in 1984, which is when we moved to Washington DC." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "By your fourth year, or whenever you started to write your thesis, were you aware of a community of historians who were doing work that was meant to be consumed by the general public? And what was the state of public history in the early 1980s? Did you know that you were going to be able to enter this line work?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "I may have been vaguely aware that there were archivists and there were historical editors, and I think I probably saw some of the early issues of the Public Historian. But I was pretty focused on being a college teacher, and the University of Iowa was, and I believe still is, a somewhat traditional department in the sense that they see their role as training historians who will teach college history. That may be a little short-sighted, considering the prospects for jobs in college teaching, but that’s the position they took. However, Iowa does have a long tradition of also having some of the founders of what we now call public history, people like Benjamin Shambaugh. But by the time I got there, it was pretty focused on college teaching, and that’s what I thought I was going to do. So as I finished my dissertation, I started applying around the country. First of all, there weren’t that many jobs, and that included one-year positions. I applied even for a job in New Zealand, and I did apply for a couple of jobs that were not traditional. I think I applied for a job with the Samuel Gompers papers because I had used his papers in my dissertation. My wife and I had a big map of the United States pinned up in our bedroom, with pins in all the different places that I had applied. Slowly, those pins started coming down, and my wife, very wisely, said to me at one point, “You know, you need a plan B.” She was right, as so often she is. So I started thinking about what else I might want to do, and eventually, we came up with the idea to move to Washington, DC. At that point in her career, she was in what we now call IT, data processing, systems analysis, coding, and that kind of thing. We thought she could get a job pretty easily in Washington DC, and that I would look for history-related employment there. So, once again, we packed up our Pinto—fortunately, we did have a moving van that time—and the Monday after my graduation from Iowa, we drove out of Iowa City to Washington DC." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Wow, it’s kind of a leap, right?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "It was, and we had friends who said, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” But we were pretty confident because she had these in-demand skills, and in fact, I think she got a job in a month or less. So that allowed us not to have to sell apples on the street or anything like that." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "So, once you land in Washington, there are all these institutions: the Smithsonian, the Museum of American History, was that there, actually?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "The Museum of American History was there. At the time, it may have been the Museum of American History and Technology, I don’t know if it was before it became the Museum of American History. I looked for a lot of different jobs. Smithsonian was a good example. I also looked for jobs at the Library of Congress. I was in for a little bit of a rude awakening because I had never applied for federal jobs before, and I soon realized that there were a number of jobs out there that sounded interesting to me, but I couldn’t apply because they wanted you to be a government employee before you could apply. So there was a catch-22. I looked for a job for about eight months—we arrived here in August and I started at the Archives on April 1. I had several interviews, a number of interviews with the National Archives, I interviewed with NHPRC [National Historical Publications and Records Commission], I actually had an interview with the Exhibits Office at the Archives, and then also had an interview with the Federal Register, and that seemed to be the only place I was getting any nibbles. Eventually, I got an interview for an archivist position, and was hired for that archivist position, and started on April 1, 1985, which is an important date in National Archives history. It is the date that the National Archives broke free of General Services Administration. I don’t think there are too many people still in the Archives, who started on that particular date. So I spent my whole career working for the Archives as an independent agency." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "That’s amazing. Were people happy about that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "People were delighted. I’ve heard people were delighted, and one of the things they did was take a gigantic staff photograph of the people who worked for the National Archives out in front of the Constitution Avenue steps. That has relevance to me only because it was my first day. I was waiting around for people to break free of their celebrations so I could start my career. The funny thing is, I arrived at the National Archives early in the morning, I walked in through the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance, and they told me to go to a particular room, and I was standing there, and there was actually another guy who was starting that particular day. We stood there for a while, and nobody came to greet us, and so we stood there for a little bit longer and eventually, somebody came out of the motion picture reference room, right near there. He said he’d seen me standing there for a while, and what were we doing there? We said, “Well, this is our first day, and we were told to come here, but nobody’s come to get us.” He said, “Oh well, I’ll call over to Personnel,” and he called over to Personnel, and came back and he said, “Well, you’re supposed to go across the street to the Personnel Office,” which was in the Patrick Henry Building across the street on Indiana Avenue. So we walked on over there, and we went into the room and sat in the lobby for another, I don’t know, half an hour, 45 minutes, something like that, and eventually somebody came into the room and said, “Well, what are you doing here?” And we said, “Well, we’re starting our first day, and they told us to come on over here, and we—” The person said, “Oh, well, I’ll go find out what’s going on.” When she came back, she said, “Why are you here? You should be across the street on Pennsylvania Avenue.” So we walked back across the street, and walked into the same place where we were, and we waited another 15 or 20 minutes, and finally, this woman came around the corner and said, “Why are you here? You should be across the street at Patrick Henry.” So we walked across the street with her one more time, and eventually, at that point, we both signed our papers and took our oath of office and got fingerprinted, and all that kind of stuff. So that was my introduction to government service. Then I said to the person, “Well, I’m supposed to be working for the Cartographic and Architectural branch,” which is out in Pickett Street in Alexandria. “So what should I do now?” She said, “Well, I guess you should go out there.” By this time, it’s 11:30 in the morning or something like that, in the middle of the week, and so it took me a long time to take the bus back. What I didn’t know is that there was a shuttle that ran between Pickett Street and the National Archives Building. So eventually, about 1:30 or so in the afternoon, I reach Pickett Street in Alexandria, walk into the office, and the secretary is sitting there, and I told her who I was, so she called John Dwyer, who was the head of the branch there. He walks out, and the first thing he says to me is, “What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here ‘til tomorrow.” So once again—anyway, I don’t know how I managed to stay 30 years after that, but I did." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "That was my first day at the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "So this was pre-College Park, right?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "Yes. There were offices in Alexandria—the Cartographic, the Nixon Project, and some motion picture storage. And then there was the Suitland National Records Center, which also at that point not only had records center material, but also it was an archival branch, with a lot of modern military records there. And there were other scattered offices, like the Personnel Office, the Federal Register was on Farragut Square, or one of the squares nearby, and NHPRC had rented space. There were kind of little pods of the Archives all over the place, which is one of the reasons why we needed to have Archives II." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "So, that was your first day at the National Archives, and what about your second day? What about the next, I guess—" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "[interposing] Twenty-nine years?" }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Well, yeah, it looks like you were at the Cartographic and Architectural branch for three years—" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "Interestingly enough, my dissertation was in 20th-century labor and political history, so it sounds like the ultimate joke at the Federal Government that, of course, they put me in the Cartographic and Architectural branch. I have made that joke several times, but one of the great things about working there was that it was very new to me. I hadn’t thought about latitude and longitude since about 6th grade, and I realized a couple of things while working there. One was that I enjoyed learning about new things. I had the opportunity to learn about things like geography, and architecture, and aerial photography, which I knew absolutely nothing about. So that was great. I also learned that I enjoyed working with visually interesting material, as opposed to some of the typical archival reference work, or project work, where you’re basically going through memos and boxes of correspondence, and things like that. So my experience there was very useful to me. I did project work. I started off by doing a project on the Army maps from World War II, which was a very nice, interesting project. I actually got to work with the maps that were used in planning the Normandy invasion, for example." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Which may have been housed on the fourth floor here, in the current history Office, the communications office, the OSS?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "Yes, there was a cartographic branch originally here in Archives I. I’m not exactly sure where it was, somewhere on the first floor, somewhere around where the researcher orientation area is. Anyway, I got to work with those maps, which was very interesting, especially considering my dad had been in World War II, and he was still alive, so I could tell him the kinds of things that I was finding. I also got to do a variety of reference-researcher assistance. Eventually, I worked with aerial photographs, and that too was a good thing for me to do because I would argue that it’s one of the more challenging reference jobs that someone can do at the Archives, in the sense that people write in and say they want an aerial photograph of a part of Mississippi, or a part of, you know, Korea or something like that. What they would do is send a map to you with a highlighted space, and then it was up to you to locate that particular geographic place, to see whether we had coverage of that particular place, and then write back to them and say, you know, “We have these four photographs of this area.” It’s kind of a complicated process going from the latitude and longitude to the indexes to the aerial photographs, to actually looking through the aerial photographs frame by frame, and then finding the place by following rivers, or streets, or whatever it might be." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "How were these stored?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "We have both original rolled aerial photography, the negatives, and there was a special viewing device that you used to roll that film out and look at it frame by frame, and then in some cases we had individual prints. For example, there was a series, within the captured German records that were captured German aerial photographs of a good part of Western and Eastern Europe. That was pretty fascinating, too. I mean, everything, from photographs of London that were taken by the German air force; to photographs of the parts of Warsaw that were the ghetto that was eventually razed; to people who were looking for their family homestead in some tiny little town in Russia. People would actually sometimes say, you know, “It’s at this crossroads,” and you’d get a photograph of the town, and they could actually look at it and say, “Oh yeah, that’s the house that my great grandfather was born in,” or something like that. So it’s pretty amazing, the kinds of questions you can answer through aerial photographs. Genealogy questions, but also issues that ended up being parts of legal cases, environmental research that could be done through those photographs. The other thing I was doing during this whole time at Cartographic, was the Archives training program, which was called the CIDS program, the Career Intern Development System—a horrible name. One of the things they did was, it was both classroom work and also you did various training rotations around the Archives. For example, I did a training reference rotation with social and political records. I did a rotation with still pictures, and at that point, you were required to do either a rotation through Education or Exhibits, and I chose to do Exhibits. I spent a six-week training rotation with the Exhibits Office, and it was at that point that I got very, very interested in doing exhibit research. At the end of that, I thought to myself, “Hey, this is really fun and interesting.” I thought this would be something I could see myself doing, and a few years later, a job came open, and I applied for it and got the job." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Before we move on from the Cartographic branch, were there digital technologies that you were using at this point? GIS? In a proto-stage? Or was it kind of eyeballing it, and things like that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "It was a lot of eyeballing it. I said I hadn’t learned latitude and longitude, or used it since 6th grade, and so suddenly I was trying to figure out the latitude and longitude of a town in Estonia, or something like that. I’m trying to think of the state of what we now call digital. We had a Trash-80 Radio Shack computer stuck off in a corner. I used it to write my reference letters, and to do any kind of lists I was working on in projects. There was a dedicated word processor system that the Archives used, it was called Datapoint, and it was basically just a word processing system. It didn’t do anything else. They were beginning to work with electronic records, and actually I had a training rotation through the Electronic Records Office, which was at that point called Machine-readable Records. People knew that this was going to be a huge issue, but they were just then beginning to deal with it. For example, they knew that we were going to be accessioning digital maps for Cartographic, but nobody quite knew what that meant at that point. At least I didn’t at the beginning of my career. The maps were kept in big map cases, as they still are, and if you were trying to find, for example, an aerial photograph of a town in Texas, you found the USGS quad, and you found that particular town, and then you went from that quad to the aerial photographs, and then tried to match the two things up. So it was not very high tech." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "No. But when pilots were flying over places, would they have marked the lat-long data?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "What they had—the different agencies created indexes, either photographs, where they laid out all the aerial photographs and then took a picture of those. Or, in the case of some of the intelligence agencies, there were clear plastic indexes that you would put over the top of a map, and line up the latitude and longitude, and it would show that there are three photographs of this particular area, where there might be coverage. Just because something was indexed, it didn’t actually mean that the Archives had the coverage." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "The majority of your holdings were from when? Did you have records from dirigibles and things like this?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "No, the records started roughly in the late 1920s. I think there were some aerial shots of, for example, I think there was a big flood in Washington DC in the late 1920s. Most of the shots were from the New Deal agencies like the Soil Conservation Service. It was called the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service. Those were two New Deal agencies, and they did a lot of aerial photography in the mid- to late-1930s. And then, in World War II, there was a lot of photography, for example, military photography of D-Day, or Iwo Jima, things like that. Then, in the fourth coverage of the United States, which are most or our holdings, we had started to get some aerial coverage from intelligence agencies, like the Defense Intelligence Agency, which had done training missions over a lot of the United States, so it had coverage of the United States. But you’d need to talk to somebody who stayed longer than I did in Cartographic. I think the big jump started happening after I left in 1989. You started getting more domestic photography from the 1940s and into the 1950s and 1960s, and then you also started getting more and more foreign aerial photography from the defense intelligence agencies too." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHOADS", "text": "Because there would have been a 50 year, 40 year, 30 year cap?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "I’m not sure exactly when they start. I know that one day as part of my training, I went through some of the aerial photography that was still at the Suitland Records Center that hadn’t been accessioned yet by the National Archives. I was blown away at this. Basically, an entire stack area, which are roughly about the size of a football field, and the place was filled with cans of aerial photography. I thought, “How are we ever going to get a hold of this?”" }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "So after Cartographic, you worked on the Reagan Project, and this project came about in the immediate wake of Reagan’s leaving office, versus maybe like, Nixon." }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "This was a detail I had to the White House Old Executive Office Building, to the White House Office of Records Management. Trudy Peterson, who was the head of the old Office of Record Services, called me up and said, “I need to put some people on this detail and I want you to do this.”—It was Thursday—“and you need to show up at the White House on Monday morning.” The idea behind it was that the Archives would start processing the Reagan papers before he left office. They would do the initial review for privacy and for Presidential Records Act in the Freedom of Information Act. And you would read through box after box from the White House central files, marking, tabbing the documents that you think would need to be withheld, and marking what the restriction was, whether it was law enforcement or personal privacy or national security, which I didn’t look at much, but things like that." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Yeah, and was this highly publicized?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "No, the line was—and I don’t really know whether this was true—that Nancy Reagan had gotten it into her head that she wanted Ron’s papers processed efficiently and fast, faster than other previous Presidents had theirs processed. So they created this detail to start the process even before he left office. I don’t know if that’s really true or not, but that was the story I had heard. So we came into this one office in the Old Executive Office Building (EOB), and there were big tables, and six or seven of us sat around the whole day reading box after box, certain topics within the White House central files. It would have been great if I had a security clearance so I could have read more interesting kinds of things, but I ended up reading things on topics like housing and religion, which actually was somewhat interesting, and petitions. It was fascinating to work in the old EOB and the White House. We got some incredible perks. We got to see the Fourth of July fireworks from the South Lawn of the White House, and we got to go to Kennedy Center and sit in the Presidential box and watch a performance. That was incredible, we’re talking about once in a lifetime kinds of experiences. But the work was horribly boring. It just boring to tears. Sometimes, you do a job and you realize “I don’t ever want to do this again,” and that kind of review, I realized, I don’t ever want to do again." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "What was the state of Reagan’s Presidency at that point? I mean, Iran-Contra had already broken—" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "[interposing] This was 1988, the Presidential election year, before George H.W. Bush was elected. So yes, Reagan had made it through Iran-Contra, and he was, in a sense, coasting, I guess—if a President is allowed to coast in his last year. So I didn’t have any sense that there were crises taking place." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "After this detail, you had been to Exhibitions, really enjoyed it, so you were going to re- enter somewhere. How did that come about?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "Yeah, that summer there had been a job announcement for a curatorial position in Exhibits, and I applied for that position. I was applying to the person I had worked with, Emily Soaps who was a curator with the Exhibits Office. In the year and a half or two years after I had done the detail, she had become the branch chief, and she had thought highly, I guess, of my work and eventually hired me. I started in 1989 on my birthday, January 23. It was the Monday after George H.W. Bush was inaugurated. So I left my detail at the White House, and moved on over, and started to work in what was called the Exhibits Branch within Exhibits and Educational Programs. The old acronym was NE, and my office was down in what was then called 3E1A, which is on the east side of the building. The offices were where the National Archives Foundation offices are now, and if you go down that hallway toward the stacks, that’s where the Exhibits Office was." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "How were Exhibitions understood, when you arrived there? I saw that there were sort of interesting things like the Freedom Train? In 1950 or something like that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "Right, that had been a big deal. By the time I started in Exhibits, Exhibits were starting to grow again, but it was still a pretty small operation. We tried very hard to be professional, but you know, we were kind of jacks of all trades. My technical title was “Exhibits Information Specialist,” although we called ourselves curators, and my job was basically research and writing on exhibits, which is what I do today. But we did a little bit of everything. When there was an exhibit that was going to be opened up, it was all hands up in the gallery. You moved the cases in and out, you took the vitrines off the cases, you helped to mount the documents, you did some actual screwing in of things that were mounted on the wall, and it was a little bit of everything. Our exhibits were, I think, well done, but they were very traditional exhibits, in the sense that we were working in a gallery that we called the Circular Gallery, which was actually semicircular, that was a hallway that went around the outside of the Rotunda. So we had to mount things on these sort of round walls, and that was challenging. Some of the cases were these old-fashioned cases that we re-used over and over again. And then, over the next five or six or seven years, we started to have a more professional look, and do exhibits that were a little bit more complicated. But the exhibits that we did were pretty simple. They had things mounted on the wall, and cases with documents in them, and we often had an AV segment to the exhibit too, but very kind of traditional, straightforward. The text was longer, much longer, than we ever would have today. That’s one of the things I notice when I look at my old exhibit scripts, how much longer the text is, compared to today. If there’s a main label that has 200 words, that’s kind of long. Maybe I’ve become a more efficient writer, too. But we would have 260- to 300-word or longer labels that I’m sure nobody read." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "In your first couple of years there, how did you decide what topics exhibits would focus on, and how the exhibit would coalesce, and whether or not you had any guidance from the Foundation at that point?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "The Foundation existed, but it was not the lively, fundraising entity that it is today. As far as topics are concerned, my impression—and of course, I was just starting—is that the decisions about exhibit topics were being made by the managers, and a lot of times they were driven by anniversaries. For example, my first exhibit, I was the co-curator of an exhibit called “Washington Behind the Monuments.” My boss came to me and said, “Well, you know, we’re working on this exhibit…” because it’s the anniversary of what was called the 1791 Residency Act, which is where the precise boundaries of Washington DC were drawn. So for the anniversary of this, we thought we’d do an exhibit about Washington DC. I worked with Claudia Nicholson, who was the co-curator of the exhibition with me. We came up with different exhibits, we did the research, and we did the writing. One of the big difference from today is the collaborative process that you have with an exhibit designer. In those early days, before computer-aided design, you wrote the script, in the word-processing age, so you were typing out multiple copies of the script at that point, which is good. I’d never had to experience that. But you chose your items, you created the script, the script was reviewed by your bosses, and then you began to work with a designer. The designer would look at your script and look at, typically, photocopies of the exhibition items, and then the designer would go off, and in a few weeks come back with his or her design, and then the two of you would sit down and go over the design. But it was very difficult to change anything. I could say to a designer, “Oh, this doesn’t really work, this photograph is too big, or this needs to be in a separate case by itself.” Often the designer, somewhat understandably, would get mad, and say, “Well, you know, I spent, you know, two weeks drawing this design by hand and, you know, yeah, I can make a few little changes, but you know, it’s hard to make changes at this point.” I’m exaggerating a little bit there. But today, when we have a much more collaborative relationship with designers, we start working with a designer earlier. We start sitting down with him or her, and they can put some initial ideas together, they can do an initial design, and I can sit there with a designer and say, “Well, how about if we blow that photograph up and use it as a photo mural?” And he or she, within ten seconds, can move that around on the computer screen, and see what it looks like as a photo mural. Or, “What if we move this exhibit case over to the end of the exhibition instead of the beginning of the exhibition?” And you can do that again in ten seconds or less, and try out different things. I think it really does promote a lot of creativity. It allows the curator to have a hand in the design. It allows the designer to understand the content of the exhibition a little bit more, and so it’s been a tremendous boon to exhibit development. I got off track there a little bit." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "No, no, it’s great. I’m wondering about anniversaries, like the West, closing the Frontier was 100 years before, right?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "It was our effort to do something for the anniversary of the Columbus quincentennial, I think. So it’s 1492, 1992, and I don’t know whether our management decided we needed to commemorate this, or there was some pressure from the outside to commemorate the Columbus quincentennial. But the National Archives doesn’t have a lot of material about Columbus. But what we do have is material about the exploration of the West, the Frontier, things like that. So I was asked to be the curator of that exhibition, which eventually became “Western Ways: Images of the American West.” My idea—and I don’t think it worked all that well, but it was okay—instead of having an exhibition where you have documents, and the images support the documents, I wanted to do an exhibition—and this is a theme that I think probably does run through my whole career—where I would use mainly images, and occasionally have a document that would support the image. So at first, I thought I might limit myself to photography, but I couldn’t help myself, once I started seeing some of the other materials. So I used maps and I used some of the wonderful prints that we have, and, of course, the photographs. I created this exhibition that looked at the West, and tried to use our records to interpret the West through the lens of some of the more modern or contemporary historiography that was starting to come out on the American West. One of the first things I read was Patricia Nelson Limerick’s _Legacy of Conquest_ . That set me off in a direction of trying to think about an exhibition of the American West that didn’t focus on traditional themes like the Frontier; that dealt with Native Americans more sensitively; that appreciated the diversity of the people of the West; that wasn’t stuck with the end of the Frontier in the 1890s; that looked for continuities within Western American history; that continued into 20th century. Those are all themes in Limerick’s book, and also one of the things that I try to do with every exhibition. I try to incorporate what I see are some of the historiographical changes or trends or controversies into the exhibition that I’m working on. So I tell people that when I do an exhibition, I don’t necessarily start with “Oh, what records do we have in the National Archives?” I try to familiarize myself not only with the topic that I’m working on, but also, I think because I’m a historian, I want to know what is the historiography. Until I feel familiar and comfortable with the historiography, I don’t feel comfortable choosing an organizational structure of an exhibition, or the content." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "I do want to come back to that and talk a little bit about how the workflow played out, from inception to completion. But as anyone who’s looked at historiography knows, politics can come into history, right?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "Mm-hmm." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "It would be foolish to assume that it doesn’t, you know. We all come with our biases, and no matter how much the discipline would like to say that we’re being objective—" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "[interposing] Mm-hmm." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "So, that approach was it you know, was it kind of controversial at the time? Have you run into—I mean, historiography and contemporary historiography, sometimes what makes it interesting is that it’s sort of controversial, and it’s taking a radically new look at things. When you’ve incorporated those sort of, you know, lenses, have you found that either because of personalities, or because people see it as a conflict of—you know, the—a conflict with the Archives sort of, what is supposed to be, you know, politically neutral institution as an agency of government. Have you run into, you know, into controversies about that? So, was it kind of controversial at the time? Historiography and contemporary historiography, can be sort of controversial, taking a radically new look at things. When you’ve incorporated those sort of lenses, have you found controversies, either because of personalities, or because of a conflict with the Archives, although it’s supposed to be a politically neutral institution as an agency of government." }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "To tell you the truth, we’ve rarely had those kinds of controversies that took place at the Smithsonian around the Enola Gay exhibition, for example. We tend, first of all, to be a little less interpretive than some of the Smithsonian museums. I may have an interpretation in my head sometimes, but what we do, and the way we see our exhibitions here at the Archives is that we are presenting the records, the documentation that we have in the National Archives, and these are the records. You, and we, may not like what the records say, but there are records, and I think that has allowed us to avoid a lot of the controversies throughout my career. And I have to say too that management has been supportive of some of the new directions that we’ve gone in. I can’t think of very many times at all when somebody said, “You’ve got to take this document out,” or, in effect, I don’t think I’ve ever had somebody say that to me. I may have done a little self-censoring from time to time. But when I worked on the development of the Public Vaults, and then the Civil War exhibition, we started to emphasize that we were hoping that people would discover the records, or discover for themselves what’s in the records, and that approach has taken us a long way, I think." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Can you talk about the origins of the idea for the Public Vaults? What type of audience were you trying to reach? What is its purpose? Why did you take this approach in doing the sort of centerpiece, it seems now, to the visitor experience at the Archives? If that’s a fair characterization." }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "Yeah, I think in some ways it is. I’m going to have to go back and give you deep background, I guess. My understanding is that Archivist John Carlin, at a certain point, somewhere around 2000 or so, was convinced by someone in the museum community that a lot of his legacy was going to be tied up in not just how he managed electronic records, or how he dealt with declassification issues, and things like that, but would be tied up in what the public spaces looked like after the planned renovation that was going to take place. At least according to my former boss, Chris Rudy Smith, Carlin called together a group of wise people in the museum profession, and they again convinced him that the exhibitions that were going to be done in the public spaces, the way the Charters were going to be presented, that that would have a large effect on how he was going to be seen. In that meeting, and Chris was there, Carlin was convinced that they needed to bring in a museum professional, a kind of high profile person to oversee that process. Four or five people applied for the position, and ultimately the person who got the job was Marvin Pinkert. He was a vice president at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. And that’s important because his background is in science museums, which is a very different kind of world than the world of the history museum, especially at that point. Science museums were seen as being places of discovery, being heavily into interactive exhibits, kind of kinesthetic experiences and things like that. So that’s where Marvin came from, and he started at the National Archives in, I think it was January 2001 [December 18, 2000]. He really brought a revolution with him. I don’t know if anybody’s done an oral history with Marvin, but they should because he really was the prime mover behind what he eventually named “The National Archives Experience.” The National Archives Experience included the new theater; it included what became the Public Vaults; the new Learning Center; the new temporary exhibition gallery; the new Rotunda; the whole sort of new visitor experience. I think every bit as important as those physical structures, it was Marvin who said that we need to take the Foundation and move it from what was, I don’t know how to characterize it, an honorary kind of position, where people met about twice a year, and they had a little budget, and they doled out a little bit of money, and it was not very thriving. He said, “This needs to become a standard 501(c)(3) entity that will fund our exhibitions and our educational programs, and that will raise money for the National Archives,” and even if we move beyond the Public Vaults and do something new in that space, and get rid of the Learning Center or whatever, that is going to be one of the major changes that we’re going to be living with for a long, long time here in this agency, is the creation of that National Archives Foundation. At that point, it was called the “Foundation for the National Archives,” and is now called “The National Archives Foundation.” So Marvin came in in early 2001, and as I said, kind of brought a revolution with him. He wanted us to think differently about exhibitions; he wanted us to think about using interactives in exhibitions; he wanted to get away from the old traditional, here’s a display case with two or three documents in it; and he created one group that worked on the re encasement of the Charters and the exhibition there. There was another group that worked on what would become the Public Vaults. He and I were both on that group." }, { "speaker": "The other thing that Marvin did", "text": "it was Marvin who convinced the Archivist and the management of the National Archives that if we were going to raise money for a new theater in the National Archives, we needed a different plan. The plan when he came in was that the theater was going to be basically an auditorium, and you’d use it for internal events, and maybe the occasional film, and things like that. But Marvin said, “You’re trying to raise $5 million for this, nobody’s going to pay $5 million for this. You have to have a whole public program, and you have to have a different looking theater.” So it was Marvin who really was the person who pushed that idea. He, with the National Archives Foundation, got the money from the McGowan family to have what we now call the McGowan Theater." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "So anyway, you were asking me about the Public Vaults." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "That’s right. How did you feel about that big change?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "It was a major, major change. Marvin is also quite a powerful personality, and so there were a lot of frustrations. With Marvin, it’s kind of like a train coming down the tracks. You have two choices: you can step off the track, or you can get run over. So he was very much the dynamic force behind that process. We went to different museums around the country, we started going to professional meetings like American Association of Museums (AAM). Most of us had never been to those meetings before, but he wanted us to think of ourselves as exhibit developers rather than just content specialists. I’m sure he would say that there was a fair amount of resistance, especially early on. We thought that we also did bring a knowledge of the National Archives with us, people like Chris and myself, and the records. So when he would come up with some brainstorm, which he did often, we could kind of pull him back and say, you know, “No, we don’t think we can do an interactive around medical discoveries from the records of the National Archives,” for example. “But maybe we can come up with an interactive that lets somebody go through the genealogy, the process of discovering records about genealogy. They may not get some sort of medical discovery out of it, but maybe they would get their grandfather’s Social Security benefit, or something like that.” So it was a very creative time period. It was also really stressful because we were really under the gun. They were trying to raise the money, really, as we were creating the exhibition. There were times when we didn’t think the money was going to be there. Another big change was, we worked with an outside design firm, Gallagher and Associates, as opposed to the in house designers that we had. So this was a massive, multi-million- dollar contract. There were new players from the outside. Marvin was new. So it was pretty stressful. I think what we came up with, with the Public Vaults, was really a good exhibition. I think it pleases the visitors. One of the most rewarding things for me, when we finally opened it in 2004, was the staff members who came through and told us that they thought that we had captured the records of the National Archives and the things we do in the National Archives in a good way, in a thorough way. I think that’s a little bit of a change, in the way the staff has viewed exhibitions. When I started at the Archives, and really first started at Exhibitions, there wasn’t a great deal of support for Exhibitions on the staff. You’d hear a lot about, “Well you know how many Hollinger boxes you could buy for the amount of money it would take to mount that exhibition,” or, “We could take your full-time employee and could put you with the Reference staff, and get a lot more use out of you than in Exhibitions.” There wasn’t an appreciation that we had those million visitors who came through the Exhibition Hall every year, and that they needed to be served too. I think that has changed dramatically over the 30 years that I’ve been here at the National Archives. I can remember being told by an archivist whom I worked with early on, that he didn’t like Exhibits. He didn’t even like Reference. He thought that you should just take the documents, keep them in boxes, or keep them in the big map cases, and maybe bring them out occasionally to showcase them. But that was our role. I remember an actual quote from one of the deputy archivists, the person who became Deputy Archivist of the United States. He said something like, “In a perfect world, no one would see the records.” But the attitudes have changed." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "I wondered if there was one of your major exhibitions that you would want to give some background to, and explain how it came about, from inception to final manifestation, so that people in the future understand how this works, and all that goes into it." }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "Okay. I guess one of my favorite exhibitions that I did was “Attachments: Stories and Faces from America’s Gates.” It was about the people who came to this country and found themselves at the gates of America, and their stories. Whether they eventually came into the United States, or whether they were blocked from coming into the United States, or whether they came in and then left again. That exhibition came about because I was working on the exhibition that became the Records of Rights exhibition. I was working on the immigration section, and we had a hole in our schedule, and Chris Rudy-Smith came to me and said, “We don’t want to have the Exhibition Hall dark for about three or four months during the summer, so can you think of some exhibition you’d like to do, and we could do something on that topic?” I said, “Well, I’ve been doing a lot of research on immigration, and I keep coming across these case files, the actual stories of people who were trying to come into the country or trying to stay in the country.” I said, “Some of these stories are just really fascinating, and a lot of times they have photographs attached to the paperwork, and so I look at these people and I wonder whatever became of them.” I wanted to have more information about them. I said, “Do you think I could do something along those lines?” And she said yeah, she thought that was a great idea. So, as I think I said earlier, I started doing research in the sense of reading secondary sources about immigration and deportation and Nativism, and that led me to, for example, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and I realized what great records we have here about Chinese Exclusion. Especially case files around Chinese who were coming into the country and who eventually, by law, had to have a photograph taken of them. And I started playing around with the idea of attachments. The physical attachments to the records, like the photograph being attached to the record. The attachment of the immigrants coming into the country to their former lands. And then, the attachments that they formed to their new country, the United States. The attachments they had to community and to family. Eventually, I came up with about 25 or 28 different stories, and documents that I think had both compelling photographs and compelling stories. I chose those people, and started to write the script, and then also started to work with a designer. The designer was Ray Ruskin, a tremendously creative person. Ray and I decided very early on that one of the things we wanted to do was to mount large-scale photographs of the people on the walls near their stories and the documents about them. We wanted visitors to look into the eyes of these people. So that’s what we did, and that also led me to organize the exhibition around themes, like arriving in the United States, and leaving the United States, and staying in the United States. We had a gigantic photo-mural of Angel Island, which was the main processing point for Asian immigrants coming to this country on the West Coast. Angel Island was very different from Ellis Island, which was basically a processing place. Angel Island was a detention center, basically. We wanted to challenge people by this different sort of idea of immigration into the United States. Ray had a great idea of creating an actual gate that visitors would walk through in the exhibition. Then, we based that gate on the gate that is in the Rotunda of the National Archives. That is, of course, the gate up to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Into our exhibition gate, Ray inserted photographs of the different people featured in the exhibition. So you had to kind of pass through a gate yourself, and pass the faces of these folks. I discovered some just incredible stories. One was the story of a woman who is now a distinguished professor of immigration and Chinese-American history, Erika Lee, who teaches at the University of Minnesota. I read her story in a book that she wrote about her grandparents, who came into this country—I won’t go into the whole story—but came into this country and 70 or so years later, she asked to see her grandparents’ case file when she was a graduate student working at our San Bruno office. They brought that case file out, and her grandparents’ wedding photo literally fell out of the case file. So we used her story. We brought her in to talk to the press when the exhibition opened. We used her grandparents’ photographs on the big banners that were outside. She talked to us about how moving it was for her to walk up to the National Archives and see her grandparents’ photo on the banner. We had another incredible story. I had an intern working for us one summer, while I was still doing research, and I said, “You know, there are these case files of refugees out at Archives II.” There were about 25 boxes, and I didn’t know a lot about the boxes. I said, “Could you go out there and take a look at some of these, and see if there are any good stories there?” She did the research and she came back with four or five really good stories. I chose a couple of them for the exhibition. One was the story of a man by the name of Michael Pupa. Michael Pupa was a young boy, about nine years old, who was living in Poland during World War II. His family—again, I won’t go into all the details—but his family was eventually killed by Germans who came into his town. Michael and an uncle and a cousin escaped into the woods of Poland, and spent the war hiding there from the Germans. He eventually goes into a deportation camp in Germany, and eventually comes to the United States as a refugee. Those were the records that our intern found. When the exhibition was just about to open, I asked one of our Public Affairs officers, Miriam Kleiman, to come down, and we talked about the different stories in the exhibition. I usually do this with her, give her some story examples, when an exhibition is going to open. I know Miriam has an interest in the Holocaust. So I started off by telling her about Michael Pupa, and she looks at me and she says, “Is he from Cleveland?” I said, “Yeah.” And she said, “I went to high school with his daughter.” So she got in touch with her high school friend, who then got in touch with the father, Michael, who was in his early 70s. He had rarely spoken to his family about his experience, either in the Holocaust or the deportation camps, or displaced persons camps. So we started working with him, and with the rest of his family, to incorporate him into the opening of the exhibition, and he came to the opening of the exhibition. Well, as I said, he’d rarely spoken about this. His family wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about this, and in what has to be one of the most moving parts of my career, he began to warm to this idea, and he began to talk to his family about his experiences, and he went from talking to his family about his experiences to doing an interview with the Holocaust museum and then doing interviews with the press about his experience. He has gotten to the point now that he goes around to schools, and talks about the Holocaust and his experience. So this is an incredible coincidence, I don’t know what to call it, of the intern picking the four or five stories out of the 25 boxes of material; my picking his story from the four or five that she brought back; the fact that Miriam had gone to high school with his daughter; then he went through what his family says is a life changing experience. You know, that wasn’t something I signed up for when I started on April 1, 1985. But it’s been one of the best parts of my career." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Thanks, that’s fantastic. Is there anything else you’d like to speak about? That’s a great little capstone, isn’t it?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "Yes. I have had a fantastic career here. You know, I haven’t cured cancer or stopped terrorism, or anything like that. But for somebody who came into the Archives wanting to work with historical records, and wanting to work as a historian, it’s been fabulous. I’ve been challenged; I’ve felt like I’ve been able to be creative; and I’ve had fabulous colleagues all the way along who have helped my career and have stimulated me; and I think that the work that we do here at the National Archives is incredibly important; and that the Archives needs to get a whole lot more credit than it does. I’ve had a very happy, exciting career. And as I move in the next few years into the next phase of my life and retirement, that’s going to be the big challenge, finding something as stimulating and as interesting to continue to do. So that’s it." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Bruce, thank you very much—" }, { "speaker": "MR. BUSTARD", "text": "[interposing] You’re welcome. # National Archives History Office # 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW # Washington DC 20408" } ]

[ { "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", "text": "All right, so I've got the recording started. First, I just want to say thank you for participating in the National Archives Oral History Project, documenting the history of the agency by preserving firsthand accounts of events. My name is Stephanie Reynolds, and I'm based out of the National Archives Facility in Denver, Colorado. I'm assisting the agency Historian, Jessie Kratz, in this important endeavor. Today is Thursday, August 10, 2023. And today I'm speaking with John Constance, whose career and accomplishments spanned 35 years from 1972 to 2007. Okay, John. So could you just start out by telling me where you're from and what your educational background is?" }, { "speaker": "John Constance", "text": "Absolutely. And thank you, Stephanie, for taking the time to do this. I am originally from Catonsville, Maryland, which is a small community outside of Baltimore. I had a public high school education, graduated from Catonsville High School, and went to the College of William and Mary in Virginia. I had an interest in history from the get-go. And obviously, Williamsburg was a place that helped facilitate that interest over a period of years. I got a bachelor's degree in what we called \"government,\" political science everywhere else, in 1972. While I was at William and Mary, I was an intern in the Office of the Archivist of the United States for the National Archives for two summers. I later got a master's degree—a master of administration with a specialty in public administration from George Washington University. So that's my education." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Oh, okay. So you are highly educated." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Well, that's a matter of opinion. But nevertheless. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So what were you doing then on your internship?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "I came into the National Archives actually through GSA [General Services Administration], their then-parent organization. I had a neighbor in Catonsville who had become a public affairs officer for GSA and had heard me complaining about my summer jobs as a telephone installer and working on a survey crew out in the hot sun of Baltimore. I was really in search of something that was going to be more career-oriented and more along the lines of something I might eventually want to do. And Doug—Doug Brown was his name—Doug referred me to the GSA summer intern program. The application process involved interviewing with each of the GSA services; the Public Building Service, Federal Supply Service, etc. And one of those services back in those dark days was the National Archives and Records Service, at that time, NARS. So I did a day of interviewing in Washington. The way the process worked was you would interview, and they rated the interviews. You rated who you would be most interested in working for. And my number one choice was the National Archives. And so eventually, through a couple of blips and iterations of that process, I was hired by GSA as a summer intern with the National Archives in the summer of 1971, which was the summer between my junior and senior years at William and Mary. I reported that first summer to Herb Angel, who was the Deputy Archivist of the United States. Herb is significant in National Archives history in that he and Everett Aldredge were two guys who worked for the Department of the Navy in the Second World War and actually came up with a concept of records management. They were the two who even coined the term “records management.” They did it for the Navy, coming out of the Second World War. And as you know, Stephanie, it was the Second World War that exploded the amount of paperwork and the amount of documentation that was coming out of the United States Government. And they were the ones that really took on that challenge. And so Herb came to the National Archives, worked in records management for a number of years, but eventually was chosen as Deputy Archivist of the United States. And he was the one that I had interviewed with and was my first supervisor. And the two things that I must say that I learned from Herb Angel were, even to a lowly intern, give meaningful work. And also let all of the senior staff know that you support them and that when you're speaking to this young, lowly intern, you're actually speaking to the Deputy Archivist of the United States, by extension. Herb had a meeting of all of the top echelon of the National Archives in his office. He introduced me, and he explained that one of the things that he had wanted for a long time was a three-ring binder that could sit on his desk and have all of the key measurements—we call them \"metrics\" today. Back in those days, there was no such thing as that term associated with accountability. But Herb had a vision that he wanted to be able to open that book up each month and tell where each office of the National Archives was as far as their progress. And so he wanted me to interview each of the offices, let them come up with what those key metrics were going to be and develop a system whereby all of that information would flow through to the Deputy Archivist of the United States. It was a big deal. I mean, I'm a junior in college. I'm not 21. I'm 20 years old. And so it was heady stuff for me. And he made it known in the meeting, “I want your full cooperation with John.” And so there I was. And that was my deliverable that first summer. And that's what I delivered." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow, that must have been a huge confidence booster. You know, still being in college and being given this responsibility. And they trusted your experience, your skills, everything that you're providing." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah, I tried to remember that in my career whenever I had a young, new person coming on board or, you know, I hired interns at various points in my career. And I always think back to that meeting and say that, you know, every person has skills and every person has worth, even if they don't have experience, and that it was really my job to pay that forward to those that had come after me, because you're right, it was a huge leg up in terms of my career." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, I've heard a lot about the importance of mentors, too, within the agency and providing that experience and helping them move up within the agency, so I could see how that would be really important." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "It was. And it also helps your confidence longer-term, because when you're an intern, I've always told people that you start at the top of the organization and work your way down. I started in the office of the Archivist of the United States, but the beginning of my real career is a good illustration of that fact. At the end of the second summer, I really had liked my time at the National Archives enough to stay. So I went to see the then-acting Deputy Archivist of the United States, Jim O'Neill, and said, “Jim, you know, I would really like to stay here and have a full-time job.” And he said, “Fine, I'll check with personnel and we'll go from there.” Well, it was the Nixon administration and things, you know, were not fulsome, shall we say, in the federal government in terms of finances. And so there were a limited number of jobs at the Archives. So I got a phone call from Judy South, who was the head of personnel for the Archives at the time. And Judy said to me, “John, I heard from Dr. O'Neill, and I just have one question for you.” And I said, “What's that?” And she said, “Can you type?” And again, my ego at that moment shifted into protection mode, I think. And I thought to myself, oh, she just wants me to type my application. Well, no. The next thing that she asked me—I'll never forget these words—she said, \"How fast can you type?\" And I thought, Oh, oh, oh, no, no, here we go. I'm sitting here with a four-year education from the College of William and Mary. And I'm being asked to be a typist. Oh, no. So, I said, “Well, I guess I can type fast enough. I've never actually timed it.” So, she said, “All right, we'll give you the test to be a clerk typist,” you know, GS whatever it was, GS-2 at the time. In that second summer, I had been working on a project with the National Audiovisual Center, which no longer exists as a part of the National Archives. But it was a group that sat out in Suitland, Maryland, at the records center. And what the National Audiovisual Center was, it was a concept of taking films and other audiovisual materials that have been produced for training or for public information or for specific uses by the federal government, and setting up a business that would market those materials for sale or rental to schools, to businesses, to state or local governments. So we'd take these films and repurpose them for use outside of the federal government. Fascinating concept. I worked on a project to create a computerized catalog for the Center. And I'd made some contacts and some friends out there. So as I'm sitting there perusing my future as a clerk typist, I contacted Glenn McMurray, who was the head of information for the National Audiovisual Center, and I said, \"Glenn, I've got a problem. And that is I want to work for the National Archives. But it looks like the only thing available for me downtown is a clerk typist job.\" And he said, \"Why don't you come to work for us?\"—the most lovely words that I'd ever heard spoken. Glenn was not the greatest administrator in the world, which he would admit were he still alive and sitting here. So in terms of budget or a position or all those little details, he turned that over to his staff and said, “Get this guy hired.” So that's what happened. My first permanent job with the National Archives was a GS-5, working in the information department of the National Audiovisual Center. I was the supervisor of the keypunch staff, which was composed of seven women who sat all day and typed keypunch cards that were being created for information reports on sales and rentals by the National Audiovisual Center. Also, they would eventually input the data that became our first computerized catalog. So there I sat, never having typed a keypunch card in my life, and I had very little knowledge of computers or anything else for that matter. And, I had no idea how to supervise a staff. And there I was, the first day, bright, shining, hopeful, supervising the keypunch office and just thanking God that I wasn't typing myself. [LAUGHS] That's how I started out." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. Where did those videos come from? Did we request copies from the agencies, or were these accessioned records?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "They were not accessioned records. They were on a different track. Let me give you an example from your background at the National Park Service. All of the national parks throughout the country, as you know, have orientation films. When you go to Antietam or you go to Gettysburg or you go to any national park, the first thing that happens is you're escorted into the dark and the air conditioning, and they turn on an information film to orient you to the history and the context surrounding the site and to give you enough background for you to go out and experience the site with that kind of history under your belt. They were all produced in Harpers Ferry at the Interpretive Design Center for the National Park Service, and I called on Carl Degen one day in my later career in accessions for the National Audiovisual Center. And I said, “Carl, we've got this operation, and your films are exactly like what we're distributing right now from NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration].” We had a huge collection of NASA's information and educational films, and I said we'd like to get into the distribution business for you and put your films in every school in the country. Typically in those days, they were 16 millimeter films. And so we would sell 16 millimeter films or rent 16 millimeter films, depending upon the needs of the user. And we wrote a contract with Carl. And again, these were not on the accession track for federal records, though there was the other group, the parallel group working for the motion picture division for the National Archives that was doing that on their record schedule when it was appropriate to retire them. We were kind of a different and independent player, and that whole system was set up under the National Archives Trust Fund as a revolving fund operation that, when we sold the films or rented the films, the money for that came back to us through the National Archives Trust Fund, and we used that as a budget to hire staff, to rent space, to do everything you would do as a business. And so for 12 years of my career, the first 12 years, I progressed through positions of increasing responsibility with the National Audiovisual Center." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So I had not heard about this center before. How did this come to be? I mean, this doesn't seem like something that the agency would do. How did it fit into NARA?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "It starts out with a guy—a lot of times in federal agencies when you have this kind of a one-off operation, when you trace it back through history, there's usually a salesman involved. And the salesman in this case was a guy by the name of Jim Gibson, who had been in the federal film business. He had been a public affairs spokesperson. He was one of the first voices of Smokey Bear. Jim was nowhere and everywhere in the federal government. And this was a vision that he had of how all of this material that's being produced, millions of dollars worth of audiovisual materials were being produced by the federal government each year being used for their specific purpose, and then going back on the shelf to gather dust until they eventually were accessioned into the National Archives. And Jim said, “That's not right. We really ought to be able to set up a business operation that would see that all of those wonderful federal films got out to the public.” And he pitched this to the National Archives and to the National Archives Trust Fund Board. And they said, “Okay, let's go ahead and do it.” And since it was under the Trust Fund Board, it was very much of a dotted-line kind of office under the NARS Executive Director. And back in those years, the position was—it's kind of now Chief of Staff—in those years it was called Executive Director of the National Archives. Walt Robertson was that Executive Director. And this was kind of a dotted-line off of Walt Robertson's office and his responsibilities. We were very independent. Jim was the first director, and when he retired, he hired a guy by the name of Jack McLean, who had been the head of the Naval Photo Center in Anacostia where they produced all the films for the United States Navy. Jack was a retired lieutenant commander and came to work for the National Archives as the second Director of the National Audiovisual Center. And so that was the way it happened. Eventually, the National Archives some years later decided to work out a deal with NTIS, the National Technical Information Service, which was part of the Department of Commerce, and lock, stock and barrel, the whole operation went to the Department of Commerce. And it is still to this day part of the Department of Commerce in what is now a new iteration of the old National Technical Information Service. Their mission was somewhat similar in that they took federally funded scientific research and marketed it, you know, provided the publishing and marketing of that in a way that the Government Printing Office was not interested in doing. So NTIS was created really for scientific information, developed at the expense of the American taxpayer, that would then go out and be distributed this way. And so some years later, after I left and under a new Archivist of the United States—I can't quite recall right now who it was— but anyway, the decision was made to transfer it to NTIS at Commerce." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Interesting. And so they're still marketing some of those same films by the National Park Service and whoever?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah. Exactly. I mean, one of the responsibilities I had was accessions and disposal. The disposal, meaning that we didn't actually throw the films away, but when they were outdated or had information that was no longer viable, and most of those would have been under the category of training materials. The Bureau of Land Management created a huge curriculum on how to fight forest fires, how to do it on land, and how to do it by air. And they really were the ones that did all the R&D [research and development] for that. Well, that material, for a local fire department that had a forest nearby or for municipal fire departments or, you know, fire services all over the country, they were very, very interested in acquiring that. So that's an example. But as new techniques occurred or new films came about, or we-don't-do-it-that-way-anymore kind of things happened, we would take those materials out of the catalog and put in updated material. So it was somewhat of a rotation. The Battle of Antietam never changed." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "The outcome was still the same. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "The outcome was still the same. [LAUGHS] So that didn't change. But even the Park Service, as you know, when the Park Service would update or upgrade a visitor center, they would often not use the old film and create a new film. And so we were right there to basically take whatever their new title was as well. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you know anything about the establishment of the National Archives Trust Fund Board?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "I know the original intent of it was to be able to sell copies of records on a reimbursable basis. In other words, I mean, the National Archives realized that at one point in the life of the Archives, it was realized that, oh yeah, sure, we'll send microfilm copies or we'll send Xerox copies of records to people. But wait a second. There's a hunger for that, that we'll never get enough appropriations in order to satisfy. I mean, the public, when they realized that they could get documents from the National Archives, they said, “Oh, yeah, more of those. Let's have some more of those, and we'll have some of these, and we'll have some of these, and we'll have all we want.” Well, that's fine. But the Archives realized that they had to set up some kind of a funding mechanism to ensure the fact that we didn't go broke providing those copies. And the National Archives Trust Fund initially was set up in order to be able to receive reimbursement from the public for copy costs that the National Archives was expending in order to provide these copies to the public. And so that's how it was originally set up. That's the how and why of its original establishment. And I think, frankly, that might have been in the 50s. I can't quite recall. But they used to have their own logo, and they had a board that administered the Trust Fund, and they operated very much in and of themselves like a business where they were audited each year, they had financial reports, etc." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So this was before GSA, that you think that this board was created? This Trust Fund was created?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "No, the Archives was still part of GSA. GSA took over the National Archives in 1949 as a part of the Hoover Commission report." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "The Hoover Commission was created to help organize a more efficient federal government. Archives was independent from 1934 until 1949, when it was swept up into GSA and was part of GSA from ’49 until 1985." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "All right. I had the wrong beginning date there. So then when you were part of this, at some point, you also became the Chief of Product Acquisitions and Marketing. Is that correct?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "I did. And we had done the accessioning part. I certainly enjoyed that. And we had a separate marketing department. It was decided at one point to join that together. And as part of that, we eventually got to the point where we were doing about a million pieces of direct- mail advertising per year. And again, this was targeted advertising, going to schools and businesses and municipalities all over the country. It was not without controversy. There were those in the private sector who felt that we were unfairly competing with them in terms of distribution of educational materials. So there was some congressional activity that was associated with that. Barry Goldwater Jr.—not Barry Goldwater Sr., but Jr.—was a congressman from southern California. And it was a number of the associations that were associated with the distribution of theatrical film and educational film that went to him. And so there were hearings on the Hill, back and forth. The bottom line was we survived based on the fact that while our prices were lower, we were distributing a pretty unique product. Our product, yes, it was competing, but it was very, very targeted, and I think Congress at the end of the day, decided that there was probably enough room for the private sector as well as the National Archives in that business. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "What kind of training? Oh, go ahead." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "I'm sorry. Go ahead." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I was just going to ask about the training that you received when you were in that position. Were you learning about filming techniques and things like that?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "When I got the job in the whole area of accessions, initially—that would have been probably like 1975, I think—Jack McLean was the Director of the National Audiovisual Center. Jack had a very strong background, obviously in film, and decided that I needed to at least know some of the rudiments of filmmaking. And so he did two things. One, he sent me to the Naval Photo Center in Anacostia for a week, and I kind of shadowed the production process, the post- production process, the lab work, all the things that are associated with making a motion picture. I was on the floor when they would shoot the films. I went in and watched the editors edit the films. I followed the process of A-rolls and B-rolls in the lab and, eventually, the print production of actual prints coming out the other end. So I kind of had a whirlwind one-week immersion into that aspect of it. The most fun thing, though, was Jack also sent me literally to Hollywood. He sent me to Warner Brothers Studios in California, where a guy named Bill Hendricks was an old friend of Jack's. When Jack was head of Navy filmmaking, Bill was instrumental in Marine Corps filmmaking. Bill eventually became the head of the cartoon division for Warner Brothers Studios. And Jack got in touch with him and said, “I want somebody out there to shepherd this guy around for a couple of days and show him the fun side of filmmaking and the fun side of what we do.” And so I did that. I was out there for a conference where we were looking at some possible film acquisitions. But during that trip, Jack sent me to Bill Hendricks, and Bill took me around the back lot at Warner Brothers, and I watched filmmaking. I watched their laboratory operations. I watched their film- editing operations, all of which were similar to the Navy, but on a much, much larger scale. And it was fun. I had a great couple of days, met some interesting people, and it was fun and they were good contacts for the rest of my career. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Is this when you got to meet Elizabeth Taylor?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "No, actually, that was a different time. When I was in California, I did get to meet Clint Eastwood. He was one of the people that—we were just sitting on a soundstage one day watching something that's very unique. Hollywood studios—Warner Brothers at the time—had a symphony orchestra, and the full symphony orchestra would watch the projection of the motion picture up on the big screen while the conductor actually conducted the orchestra watching the film and synced what the music would be with what was happening on the screen. That was pretty cool. And so we were sitting on this big soundstage watching that happen when the door opened behind us and some guy came in and sat down. Bill turned around at one point and said, “Oh, hi, Clint.” And I thought, Clint ... let me think. How many people do I know in motion pictures whose name would be Clint? I spun around, almost threw my neck out, and Bill said, “Oh, Clint, I want you to meet a friend of mine [LAUGHS], a quote [USES AIR QUOTES] friend of mine.” I met Bill, you know, three hours, four hours before. And anyway, we had a brief—and I'm sure for Mr. Eastwood—unmemorable chat. And that was that. But the Elizabeth Taylor story—when I also was working for the National Audiovisual Center, I was working for them in 1976 when lots of federal agencies had projects that they were doing for the 1976 bicentennial of the United States. And the Supreme Court had one such project, and it was called _Equal Justice Under Law_ . And they were producing a series of educational films about the John Marshall era of the Supreme Court, the first Supreme Court, and _Marbury_ v. _Madison,_ and a variety of other key decisions that were made as part of that first court. And they went to WQED production folks in Pittsburgh, a very well-respected film organization, and they got them under a contract to basically produce this series of educational films. And somebody told the court that, hey, you know, there's this outfit over at the National Archives, and they are in the distribution business. So rather than worrying about distributing it to schools ourselves, call this guy and they'll do it. So we met. I got to work with Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justice Byron White, who was the head of this film project committee. And when the first film cuts were available, I got a phone call from the Court, and they said, “We're going to look at some of the film footage tonight. And the Chief Justice, since you guys are going to be distributing these, thought it would be a nice idea to have you all come over.” So I said, “Well, great.” It was very kind of casual. And I said, “Fine, do you mind if I bring John Barta?” I was just accessions at that time. He was the marketing director. I said, “Would you mind if I brought somebody along?” They said, “Well, let us get back to you.” And I thought that was odd. So anyway, about an hour later they called me back and they said, “Yeah, that's fine, as long as it's just one more.” I said, “Okay.” So I went over, and John and I parked under the Supreme Court Building and went up to the East Conference room. And when we opened the door to the East Conference room, it was totally dark, and they'd already started showing one of the films. So there's a flickering film up to the right on the screen and a 16-millimeter projector running in the back. And you see there are about 20 chairs there. And our eyes were still adjusting to coming out of the light of the hallway into the darkness, and could hardly see where we were going. And Barta and I found two seats and sat down. And when the film came to its conclusion, the lights came on and I looked to my right and realized that I was sitting next to Elizabeth Taylor. And I was not drinking at the time. [LAUGHS] So, I mean, that's the kind of experience that, you know, you think, wait a second. My first thought was, am I in the right room? [LAUGHS] Because I thought there's no way that I'm supposed to be here. I quickly realized that she's sitting next to—and I can't remember if they were married at the time or just dating—but John Warner, who was the head of the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, ARBA, before he became a United States Senator. He was the head of the federal government's whole effort on the bicentennial. So Chief Justice Burger had invited him to come over and see this screening along with some other court members. And draped in mink and sitting next to little old me on this little gray metal chair was Elizabeth Taylor [LAUGHS]. I thought, holy mackerel. So anyway, that was an interesting encounter. I had already met with John Warner at ARBA over soliciting any films that they got as part of the bicentennial for the National Audiovisual Center. So he and I had been in a couple of meetings, and so he knew me, and he leaned forward and recognized me. And I thought, well, maybe there is a reason I'm here. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So it is the right room. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Exactly. Exactly." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So did you get to talk to her?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "As much as she wanted to talk, yes. She was not in the communication mode that night, you know, until someone asked her what she thought of the film. I mean, someone had the brains to say, \"Well, Ms. Taylor, what did you think of the film?\" And she kind of critiqued the production that she saw, the production quality, and that was value-added. The producers are there, the director is there, that whole staff, I mean, they didn't exactly think that ever in their career they would get a critique from Elizabeth Taylor, but there they were. And so they were wrapt in attention and listening. So anyway ... But I will tell you one thing. When John Barta and I walked out of that room that night, we thought it would be a good idea to leave early and not assume that we were really supposed to be there for the entire evening. We left a little early. And as we walked back down through the marble hallway of the United States Supreme Court with the high ceilings and all of the grandeur around us, I don't know whether it was Barta or me, but we broke into that old song from Sweet Charity, \"If My Friends Could See Me Now,” and we danced all the way to the elevator singing and dancing. [LAUGHS] We both knew that we had just experienced, between spending the evening with most of the Supreme Court as well as Elizabeth Taylor, that this was something we were going to remember all our lives." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "For sure, yeah. I don't know how you could forget that one. That's very memorable. I would have thought the same thing. I think I'm in the wrong place." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Exactly." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. Yeah. What a great story. So you said that you were supervising, I think, seven staff members. Is that right? I'm wondering how many people were in that center to begin with." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "At its maximum, we probably had 65 employees. We had a huge warehouse with a big film inventory. And that was the rental operation, the films that went in and out, in and out. So we had folks doing shipping and receiving and all that went into that. We had a finance division that took care of our sales operation. We had a guy that did all the liaison work with the laboratories that we bought our films from in order to either put them on the shelves to rent or to resell. We had, as I said, the marketing group. We had an information staff that published the catalogs and did that until we eventually figured out that direct-mail advertising, not just the big catalogs, was going to be really the way to go. And so yeah, it was a humming operation and one that operated in the black most every year. I mean, I think by law, under the Trust Fund Board, we were only able to make so much over cost. We were not obviously able to make a lot of money, but just enough to cover our costs plus. And then we operated truly on that basis all the years that I was there. My last initiative when I was in marketing, I spanned the time where it was all 16-millimeter film to where, toward the end of my time there, videotape was clearly coming more and more online. And I convinced them to make an investment to go into the home video market. And we were pretty successful with it. Basically we targeted the home market with some of the World War II films, documentaries that had been done by the military about World War II, the battles in the Pacific and those kinds of things. This was before the History Channel. And a lot of what's on the History Channel now is kind of driven by that subject matter. So we got into the home video market and started approaching it that way, with advertisements in magazines, publications, and other things. We had done some airline in-flight magazine advertising already. One of the big series that we distributed was a series of audiotapes that were produced by the State Department to teach diplomats how to speak foreign languages. That wasn't commercialized, at that point, through all of the various means now that you can go online and learn a foreign language. Audiotapes that would teach you foreign languages were something that the government had to create themselves. And the Department of State had created a long series on that. And so we just started to distribute those. And we would advertise those in airline magazines. And the tagline was \"Speak like a Diplomat.\" And so again, it was an audiotape series that we sold for reuse." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So some of these, like the National Park Service, the Forest Service, those films were you basically just taking it and making copies? Or were all of these kind of re-engineered in a way?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Some of them had accompanying written materials. I mean, when the agencies realized, it was in the infancy, I think, of public education for a lot of these agencies. NASA had kind of led the way. The people at NASA realized that the future of the space program, I think, was going to really be reliant on their whole public information operation. And they had really led the way in educational materials being produced by NASA. And a lot of their stuff was just kind of a natural to go into those markets. Some agencies would do learning guides, other materials that were then distributed along with the films and the materials. We sometimes pre-packaged things like—take the Park Service, for example. There were brochures and maps about Antietam or about various national parks around the country, and we would distribute some of that written material along with the films to just kind of broaden the perspective. But for the most part, with those educational materials, we knew that there was a teacher on the other end that was going to figure out how they were going to use this material in their curriculum one way or the other. So, a lot of it was relying on that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, it's just very interesting. I had not known that NARA was in that business for a period of time. Do you know when it was transferred over to Commerce?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "I can figure that out for you at a later time. But no, I won't even guess because it was after I left. I left to come downtown in 1985, and I'd been there 12 years. So I went there in '72, coming out of college and was there until '84, '85, that time frame. So it was after I had left that it was transferred. I got involved in some of the negotiations because of my previous involvement." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I know that you've done a couple of details to other agencies. When did you do the detail for the Department of Education and for OMB [Office of Management and Budget]? Do you remember?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Both of those were during my career at the National Audiovisual Center, because both of them involved public affairs. The Department of Education detail happened when the Department of Education was created during the Carter administration, if you recall. HEW, Health, Education, and Welfare, was the structure under which the education piece of federal policy and direction of education was for many, many years. And under the Carter administration, that's when education was broken out as a separate department, and HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] was created in its wake as the remainder of what had been HEW. So when the Department of Education started, Liz Carpenter was the first head of public affairs for the new Department of Education. And Liz had a connection to the National Archives through the Johnson Library. Liz had been the press secretary for First Lady Lady Bird Johnson during the Johnson administration. And so through those connections, I think it was kind of how the word came back to the National Archives that Liz wanted some help in terms of looking at how their filmmaking would be done or their audiovisual policy would be in terms of the creation of educational materials. And they asked me to come over on a detail and be a consultant to them for a period of time. I can't recall. It was not a year. It might have been four months, five months, and to basically put together a procedures manual in terms of how their whole audiovisual operation, the audiovisual portion of their office of public affairs would be done. And that was fun. I mean, I enjoyed that. A lot of times, you know, in your career, a change of venue and purpose is a good idea. And I'd been at the Archives or the Audiovisual Center for a while, so it was a new possibility, a new place to work. And contractually, my boss let me go with the promise that I'd be back in a certain number of months. And so in that respect, it was—you know, sometimes in the federal government, you get detailed someplace and it's kind of, shall we say, not the best sign of the future for your career if your agency is willing to detail you for a period of time. In my case, I was lucky enough that it was kind of a win-win. The Department of Education got somebody who had good experience, and I was able to help them out. And when I came back to the Audiovisual Center, I had that much more experience in terms of how a different agency did it. And we obviously had kind of a front row seat in terms of getting their training films that were produced through that process as well. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And then what about OMB?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "The OMB detail was in the first stages of the Reagan administration. Ronald Reagan came into government to cut government spending. He famously said—I think it might have been in his inaugural remarks—that the government does not solve problems. Government is the problem. And so those of us who were in federal service at the time thought there was some concern, shall we say, about that approach. And there were a number of task forces that were set up in the federal government to cut out waste, fraud, and abuse. Those were the big three that they were going to do. They primarily worked through the Inspectors General, the IG corps of each agency, to determine where there had been waste, fraud, or abuse of federal money. There were some broad categories, however, that they decided that they would set up separate task forces, and one of those task forces had to do with what they euphemistically called “Hollywood on the Potomac,” that they weren't really thrilled with the amount of money that was being spent on filmmaking. See also Barry Goldwater Jr. and the whole concept of should the federal government—they were after us on the distribution of films. The question was, should the federal government be producing all these films? Why shouldn't they be using the private sector? Why shouldn't they be using the studios or private film producers in order to produce this? Why do they set up their own filmmaking operations? And that was really the target. And so I was detailed, and this was kind of not voluntary. The guy that was the lead on this for the Reagan administration, they picked some names in the federal government. My name came up as somebody they wanted on the task force because, you know, if you want to rob banks, you need to know where the money is. And I knew where all the filmmaking was in the federal government. And if they wanted to cut all this filmmaking, they had to bring somebody in like me to say, \"You may want to look over here, or you may want to look over there.\" So to say that I was conflicted in that role is the understatement of the year. But no one asked me whether I was conflicted. They brought me in, and I became a part of the task force at OMB. And I was the part that was, yes, working towards cutting filmmaking. I knew that there was a certain percentage of it that was wasteful. No doubt about it. But I also knew that there was a larger percentage that was useful. And so I made every effort to be the voice on the inside saying, yes, there's some problems over here and there's some problems over there, but you don't want to take all of these mechanisms apart, because there are some things that they can do that nobody else can do. There's some expertise that they have that nobody else has, and that to contract out to the private sector, you'd wind up with a director, a producer, and editor, everybody duplicating what was already being done. And so anyway, the goal though, was to be able to show on paper that we had cut a certain amount of funding from federal filmmaking. That was the goal that was given to the task force. And all I can say is that on paper, at least, we met the goal. Whether an audited outcome could ever be done to show that, yes, federal filmmaking was cut by the same percentages that those reports were presented to Congress or those reports were presented in a very large press conference that we held at the end of the project, I can't say, but it was—once again, I'd never worked in the White House before or any part of the White House. So the six months that I worked there was kind of heady stuff, also that I was working in or kind of near the center of the Reagan administration. And so I met a lot of nice people. I met some smart people who had a different perspective on the world than I did. And, that was good also." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Good experience, it sounds like. Do you remember how many people were on that task force with you?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "It was small. There were probably at most, at any one time, five permanent staff: myself, and several folks from the Pentagon, a couple of folks from the Department of Commerce. I mean, they knew that the vast majority of money in federal filmmaking was being spent by the Defense Department, far and away. An awful lot of that were things that the National Audiovisual Center would never be able to touch because they were, you know, either classified or they were materials that really, really wouldn't translate very well to the private sector. So I had some experience with Defense Department materials, as I said before, most of which were World War II documentaries and those kinds of things. But what they needed were the experts from the Pentagon, from the filmmaking world at the Pentagon that could help this task force out and identify where the pockets were that could, in fact, be cut. And so that's where a couple of guys from the Defense Department came into play." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. I mean, I feel like that would be a little uncomfortable if you're doing it within your own agency saying this is what should be cut. That would be very hard. And then I wonder, did they get any kind of flak from that within their own agency?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah, I think so. I mean, most of the guys that I worked with on the task force were people not in the hands-on film production world but in the administrative ends of the Defense Department that oversaw those operations. So I think they didn't have to worry for their personal safety when they went back to work. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, that's good. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "I don't know that they had a big victory party for them when they came back. But nevertheless, I mean, I think a lot of that process was really identifying the things that most of the agencies already knew, that they had some wasteful spending in these areas. Some of the agencies knew that they had duplication of effort. It was funny in the military; the thing that was the most sensitive was that the Navy and the Army and the Air Force, the Marine Corps, they were all producing some training materials that were absolute duplications of each other. The only differences were the uniforms that everybody had on. I mean, literally. And so those were the things that were driving Congress and the Reagan administration totally crazy, such clear duplication of effort. There wasn't really much to debate regarding that. So anyway, it was interesting. It was mainly interesting to see—this was the first time in my career that I'd seen the policy world and the political world collide, and kind of how that operated in real time and in reality in the White House. You had career OMB folks that were in the bean-counting world. And they were there before the Reagan administration, and they were going to be there after the Reagan administration. And then you had the political echelon that knew that it was their job to come up with numbers that were going to look good at that press conference. And they were reporting to folks in the White House that knew that their time was limited. And during that limited time, they needed to produce for that administration for their own political futures and for their own involvement in politics and the rest of their lives. At the National Archives, you know, we're enough of a sheltered workshop when it comes to that kind of politics that I had never seen before. And it was helpful to me when I eventually got into congressional affairs work to have seen that and to really understand kind of how that operates and how that operates within the structure of the White House." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, that's a very interesting point. You got some of that background information that you wouldn't have had otherwise that helps you in the future in the congressional job. In both of those situations and both of those details, do you think that those were valuable experiences and perhaps NARA should be pursuing more things like this? Or what are your thoughts on that?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "I think it's always good to breathe the air on the other side of the street. I think it's always good, particularly from a career development standpoint, to be intentional about those internships and those opportunities to go out and not get hung up. They have to be contractual. I mean, you have to agree that this person is going to go out and do this work, and they're going to come back on this date. But, as far as the experience of doing that and really understanding—take records management, for example. You know, a lot of times in records management, other parts of the Archives, you say you know what the problems are of the person on the other side of the equation. I mean, do you really unless you've been out there and working in that environment? You know, the National Archives has been very, very fortunate over the years to bring in people, like yourself, who have been out in different environments. But even, and particularly for somebody who comes in through the archivist training program or something internal, where the agency wants them from birth to death, somewhere in that chain, they really need to get out and experience work in other places in other ways. And I got to tell you, at the time did I think I was gaining anything that was going to be useful to me? I don't know. I mean, I always say that you live life forward, but you understand life backwards sometimes and that so many times in my career I would say, \"Well, I know how that works\" or \"I've been here before\" or, you know, \"I can do this or I can do that.\" And I'm thinking to myself, \"Gee, how do I know that?\" And largely it was through those kinds of details or those other experiences. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, those are really good points. Sometimes we tell agencies to do things, but it's easier to tell than to actually implement and know what the outcome of those decisions are, maybe. So yeah, I think it's knowing the other side is really important." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "I was involved in enough policy work at the National Archives to have seen, a number of times, policy directives that were sent out and only in the light of the violent reaction that you get other agencies reacting to those things that sometimes, not always, but sometimes that was like the, \"Oh, gee, we never thought of that\" moment. And you want to avoid those. Obviously, the whole Federal Register process with regulations and things are all designed, the Administrative Procedures Act and all these things that, you know, they're designed to avoid that. Sometimes it's crushingly slow. Sometimes, by the time you get the policy out, the question is, do we still have this problem? And, you know, it's maddening, but it's all necessary in order to ensure that. And sometimes it's not a matter of having the answers. It's a matter of knowing what the right questions are. And unless you've been out there in a different environment, sometimes you don't even know what the questions are, let alone what the answers are. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, that's interesting. I'm looking at our time here. I scheduled you for another seven minutes. I wanted to ask about your thoughts on when NARA became an independent agency and separated from GSA. I don't know if you want to talk about that now a little bit or if you want to wait and we can schedule another time, because I know we're going to have to schedule another time. There's so many other things I want to talk about." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Why don't we go ahead and save that for the next time? And it will afford me the opportunity, Stephanie, to also take a look at some material that I've got that may refresh my memory, because that starts into an area that I may have some perspective on that might be unique and might be helpful in terms of, frankly, where, in my humble opinion, the Archives went right and sometimes went wrong in terms of that process in becoming an independent agency. And we suffered for a long time as a result of some of the boxes that we didn't check and some of the T’s that we didn't cross when we were heading in that direction. So anyway, let me take a look at that, and I’d be happy to schedule again. An hour and a half in my time is not onerous. And it's going to all depend really on what your schedule is. So if you want to arrange some other times now or send me an email, that'd be fine." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Let me send you an email with some available dates and times and, you know, we'll see what works for you and then we'll schedule another one." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Okay, yeah, that's great. That's great. I appreciate it. You're good at what you do, and I thank you for your questions and your time and look forward to chatting with you again." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. I can't wait. Thank you so much." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "All right. Take care." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Talk to you soon. Bye." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Bye-bye. [END RECORDING PART ONE] [BEGIN RECORDING PART TWO - August 24, 2023]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. I've got the recording going. Welcome back. This is part two of an oral history with John Constance. And today is Thursday, August 24, 2023. And I just want to do a quick recap here of what we spoke about last time. We covered your internship with the Deputy Archivist, Herb Angel; your work and experiences with the National Audiovisual Center; the acquisition and marketing of films; a detail that you took with OMB and the Department of Education; and, of course, your run-ins with the rich and famous: Elizabeth Taylor and Clint Eastwood as well as several Supreme Court Justices. So that's what we went over last time. Did you think of anything that you wanted to add or clarify from last time?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "No, but I think, and I might have mentioned this, I had the benefit early in my career of some excellent bosses and mentors. And as I look back over my career, that really made a big difference. So for that, I am very grateful." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, sometimes it takes having some mentors or some really bright people to help you along and get you into those right places, right, who know your skills and where your best fit would be." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Exactly. And I've tried to emulate that since then and even in retirement. I'm always looking for folks that need a hand or need some advice, and I continue to find that very gratifying." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I'm sure everyone appreciates that you've helped out. Okay. So kind of leading off where we were last time, we were just starting to get into when NARA became an independent agency from GSA. Do you remember anything from this time? Maybe some of the changes that were happening?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "What was involved in this sort of transformation?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "I followed the independence movement kind of from afar. I was still working for the National Audiovisual Center, but I had an awful lot of excellent contacts downtown with people that I had worked with through the years, and through that and through those contacts, continued to kind of stay abreast of what was going on in the independence movement, given the fact that a lot of that was coming out of Congress. And that was certainly a first love for me. I was following from that perspective. I guess the Archives Act was actually passed in October of 1984—that was when the act was actually passed and it was not going to become effective, and the Archives was not going to actually be independent until April 1, 1985. Thus, the emblem of the National Archives and Records Administration has 1985 down there as the effective date on the seal. You know, as soon as the bill passed, my mind started kind of spinning towards where I could be next in my career that would be logical for me and also kind of fulfill what I hoped it would be. And that was not just to be part of a satellite of the National Archives at the Audiovisual Center, but actually be downtown and kind of directly in the mix. So I remember at some point in the winter between 1984 and 1985, I made it my business to come downtown and see Adrienne Thomas. And Adrienne Thomas, at that point, was really moving into the role of policy and program management under the new independent agency. She was going to be the head of policy, and she was going to report to Jim Megronigle, who was going to be the Deputy Executive Director reporting to Claudine Weiher, who was going to be the new Executive Director. There might have been some other fancy titles there about Assistant Archivist for Administration is maybe what Claudine's title was going to be. But in that chain of command, it was clear to me that, number one, I had the most long-term contact in that chain with Adrienne. I had worked with Adrienne literally from the time I was an intern at the Archives. So I came down to see her. The only thing I remember about that day was that it was snowing in Washington and a number of people had not shown up. So it was rather quiet in the building. And I went to see Adrienne, and I just said, “You know, let me just lay it out. I'd really like to be a part of the new independent National Archives, and I'd love to have a role down here.” And she was very encouraging from the get-go. And that made me feel very, very good, and she said, “Let me see what we can work out.” Well for the second time in my career, I had pictured a position of some authority, just as I had when I went from intern to a permanent job and was asked, could I type? Well, it wasn't quite that austere, but what they had available for me was a program analyst job, not supervisory. I would come down to work for Michael Kurtz, who was going to be head of program analysis. Well, I didn't know too much about program analysis, but they knew me well enough to know that my head kind of worked that way and that I would basically be able to learn on the job. And I came down in the spring of '85 to work for Michael. And a couple of things I do remember about that—I remember about this uncertainty every day coming into the office. What in the heck am I doing? And do I really know how to do this? And Michael was very good. He was a very good teacher his whole life. And he was quite helpful to me in that role. So, you know, I can't remember how many months. I mean, it wasn't a lot of months that I was in that job when one of the other supervisors who was on the same level as Michael kind of crashed and burned. His name was John Kelly. And I can't remember what he did or what he said or what happened that kind of spun him out of favor, but the next thing I know, I'm sitting in front of Adrienne Thomas again and she's saying, \"We need your help in running the Directives Management Branch.\" Okay, so here we are in something else that I don't know a whole heck of a lot about, but I had written procedures manuals for the National Audiovisual Center and the Department of Education and had a lot of on-the-job training. I went to a bunch of classes. I did a lot of practicums, and I learned how to write procedures—not the most exciting writing in the world, but once again, it works kind of the way my head works, kind of one step at a time, and what's the logical next thing to do and what are your choices and in which direction should this flowchart go? Et cetera. Et cetera. So I took over as head of Directives Management. Well, the significant thing about that for the National Archives at that moment in time is that here we are a small portion of GSA, and now we are our own independent agency. So all of the reports through the years that have been generated by GSA on our behalf, that we were just a feeder to GAO and the Congress and you name it, all of a sudden, all those reports were our responsibility. Second of all, we had no procedures on how to do anything from procurement to finance to property management. You know, you name it in terms of what you would have to do to run an organization. We didn't have any of those procedures. So it was going to be the responsibility of this Directives Management Branch to, first of all, establish a system for directives. Second of all, basically start writing this gargantuan, massive volume of how the agency was going to operate and do it quickly, because we were doing all those things on a daily basis but didn't really have any directives or policy to point to as to what we were doing. We certainly had some of GSA's material. We had picked up some employees from GSA in the transition. None of them were happy. None of them. You know, again, just picture GSA, who is all ticked off about the fact that the Archives was breaking off and being this independent entity. They weren't exactly going to give us the cream of the crop, shall we say, when transition occurred. In fact, they were going to take the opportunity to dump a number of folks that had not been the best. And now there were exceptions, but the people that I had reporting to me were not a chapter in the best and the brightest. So consequently, I had a big job to do and I had some people who were retired in place. And then I had a bunch of old loyal National Archives folks who I knew that I could rely on to do an awful lot of the work, and a portion of the writing I was going to do myself. I picked up along the way Shelby Bale, who had been a long-time editor for the National Archives. He certainly did not see himself as a directives writer, but he basically knew how to write. But, you know, he was suddenly going from being the guy who edited _Prologue_ and edited scholarly articles to writing an article on how to buy toilet paper and how to control real property. He wasn't very happy. So again, my recollection is that it was a challenging time. But just like any elephant that you have to eat, we cut it into very, very small pieces. We attacked it. We established a system of goals and accountability and timeframes. And within, I think, 18 months, we had ourselves a procedures manual, at least one that was going to serve us until something else or something better came along. So, as I look back at my career at the National Archives, having been involved in writing that manual, there was nothing that we did at the National Archives for the rest of my career that I didn't at least know something about. I was there when, due to some pretty high-profile thefts of records from our research room, we developed what we coined as the \"clean search room\" or the clean research room policy, where people were no longer going to be able to bring briefcases in. We set up a system of lockers. Gentlemen had to put their jackets away. Women couldn't bring large purses. You couldn't bring your own note material. And we provided paper and pencils. Et cetera. Et cetera. And so, in terms of writing procedures and writing directives, everything from basic administrative jobs in the agency to things as important as serving records to researchers, I was involved. So from then on in my career, when I went up the chain in the policy group and eventually ran the policy organization, I pretty much knew all the policies. And when I moved on from there later on to Congressional Affairs and I had to go on the Hill and talk about what the National Archives did, I was always doing it from the basis of something that, once again, when I looked at it initially, I said, \"You want me to do what?\" to something that when I look back on it in my career, it was a foundational skill and experience that I had that I really didn't appreciate. The other thing that it did, it taught me how to supervise difficult people. When you've got a staff of people and I had, I guess, 12 people that were reporting to me and at least 4 or 5 of them, the GSA folks, didn't want to be there. You know, they didn't like me, didn't like being shoveled over to the National Archives. They certainly knew why they were there. We knew why they were there. And so consequently, it did teach me a lot about supervising people who are hard to supervise, and that was a valuable experience as well. There were times when I was in the middle of it that I thought, oh, my God, you know, another day of this, and I'm going to climb up there where the eagles are on the corners of the building and jump into Seventh Street. But anyway, it was all quite an interesting endeavor, shall we say." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you have any lessons learned from having to supervise difficult people?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "You know, one of the things about that was I did a lot of listening and they needed somebody to vent to, which I figured out later on they were angry. They felt like they had been betrayed by their former agency that they had put a lot of time into. And everybody has different abilities. Everybody has different skills. And there had not been a lot of attention given to the skills that these people had. When these transitions were made, they just kind of wanted them out and we got them. So listening—and not just listening, but actually hearing what people say to you, I found to be important. And also, the silk glove along with the hammer—I mean, we had to discipline at least two of those people because of lateness, absenteeism, and insubordination. And so you listen, you listen, you listen, and you try to adjust things, but at the end of the day, it was starting to affect the morale of everybody in the organization that these folks aren't showing up. And when they are showing up, they're not working. So again, I was writing the manual on disciplinary actions, so I didn't have to go too far to find practical examples as we were writing those manuals as to what to do and what works and what doesn't work. And, you know, first letter, second letter, and three strikes you're out kind of thing. So anyway, it was interesting. And I can't say that I was or ever became friends with any of those individuals, but several of them did produce and did help with what the eventual goals were for the office. So anyway." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "For these, the manual and all of these policies and procedures that you were helping to create, where did you get the information from? Were you completely starting from scratch or were you starting with GSA's policies and then creating it or gearing it toward NARA? Or how did you go about creating those?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "For the general administrative functions, I started out looking at what GSA had. They were a big organization, and they were an organization that was not known for their efficiency. So first of all, we had to scale a lot of their policies to something that was more reasonable for an organization our size. One of the things that I still think back on from time to time and laugh about—I had a couple of people that worked for me that came up with a catalog of all of the reports that independent agencies are required to submit each year to go to Congress, to all these other regulatory agencies, and there are literally hundreds and hundreds of these reports that are required every year. And I looked at that list of reports and in talking to our staff, I said, “We don't have the staff to do those reports in a million years.” And I said, “You know what? Why don't we do this? Let's not submit any of those reports the first year and see what happens.” And that's what we did. And about, I would say of the hundreds and hundreds of reports, maybe for 40 of them the responsible agency followed up with us and said, \"Hey, where's your report?\" And for those 40, we said, \"Oh, okay, fine. We're working on it right here. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.\" But, you know, we didn't know what they were talking about. We would say, \"Could you send us GSA's report from last year?\" And they said, \"Sure, we'll send that to you.\" So through that means, we kind of worked our way through. But there were like literally 500 reports that we looked at [LAUGHS]. This is the lovely grind in Washington, DC, that laws are written, regulations are written from laws, responsibilities of the night watchman in terms of taking care of all these numbers, and does anybody ever read them and does anybody ever care? We found out that in the vast majority of cases, no, but we pared it down through one year of mismanagement. We pared it down to those that were important. So there you go." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So NARA didn't get in trouble for not submitting some of these reports?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "No, no. And you know, I always thought there was probably some guy on the end of a bunch of those reports saying to himself, \"Boy, thank God, I only got ten of these this year.\" [LAUGHS] So anyway." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So then you were the Director of Policy and Program Analysis, right?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Exactly. And I had a couple of people. Then I had, you know, folks that reported to me who ran directives and who ran program analysis. And that was fun. I mean, I enjoyed that job a great deal until I got into Congressional Affairs. I think I enjoyed that job as much as any job because I just had three branches reporting to me. It was a small number of people. I guess our total staff contingent was probably 25 at the top. And everybody worked together. Well, I mean, I can still say that the folks that were my branch chiefs in those years were good people who worked hard, and they really did a good job and so that was enjoyable. And it really started to lead me in the direction of Congressional Affairs. There was an interesting dual track that also came out of independence. Some of which were good, and some of them were not so good. And the dual track was this—there were some people who came over from GSA or who we received some pretty strong direction to hire, that the top echelon of the agency did not think were the right choices. And I won't go into names here, but we did have an individual that came over as head of Congressional Affairs. Claudine Weiher and, I guess, Bob Warner and then Don Wilson did not feel that they were the right choice. And it was really a big matter of trust because the sensitivity of congressional affairs is such that since it's where all of your appropriations come from, it's where you're enabling law came from. It's where amendments to that law are vitally important for your long-term existence as an agency. The first element that you've got to have in that relationship between Congressional Affairs and whoever's on top is trust. And that trust wasn't there. So here's the dual track. I became kind of the shadow Director of Congressional Affairs long before I had the title. I was called in and asked by Claudine Weiher and Don Wilson to do things like track legislation that would be of importance to the National Archives and to identify laws on the Hill that we really needed to know about and really needed to weigh in on, things that had to do with the Government Printing Office, things that had to do with possible mission creep along the lines of the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian or whomever else that would start to pinch our toes, given the fact that we were the new kid on the block. And there was a lot of concern that, in these early stages of the existence of the National Archives, we would be taken advantage of in the legislative process and end up not having either the responsibilities or the money for those responsibilities that we would have. So I set up a system and, basically, it was a subscription system that you could get in the very, very early stages of database scanning based on keywords that would pop things up that we would be interested in. And very quietly, when things would pop up along those lines, I would go to the front office and talk to them about what was going on, what we thought we would establish, some strategies about what to do about it. And I would quietly, you know, make contact with folks and kind of move those things ahead. While at the same time, the person who was technically the head of Congressional Affairs was going through the day-to-day routine of guests coming to the Archives and showing people around and the mundane kind of day-to-day track with our finance people about our appropriations and those kinds of things. And it wasn't a great surprise to them that there was more going on than just what was coming out of their office. But anyway, I chose not to spend a lot of time thinking about the rightness or wrongness of this and more along the lines of what I was learning and what I was gaining and how much I liked that process. And at one point, actually, when the individual and the other office kind of moved on, there was some esoteric term, and I can't even remember what it was, but we changed the name of my office to basically include legislative affairs. I think we might have called it Legislative Affairs. I can't remember. I remember arguing with Claudine in particular about what we were going to call it. But before Congressional Affairs was a separate and independent office, it was eventually kind of officially combined with my job in policy and program analysis. But I do remember that in those years, they did not want me to have the whole job because they also, I think, valued my work that I was doing in policy. So I was kind of doing both. But once again, you know, it was a good place to do both given the fact that I was working on the day-to-day policies. At the same time, I was on the Hill trying to explain to people what we did, how we did it, and why we did it the way we did it. So that was kind of a cool transition." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Now this was all before you officially were in Congressional Affairs?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Right. And let me tell you, if I could. One of the big mistakes that I've always thought that the agency made in the upper echelons, in coming out of independence—and it took a number of years for the chickens to come home to roost in terms of what caused the agency such upheaval. But it eventually happened, and when it happened, that’s how I got the independent job of Congressional Affairs. You know, there was a lot of hubris, for lack of a better term, involved in becoming an independent agency. There were a lot of victory celebrations. There was a lot of beating our breasts and, you know, and Huzzah! Huzzah! We have slain the dragon. We have broken out from our bondage. And, in fact, the buttons that were created as part of independence said, \"Free at Last.\"" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "So there was a sense in the agency that this had been a generational battle within the Archives. The shoes didn't fit from day one in terms of being part of GSA—they were the guys that took care of the buildings and grounds and bought the cars. They were the administrative arm of the federal government. And I think the Archives spent an awful lot of time with a great deal of anger about that, and when those chains were finally broken—and they were broken by the most modest of individuals, Bob Warner, who was the Archivist that deserves all the credit. He was the most mild-mannered, kind individual. And he did it with basically his own negotiation skills and his ability to bring people together. He had a cadre of people working for him who were, shall we say, the guerrilla warfare team. And I was kind of on the edge of that after we became independent. But that hubris to say, \"We've done this and we're, you know ... \" Unfortunately, in some respects, we just kept on fighting. GSA had been the enemy, and then suddenly Congress and our oversight committees became the enemy. GSA had been telling us what to do since 1949, and I think suddenly there was a sense that, hell, now Congress is telling us what to do. Who do they think they are? Huh? And that got us in trouble. A couple of the guys really, really had been the behind-the-scenes heroes on Capitol Hill, staff people, very powerful staff, people who had done an awful lot on a day-to-day basis to see that we were going to become independent." }, { "speaker": "Two of them in particular", "text": "Ed Gleiman. Ed was with the House Government Operations Committee. And in all those years, he eventually became staff director and chief counsel of the Senate Committee on Government Affairs. He reported to David Pryor of Arkansas. Ed put an awful lot of blood, sweat, and tears into independence. He was one of the behind-the-scenes guys who really believed in independence, but he realized that the National Archives had not been the best managed place with or without GSA over the years, but thought that Bob Warner was the right man at the right time and could really, really lead us into a very good place and worked very hard behind-the-scenes, along with a cabal of people from the history world and the federal history world that were kind of behind-the-scenes. And Ed did a lot of that work. The other guy that did a lot of that work was a guy named Bob Gellman. Gellman, I think, spent his whole career with the Government Operations Committee, again, our oversight committee in Congress—GSA's oversight committee—and then, of course, our oversight committee. And the first thing that we did when we became independent is, I think, we forgot to thank those guys. We had a party. We had pictures taken. We had them up there at the front for all the celebrations. And I remember Ed Meese, who had been a very important part of the President's team in shepherding this independent legislation through for President Reagan. They were all up there, and they all made the picture. I think it was also John Daniels, whose wife Maygene had been a GSA intern with me and who eventually worked for NARA. John was another behind the scenes staffer that enabled independence. Anyway, they were up there in the phalanx of the photograph, and they all got thanked on that day. But in the days that followed, not only were they no longer thanked, but I think in the minds of a lot of people in the Archives, they became the enemy. They were once again, all of a sudden, \"Oh, my God, we're out from under GSA, and now we've got these oversight committees that are all over us in terms of what we're going to do and how we're going to do it.\" And so a lot of resentment, well, it built over a period of time. And this is months and years, but it built over a period of time. And finally the last critical mistake was when John Glenn became the chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. John Glenn was our oversight chairman. And John Glenn's baby was the inspector general legislation. You know, all of the Cabinet agencies had inspectors general for a number of years. The State Department, the ... you know. And I don't know what the origin year was. I'm going to say, I think it was sometime in the late 1970s that all of those folks, you know, received IGs. But anyway, John Glenn wanted all of the independent agencies—not just the Cabinet agencies that already had IGs—he wanted all of the independent agencies to have inspectors general also in order to be the internal watchdogs within the agency. Well, this was his legislation. He loved it. He felt very proud of it. He got it passed, and it was signed into law in 1988. And then he turned to all the agencies to implement it. Well, I was not at the other agencies. I don't know how the other agencies responded or reacted. I was just at the National Archives, and I can tell you how our upper management responded and our upper management responded in a most negative manner, and with the singular determination that we might just go through the motions. We might look like we were doing this, but I think our top management had no intention of hiring an independent junkyard dog, as these guys affectionately refer to themselves, to walk the halls of the National Archives and be our internal auditor, an honest-to-God auditor. So, it's kind of difficult when Governmental Affairs was our oversight committee, okay? John Glenn was our oversight chairman. So whereas maybe an independent agency that was outside of his jurisdiction or someplace else in the government, it wasn't going to be as evident that we were basically playing rope-a-dope here and just going through the motions. The National Archives had a very well-educated workforce. What that gives you are several things. Number one, if channeled in the right direction, it can really, really make you the best. And I think an awful lot of what has been done at the National Archives has been the best. On the other hand, it also gives you a lot of people with more than an average amount of opinion as to how the agency should be run. There was an ownership in terms of the professional community in the National Archives and, through that ownership, there was always an opinion about the Archivist of the United States, and an opinion about how we were doing our job or not doing our job. There was always an opinion about what we were asking for in terms of funding, what we weren't asking for. And these people were smart enough and sophisticated enough, is probably the more appropriate word, to establish their own channels on Capitol Hill. The Archives had whistleblowers before I think they even coined the term. We were a hotbed of whistleblowers. And so consequently, when we would do things that weren't really to the letter of the law or with the intention for which Congress had wanted things to be done, there always seemed to be someone within the Archives who would pick up the phone or go to Capitol Hill or whatever, and tell the people who are interested in those kinds of things, the things we were doing wrong. Well, at some point, in the run-up to implementation of the new IG Act, it was clearly reported from some of our whistleblowers to the Hill what we were doing, that we were playing fast and loose with the implementation of this, and we were not looking for a junkyard dog, but a lap dog—someone in the agency that we could repurpose into our walking, talking mannequin of an IG. And we took a couple of different approaches. I won't go into all the details, but suffice it to say it was really clear that we weren't playing straight with the committee on this implementation, and we named someone as our first IG that didn't really meet the test of what was expected on Capitol Hill. And we paid for it. We paid for it dearly. Senator Glenn had a staff guy by the name of Steve Katz. And Steve was very sharp. And one of the things you find out about Senate staff—the United States Senate has 100 senators. They're dealing with the same number of issues, with the same amount of complexity that’s being dealt with by 435 Representatives in the House. So if you have 100 people doing the same policy work, legislative work, that you have 435 people doing over on the other side, by necessity, senators typically delegate a lot more authority to their staff. There are big exceptions, particularly in the appropriations world, Armed Services, you know, over in the House. But typically, boy, there were and are some very powerful staff people in the Senate. And Steve Katz was one of those powerful staff guys. And he knew that we were messing with him. And he was going to see that we were hurt by that attempt, so he developed a request from Senator Glenn to GAO—then the Government Accounting Office, now Accountability or something, whatever they're called now—but GAO to basically do a review of the National Archives and our implementation of the IG Act. And they came in. They had done some of their own work, but I think Steve really was way down the road in terms of what he thought and also knew had happened in this implementation. And he got them to do this report. I was sitting at my desk. [LAUGHS] One of the things is that when you're the parent agency of the Federal Register, you're also part of the publishing wing of the federal government. The Federal Register and the Government Printing Office (GPO) are kind of joined in a very close working relationship. So the guys at the Federal Register would see things long before anybody else would see them because if something had to do with the National Archives, they had folks at GPO that would say, \"Hey, do you know about this?\" Well, I get a phone call from somebody, I can't remember who now, at the Federal Register and they say, \"Hey, John, do you know about this GAO report?\" And I said, “Well, I know that they've done a review of us and a review of our IG implementation. And this person said, \"Stay right there. I’ve got something to send you.\" So I said, “Okay.” So back in those days, he didn't turn to the computer. I mean, he handed staff this blue-covered GAO report and said, \"Run this down the street to John Constance at the main building. He needs to see this, because it's about to be published this afternoon.\" I will never forget receiving that report in my office and looking down at the boldface headline that read, \"Mismanagement at the National Archives and Records Administration.\" That was the headline. And I thought, oh, man. So I ran down the hall and saw Claudine and Don Wilson and Jim Megronigle and everybody and their brother and said, \"Here it is. We’ve got a problem.\" So not to lay out all the details, but the explosion was loud. I was still only the legislation guy in the policy office and not officially congressional or public affairs, but I worked together with the press office for what was a pretty miserable couple of weeks. I took Don Wilson into a hornets nest of a meeting with Glenn’s staff. We were heading towards a public hearing, but Don Wilson preempted the bloody next steps by resigning as Archivist of the United States and taking a job with the foundation for the Bush Library in Texas, the George H. W. Bush Library in Texas. I learned more in one month than I had learned in my whole career about congressional affairs." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "And so that was pretty horrible. Claudine Weiher resigned also. I think she went on a long period of administrative leave, and Trudy Peterson became the Acting Archivist of the United States." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "The theme there is, I always thought that it really grew out of the post-independence celebration and then hubris about, boy, you know, here we are with somebody else telling us what to do. And unfortunately, that really is the way things work. And had we continued to befriend Ed Gleiman and Bob Gellman and others, had I—and I will send this out there as a personal failing—had I convinced our upper echelon that I didn’t think I had the leverage in those early days that I eventually had, but if I'd convinced them that we’ve got to get the bad news up there with the good news, it would have really truncated a lot of whistleblowing and really helped us in what was a difficult time—I mean, becoming an independent agency, particularly when it's all you really wanted for Christmas for a long time, and suddenly you got it and, wow, it was a lot more complicated, I think, politically, small P, capital P, both, than the agency thought it was going to be. So there you have it." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. So you think by not continuing to really thank them for their efforts and then us kind of giving the appearance of not following through the IG Act, those were some of the big mistakes that we had made?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah, I would say they were critical and close to fatal. I mean, there were some moments that I think a lot of the people that had assisted us in becoming independent were very disappointed. I mean, people in the history community, there were a lot of people that were very, very disappointed in that. What came out of it were several things. One, Trudy Peterson was named the Acting Archivist. When Bill Clinton became President of the United States, he decided that he was going to get hold of the executive branch of government in a rather creative way. He put White House liaisons in all of the independent agencies, certainly. I mean, given the fact that all of the Cabinet agencies had both his appointees at the top, as well as individuals down through the echelon who were Schedule Cs and political appointees, he pretty much knew how he was going to get a hold of the Cabinet agencies. The independent agencies, particularly one like the National Archives who did not have a political appointee at the top as such, our legislation made it very clear that you were not to be appointed Archivist of the United States for political reasons, that it was going to be basically your professional background that led to your appointment. That has been followed in some following years, not followed in some following years. And that's a whole different discussion for a different day. But the way Clinton decided he was going to handle this for the National Archives, he was going to park a White House liaison at the National Archives. Our White House liaison was a young woman by the name of Maryanne Smith. And Maryanne came in with a pretty clear portfolio that she made clear to us, that she wanted to be in on everything. She wanted to be in on every decision, every discussion, everything, and she expected to be. One of the fortunate things that happened to me in my career in those years is I hit it off pretty well with Maryanne Smith. My colleague, Mike Gillette, who was head of congressional archives, also hit it off quite well with Maryanne, and he made it known to her that I was competent, had a good heart and was somebody that she could count on (and that the White House could count on) to be a straight shooter. I already had a good relationship with Trudy Peterson. I worked with Trudy off and on for a number of years, and she trusted me. And she also felt that she didn't know anything about Capitol Hill and was more than willing to take my direction. She had watched me work with Don Wilson and Claudine and everybody in the spin-out from the GAO report and felt that the advice that I had given was good advice. Had they listened to some of the advice that I had given, things would have worked out better. But nevertheless, she knew the mistakes that I had made and that I had admitted to. She knew that the direction that I had suggested was generally true North. And so I already had a good relationship with her. Well, Maryanne Smith told Trudy at one point, “You know, one thing you absolutely need to do is have a Congressional Affairs Director and a Congressional Affairs Office and not have it part of your policy staff. John Constance needs to be a separate entity as head of Congressional Affairs for the Archives. He needs a separate office. He needs staff. He needs basically to concentrate all of his time on congressional affairs and not do both that and policy.” Well, that was absolute music to my ears. Trudy talked to me about it, and she said, \"What do you think?\" And I said, \"Oh, my gosh,\" you know, I felt like I'd died and gone to heaven, because that's really what I had wanted for a long time. And whether it was that Claudine and the Archivist totally trusted me or wanted me to be busy enough in a variety of different pursuits or, you know, they didn't see—I mean, not understanding what the job could be and what the office could be for the agency. They always kind of held it back from being an independent office. So anyway, Trudy was kind enough to then, obviously, turn to me. I wrote all reorganizations or my staff wrote all reorganizations. So she said, \"Write me a reorganization that basically blasts this out of policy, makes it separate and has it reporting directly to the Archivist of the United States.\"" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Because Maryanne said that's the only way this will work. “When this guy goes to Capitol Hill, when he opens his mouth, they're going to think that it's the Archivist talking. Well, hell, it might as well be, if they're going to think that anyway. And so let's create an organization chart that shows that that's true.” So that's what we did. We wrote that, and I got an administrative assistant and a legislative affairs person who worked for me and then eventually two. And we were on our way. And those are the moments in my career that I thought, wow, it's all been worth it. I mean, I'd always been a political guy. I grew up in a political family, loved politics, loved a lot of things about it. In recent years I've had second thoughts about that! [LAUGHS] But anyway, I still love things about it, not everything about it anymore. But, I thought, boy, this is going to be fun. And it was. It really was. That was when I started getting up every morning and saying to myself, they are actually paying me to go and represent the National Archives on Capitol Hill, and to try to advance our mission and try to advance our budget and try to explain the inexplicable, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And, I mean, that was great. I mean, that's the portion of my career I feel the most fortunate to have had. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's no small feat ..." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "... to explain our mission, and you were talking about the budget. Do you have thoughts on our budget over time? It seems like back then we were kind of, I don't know, flush with money and today it seems not so much. Do you have any thoughts on the budget— and what were your skills to get us more money?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Let me suggest this. Let me look, you know, because it would be an interesting story. And I might be one of the few people that can tell you about what that budget history really has been, because I think there is an impression at the Archives now that is reflected in what you said, and that is that we were flush back then. I think that, yes, by virtue of the creation of the Archives, we had an awful lot of good evidence as to what we needed to do, how we needed to do it, what we needed in the way of consolidation and new buildings and whatever. But the National Archives, as you well know—the record-generating federal government had a big head start on the National Archives. And so back in those days—and I don't know what the number is now that we quote—but back in those days, it was 5 billion pieces of paper. And so, yes, we had some good appropriation years back then. But the imbalance between the money and the mission has always been stark for the National Archives, in my opinion. If you look at the preservation of all these records and then the expectation of the digitization of all these records, throw in the declassification of all these records and the enormous tsunami of records that are out there, it's always been difficult to rectify our mission with our resources. And time and time again I heard people look across the table at me on Capitol Hill and say, “You know, I get what you're saying. I get what you're saying, but we don't have all those resources to give you. You're a small agency. Yes, you have a big mission, but this government can't afford to do what probably needs to be done.” Every time in the history of the Archives that we have had a gargantuan task, we have figured out some other way to do it other than through appropriations. Let me give you one example. When the _Pentagon Papers_ were released by _The New York Times_ and, suddenly, there was this huge scandal involving the Vietnam War and the fact that the source for an awful lot of Daniel Ellsberg's writing associated with the _Pentagon Papers_ came from records that were still classified. And so suddenly—this was in the Nixon administration when I was still, you know, a young lad—but I was there when Herb Angel, and a young Bert Rhoads and a couple of other people were musing about where in the world were we going to find the manpower to do this gargantuan job of declassifying all these records? This was like '70—I guess it was in the summer of '71. And I'll never forget, Herb Angel spun around in his big judge's chair, and he looked out at what was the park that was across the street from the Archives, which is now where the Navy Memorial is, and that was a big park with a statue of, I don't know, General Hancock or somebody. And Kann’s department store was behind there. And it was a pretty well-known hangout for the relatively small number of homeless people that were in Washington, DC, in those days. And I always remember, Herb looked over into that park and said, \"Well, we can start recruiting right there,\" and got a big laugh in the room. But what they eventually did is that they went to, I don't know whether it was Fort Meade or someplace, and they got military reserves who were doing summer duty. And they brought these guys in, literally, by the busload at no expense to the Archives. I mean, they went to the Department of the Army. We said we need a lot of people that can read documents. We need a lot of people. We can give them the guidelines. They don't have to have a great deal of skill. But if they're Army officers, first and second lieutenants or whatever, chances are they've got the educational background or the experience that we need. And I can't remember how many of these people they brought in, but it was busloads. And that's how they started that declassification project that summer under the gun from Congress who had set up some mandates, but not a lot of money for the agency to do it. So once again, it was a classic case of here's the mission and here's the money. So that's been the Archives problem for years and years. I'd like to think that when I was there—and that's one of the reasons I don't want to get my mouth out over my memory here— but I do think that in the years that I was there and the years that I left, I mean, I think it was kind of the high-water mark of appropriations, at least in that era. We had a wonderful relationship with the appropriators in those years—Mark Hatfield and Ted Stevens and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and Pete Domenici. They were people who really did understand and appreciate what our mission was and were more than willing to help fund that mission. Stevens in particular, about the digital. Mark Hatfield, being a scholar himself, had just written a book about the Vice Presidency and used the Archives for that. Pete Domenici was a brilliant guy and loved the National Archives. David Price of North Carolina was an appropriator on the House side and a guy who had been a college professor, wrote books about the Congress, and had used the Archives extensively. So we had a very, very good relationship and a good run with a lot of great, great people in those years. And then politics and necessity and the big cutting government waste, fraud, and abuse, and all the horrible things that happened under that aegis in some of the later years, and through no fault of the succession of Archivists of the United States we had or the person I helped hire to be the head of Congressional Affairs, John Hamilton, who is still the head. These guys did a wonderful job over the years. But it is the ebb and flow of Washington politics that either helps you or hurts you when you're an agency the size of the National Archives. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So we don't understand all of the intricacies of it, I guess. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Well, again, I'd be happy—again, not to prolong this in one of the next sessions—but we're at the stage of these interviews that I can start telling some war stories that may be entertaining. But I think that in terms of laying down a little bit more of the history that really is worth laying down, I'd be more than happy to do a little looking at the appropriations profile and make some comments along the way about that. I think John Hamilton is going to be the guy that can tell the real story of the last however many years. That also might be, looking at the old clock on the wall, this might be a good transition point, as they say." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "And between now and the next time, I will once again see what I can do about making this computer work. The sound works so that I don't have to continually have this ceiling fan growing out of my head when we talk. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yes. That is not a problem at all. [LAUGHS] In fact, my internet went out halfway through our talk, but I've been recording you on my phone. We've got the whole text message from the internet provider and everything saying there’s a power outage in the entire area. So ... [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Oh, my God. Well, again, your smiling face, as still as it was, was still projecting on my phone. So, I mean, one of the ways I worked my way through college was as a radio announcer. And one of the things that radio announcers try to do is make each other laugh when they're on the air, and they do some outrageous things to each other. And I am very adept at just keeping on talking and hoping someone's listening. And so when you went from your video to your still, I thought, okay, here we go. I'm just going to keep on talking and see if I can hear her breathing on the other end. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That was another reason why I kept saying, “Oh yeah.” “Wow.” “Okay.” “Yeah.” Just so that you knew I was still here. So again, technology. It's great when it works." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Absolutely. Well, thank you again for your time. And send me some dates when you get a chance. We'll figure out what works." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wonderful. Yeah, that sounds great. Thank you again for today and enjoy your time. I think you were meeting a friend or something, so enjoy your time." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Well, I'm still in the fundraising business for one thing or the other. And I'm going with a friend and someone who he thinks might be interested in one of the causes I'm working on. So anyway, we'll see." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay, well, good luck with that. But yeah, I'll send you an email with some more dates and we'll get something set up here." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Great. Thanks so much." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Thank you. Have a good day." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Thank you, Stephanie." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Bye-bye. [END RECORDING PART TWO] [BEGIN RECORDING PART THREE - September 7, 2023]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "All right. Okay. So welcome back. This is part three of an oral history with John Constance. Today is September 7th. It's a Thursday, 2023. And I just want to recap before we get started what we covered in our last session here. We talked about NARA’s separation from GSA and then your position as the Director of Policy and Program Analysis and also the creation of directives and procedural manuals that kind of helped further down the line in your other positions learning about the agency. And we talked about the establishment or sort of, I guess, NARA's first inspector general and the infamous GAO report, and then the appointment of Trudy Peterson as Acting Archivist of the United States. Then we covered your appointment as the Director of Congressional and Public Affairs and NARA's budget, and that's kind of where we left off last time. Was there anything that you wanted to follow up on in terms of any of those topics?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "No. I don't think so. I mean—under Trudy, we separated out congressional affairs, and later on, under John Carlin, we added public affairs to congressional affairs. And I had the umbrella responsibility for both of them. So there was a progression there where, initially, it was just congressional affairs. And then later, I took over public affairs as well. So anyway. But no, I mean, that pretty much sums it up. That's great." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Well, I'm glad you brought that up, though, about the two sides, because I was curious about that, because normally I feel like they are separate. And so I was wondering if it was always like that or at what point—so it sounds like this was just shortly before you took over that position or just after you took over that position?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah, public affairs or communications had been something that we had a separate responsibility for when we were under GSA. Obviously, they had a communication shop. We had a communication shop, and there was some coordination there. They never really allowed us to have our own congressional affairs operation when we were under GSA. All of our congressional affairs really flowed through them. And so when we became independent, we then had a congressional affairs shop. I had a predecessor to my role there. And then I moved into that. And then, eventually, we put them together. There are a lot of precedents for that in the federal government. Oftentimes, they will put congressional affairs and public affairs together under a kind of an external affairs responsibility where, you know, it's based on the fact, I think, that a lot of the skill sets associated with the communications part of it are the same. And you want it to be coordinated. You want what you're saying to the public about your policies and your positions on things, the same as you're saying to Congress. So there's kind of a natural symmetry between the two and there's a need to really have the two together, plus the fact there's a strategic reason to have the two together. I mean, if you are trying to promote the interest of the agency, oftentimes you're working with the press to try to do that. And a lot of times, particularly when there are issues that come up that are controversial, you're getting basically the same questions from Capitol Hill as you are from the press. And so having that coordinated through the same office is kind of an important marriage. So I think that's the reason a lot of agencies do it that way and the reason, really, under John Carlin's tenure as the Archivist that we combined the two together. When I took over responsibility for Public Affairs, Susan Cooper was still the head of that office and, really, I’d say that shop darn near ran itself by virtue of her expertise, background, and long tenure with the National Archives. She was a very independent player and rightly so. Great judgment and complete commitment. She reported to me, however, and I had kind of umbrella responsibility for both areas. They also then added to my responsibilities the website. Public affairs had not had the website as their responsibility. So I got that as well when we did that reorganization. So I had both the press office, which I'll equate to that part of public affairs, and I also had our whole web operation and was involved in the redesign of that and really as our growing public face, you know, obviously was through that. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay, interesting. So the website, this was strictly for public affairs? This is what you were kind of reimagining what it would look like and what information would be available there?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Exactly. And I want to divide that between the public affairs nature of the website and the research nature of the website. I had nothing to do with the research online, the records online. All of that was separate. But when I say the website, it was essentially the public-facing website that had to do with all of our public affairs operations. Okay." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "All right. Yeah, I was going to ask about that, too. So you've already preempted me there. So thank you for thinking ahead. [LAUGHS]." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "There you go." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Also, I think during that time—and correct me if I'm wrong—I think NARA's Archives II facility was opened in College Park?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yes, that’s right." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Did you have any part in getting appropriations for that, or how did that work? What were your responsibilities there?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "I did. One of the things that was very, very unique about the construction of Archives II and the financing of that is that, you know—and again, others can answer these questions probably better than I—but in addition to an appropriation for construction, we literally got an authorization from Congress to sell bonds for the construction of Archives II. The only other building in Washington that had ever been financed that way was the Thurgood Marshall Building. That was the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in Washington that had been financed that same way. And it was done on the bond market in New York, where we were authorized to go out and, essentially, sell Archives II bonds for cash flow purposes. And Congress then backed them up with the full faith and credit of the federal government. And those investors that invested in those bonds were then paid back on a 30-year bond schedule. So it was pretty unique. Most of my involvement in Archives II were along the lines of, kind of, where Archives II was going to be and how much support we were going to get for the placement of Archives II. I would say that Steny Hoyer, who was the head of our appropriations subcommittee at the time, really became the godfather of the National Archives, largely associated with the construction of Archives II. He was our go-to person in order to negotiate this bond arrangement with the Congress. He was our go-to person who, in turn, went to the Governor of Maryland, William Donald Shaeffer, his alma mater the University of Maryland—which was also in his district in College Park—to see whether there was land available on the University of Maryland campus to place Archives II and whether that was possible. Schaefer, a very close associate of Steny Hoyer, as well as Louis Goldstein, who was the head of public works for the State of Maryland, which was a pretty powerful position at the time—you know, they were the driving force with the University of Maryland administration to see that we were allocated that piece of land for, as I recall, if I'm correct, it was a rent-free renewable lease for 50 years or 100 years or whatever it was. The details of that escape me at the moment. But the land was provided, and Steny Hoyer was really the one that arranged both the land acquisition as well as the financing package. And I was closely associated with him in that regard and worked with his office as well as our budget folks in order to see all that through. Jim Megronigle, who was the Assistant Archivist for Administration in those years, was kind of the genius behind a lot of this and also did a lot of the negotiation and the work with the bond sellers and the bonding agency that really did that portion of the work. So it was a collaboration between a lot of us at the Archives." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you know why they went for selling bonds for creating...?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Well, it was going to be a very, very big number. And again, the challenge for the National Archives has always been when you look at our annual appropriation, and you look at projects of the size of Archives II, there's this huge imbalance between the amount of money that we were going to need and the amount of money that our annual appropriation came in at. So I don't remember offhand what the total tab was for the construction of Archives II, over $250 million as I recall. Suffice it to say, it was a big number, a very big number. And so the way to finesse that was working with Congress to see that the out-of-pocket or the above-the-board appropriation amount that was shown in any particular appropriation year was lower by virtue of financing the building the way we financed it. And that worked to Congressman Hoyer's benefit in order not to have to try to represent a doubling of our appropriation in any one year, which would have been a bridge too far, but at the same time have the money available to build a 1.8 million square-foot facility, half the size of the Pentagon, you know, for the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "So I do remember all the statistics", "text": "555 miles of shelving that, if you put it end to end, would go from College Park to Ann Arbor, Michigan. I mean [LAUGHS], all those numbers are still in my mind that, you know, were factoids that we were presenting to Congress in terms of what our needs were. The largest movable shelving installation that had ever been done in the world was done there. And so all of those things cost a whole lot of money and, consequently, creative financing was the order of the day." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Interesting. In terms of, I guess, getting appropriations and not even just for building that facility, but in general, more broad terms—I know we talked about this a little bit last time. I didn't know if you had anything more that you wanted to add about there being that perception among some staff that we were more flush with money back then compared to what we are today. Was there anything else you wanted to add about that?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah. Three things during my tenure that were the driving force for our appropriations— and we were anything but flush in any of these three areas—but the three areas were first, certainly the Electronic Records Archives, or ERA. The ERA initiative, during my tenure, was going to be a big number. It was going to be a half-a-billion dollars that we looked at over a period of years and knew that that was going to be a very heavy lift. When we got the initial contracting with Lockheed Martin, Lockheed was then able to help me with the lobbying, if you will, for the funding going forward. They had, clearly, a corporate incentive to assist with that. I was not supposed to use the word \"lobbying.\" I was not a lobbyist, although I damn sure was. But there was a big problem with Congress with that term. So, I was working with them hand­ in-hand going forward to bring that money in. So that was a big priority. The second priority was the ongoing priority of the National Archives for preservation, whether it was going to be through digitization or physical preservation of the records or just the sheer fact that those records no matter what we were doing were, you know, deteriorating. I mean, Ken Harris, as he might have mentioned earlier, said to me on a drive up to Capitol Hill one day, \"You know, John, it's all eventually going to rot anyway.\" And I said, \"Don't say that. Don't say that, Ken. You know, let's not...\" And he says, \"No.\" He said, \"You know, it's a fact.\" He says, \"Even if you keep this stuff under very, very good environmental conditions, there's a degradation of these records over a period of time that's inevitable.\" So you're constantly trying to preserve the records, have the best environment, transfer them to another medium, whether it be, you know, back in the day it was microfilm so that the records wouldn't have to be physically handled or used. And then it's digitization, which preserves the records and also allows you to distribute them more widely to the public. But it was that preservation number that was always one that we always felt we were behind on and working on. One of the things that happened in that world is when Ancestry.com was able to monetize the distribution of records for genealogical purposes. Then they came in, and they did a lot of the heavy lifting that, frankly, the Mormon Church had done before in terms of taking our microfilm and digitizing it and basically getting that out there. So the Archives suddenly was in partnership with some outside entities that had the financial means and also the profit-making incentive to be able to do a lot of that work. So that preservation area was a big deal. And the third area, closely related to preservation was buildings, whether it be the renovation of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, the construction of Archives II in College Park, the maintenance of Presidential Libraries, or the building and maintenance of regional archives and records centers. With all of that property, leaking roofs, sinking cornerstones, and all the many things that happen as buildings age, we were constantly working with Congress to address those issues. The method that I used on the buildings side of appropriations was visits in town and road trips across the country. I took our appropriators to the George H. W. Bush Library in College Station, Texas, the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, and Simi Valley, California to see the Reagan Library. And in addition to traveling our appropriations committee staff to those off-site locations, we brought the members of Congress who were associated with those states, the members of Congress who were associated with those locations—to those facilities as well. Hillary Clinton, when she was a Senator from New York, we brought her to the Roosevelt Library for an event, and those kinds of things where we got both the staff of the appropriations committees and the members of Congress to visit and put their eyeballs on these locations. And if we had a physical need for renovation or something new, we had the opportunity to get them there and actually show them the site, which was very important to get them informed and excited about what we were doing." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Interesting. So it sounds like there was a combination of large-ticket items that were all coming together at the same time that we needed money for. But it wasn't just telling the appropriations committee that, \"Hey, we're great. We need money for these things.\" You were actually showing them. Do they still do that today?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah, they do. Yeah. John Hamilton definitely does that. And again, both the show-and­ tell with the records—whether it be in regional archives or downtown at the National Archives or at the Personnel Records Center—and putting people back in those stacks and walking those halls and seeing just the scope of what our responsibility is, is really important. I mean, you can tell somebody about your needs or whatever. But when they, for example, visit the caves in Missouri and actually go underground and see what we've done and the environmental advantages of limestone caves, I mean, you can describe that, but when you take somebody underground into space where tractor-trailer trucks are driving around in what were once caverns, it is pretty amazing stuff. And that's the a-ha moment that you get from these people to say, \"Oh my God.\" When we developed the Kansas City site and the sites out there, one of the amazing things we would do is you drive by on the interstate and you'd say, \"See over there? We've got x millions of cubic feet of records space over there, and you didn't even see it. You know, it's underground.” So from the standpoint of being a good neighbor to local communities, you could put a huge amount of storage in very innovative spaces. And to take members of the appropriations committee there and to show it to them, and with the turnover of the young appropriations staff ... I know John has done this on a regular basis. This is where in appropriations you feel like you're in the training business, because you've got one person that really has in their mind what a Presidential Library is, what it looks like, what its purpose is, how important it is, you know, and they get a job with a law firm on K Street. Boom, they're gone. And you've got somebody new, 25 years old, who's coming in behind them, and you're saying, \"Okay, let's see. We need to get you up to speed with this as well.\" So that's the cyclical nature of that business as well, where you're always trying to show a new person or a new group of people, you know, kind of what we do. But that's really the fun part of the job, the show-and-tell, and the show-and-tell with a purpose. But, depending on what they see, it can complicate your life. I will never forget. We took a group of appropriators to the George H. W. Bush Library in College Station, Texas, before it opened to the public. It was just kind of in its opening stages. And we wanted to show them what a Presidential Library looked like, and I took the appropriators into the building. There is this endless hallway of skids with shrink-wrapped objects as far as you can see down this one hallway. And so I'm getting a tour from the local folks there at the library, and I said, \"So what's all this?\" And they said, \"They're Presidential gifts.\" And the appropriators looked at it, and said, \"Oh, Presidential gifts? What do you mean? Like gifts from heads of state or whatever?\" They said, \"No. No, I mean, those are in the vaults over here. These are some of the Presidential gifts with less intrinsic value.\" And the folks said, \"Well, what do you mean by less intrinsic value?\" And they said, \"Well, when a school class does a craft project, and they send it to the President, or when somebody makes a handmade piece of jewelry without really a lot of intrinsic value, all that comes to the White House, and then the White House sends it to the National Archives in Washington for courtesy storage. And then when the Presidential Library opens up or when the President leaves office, we store all of that in a warehouse along with all the records. And then when the library opens up, we transfer all of those non­ intrinsically-valued gifts to the library.\" And these guys looked at each other and they said, \"You mean to tell me we take up storage space and air conditioning and shelving and all of that for macaroni art from Mrs. Taylor's class in PS-29 in Brooklyn, New York?\" And we said, \"Yeah.\" I said, \"Technically, those were at one time the property of the President, and then now, with the Presidential Records Act, the property of the country.\" And they looked at each other and said, \"Damn, this is a lot more complicated than we thought.\" It was like, well, that's the law, and we're carrying out the law and these, you know, one-hundred skid loads of stuff down this hallway ... yeah, and it's all... . So anyway, they get to see how complicated the implementation of the laws are that they, at one point say, \"Oh yeah, all the gifts that the President gets ...\" So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's really interesting. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah. Oh, my God. [SHAKES HEAD]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, you can tell them one thing, but then, yeah, for them to actually see that, it kind of makes that light bulb go off. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah. And the fact that we'll never have, in a Presidential Library, enough space to exhibit all of the gifts from any one President... . Those are always rotated. The Archives gathered all of them at one point in Washington—I say all of them, not all of them, but a sampling of them from various Presidential Libraries for an exhibit in Washington that was called _Tokens and_ _Treasures_ . And the reason for that name for the exhibit is that there are some things that are just, you know, tokens, knickknacks and tchotchkes kind of stuff. And then they're treasures that come from the Shah of Iran to the President or whatever that are of incredible value. There was a portion of that exhibit that also exhibited things that were sent to the President as a Presidential gift that were sent to make a political point. And I will never forget. We had a real spinout with the Johnson family over the fact that in the exhibit case, where we had some of the gifts that had been sent to President Johnson, to LBJ, we had a shovel. The shovel had an inscription on it that had to do with \"use this to bury our sons who you sent to Southeast Asia to die for no purpose.\"" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "While it was a real, real statement of the nature of some of the things that are sent to the White House, and it was very illustrative of protest gifts, the President's daughter and the President's son-in-law were special guests that night of the National Archives. They left very angry that we had that on display. So it's a very good example of where our historical integrity at the National Archives sometimes has a head-on collision with ongoing political families, the Johnson family being one that really had an ongoing legacy. Chuck Robb was a United States Senator at the time, and the son-in-law of LBJ. And so you were on a tightrope sometimes, and sometimes you fell off the tightrope. That night was one that I'll never forget. We were definitely off the tightrope that night, though there was no better exhibit of an artifact than that shovel. The curator of the exhibit absolutely did the right thing by putting it in there. But we had some fallout." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Well, that's the thing with history though. You should show all different sides, right? Not just one. So it was important that that was there." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Well, and LBJ was one of the people themselves that we kind of quoted back to the family very gingerly. LBJ was the one that said, \"I want my library to show the history with the bark off,\" was his Texas phrase. \"I want to see it with the bark off. I want to see the real thing.\" And boy, that was history with the bark off for damn sure, and we lost a little of our own bark that night as a result of it. But it's the way it goes." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "You brought up the caves. I was just at Lenexa last week, and that was the very first time that I'd ever been in the caves. I'd heard about them, but going along with what you were saying, you don't really understand it until you're actually in there and see how large they are. We got lost in the cave, so ..." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Oh, yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. So your point of [CROSS-TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Just the scope of a space like that where you literally have tractor-trailer trucks that drive down in there and drive around, and the extra benefit of the dry environment, the cool environment... . And one of the other things that we were able to display to the world was the number of environmental awards that we got that we were able to, you know, preserve all those records down there with a very minimal use of HVAC [heating, ventilation, and air conditioning] equipment, because it was all naturally air conditioned, because it was underground. It was cool—summer and winter were the same." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Yeah, it was cool. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "[LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So you mentioned President Johnson's family. Do you have any other stories from other Presidential families that you had to work with?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "The one Presidential family that I had the most exposure to was the Kennedy family. And Senator Ted Kennedy was a very important United States Senator during all of my tenure. And he was, by virtue of the death of JFK [John F. Kennedy] and Robert Kennedy, he was the last one holding kind of the torch for the family and felt a really strong obligation to both history and certainly to the Kennedy Library itself. So his stewardship of the Kennedy legacy and the Kennedy Library were very important. And given the fact that we held all of the assassination records from the Warren Commission and then the Kennedy Assassination Records Act, that involved the review and release of all those records, we were ground zero for the memory of that day in Dallas that impacted the country, the world, and certainly the Kennedy family. And so for that reason, whenever we were going to do anything associated with those records, if there was going to be a new release of records, if there was going to be a controversial new fact that was going to come out, if there was going to be anything associated with that, there were a succession of Archivists that I worked for—John Carlin, Dr. Weinstein, you know—again, they understood the sensitivity of that to the Kennedy family and the sensitivity of it to Senator Ted Kennedy. And we never, ever, ever wanted him to be surprised. So consequently, I had the job of going up and briefing, usually the staff—on one particular occasion that I'll never forget, actually briefing the Senator on some matters—but he had some long-time staff that he relied on for some of the more sensitive matters. And so I typically was briefing staff and not the Senator, but we always were very, very careful in that regard. I'll give you two examples of some interest. One was during the Clinton administration. Technology had moved forward with the ability to detect DNA and also do DNA tracing. And there were some people out there in the history and science world that petitioned Janet Reno, who was the Attorney General, to try to reopen the matter of some of the things that the Warren Commission had looked at as far as the bullets and the analysis of the actual bullets from the Kennedy assassination, basically to—there were three shots fired that day. One of them hit a curb stone that missed the car entirely. One went straight through Kennedy and hit Governor Connally, who was sitting in the limousine in front of him. And the third shot was the one that was the fatal shot that killed the President. That hit him in the head. The one that went through Kennedy and wound up in Governor Connally was always referred to as the \"magic bullet.\" And there was never total agreement. While the Warren Commission, in trying to figure out how these three bullets kind of were involved, and the three shots that were heard in Dealey Plaza were involved, they always referred to that one that went all the way through as the \"magic bullet.\" Well, the interest was, is there DNA on that bullet—both Kennedy's DNA as well as Connally's DNA? That was an opportunity to analyze that bullet in a way that had never been analyzed before. And so with the new DNA technology, Janet Reno was petitioned. She felt that it was worth reopening it in order to settle that once and for all. And so it came from the Justice Department to the Archivist at that time, to John Carlin, to carry out that review. And so there were a group of experts that were assembled. And I won't get them all, but it was from the Academy of Sciences and from, you know, forensics experts and a variety of people were brought together in order to do that. And because of the sensitive nature of it, their very first meeting where they all got together and, as a group, examined the exhibits from the assassination, that was going to be done at Archives II in a conference room under the observation of some staff who were custodians of those records and basically could be observers of everything that was going to be done that day in order to start this process. They had a microscope that they had at the front of the room. They had a panel of the experts. Steve Tilley, who had the responsibility as the archivist that was involved in all of the Kennedy assassination records, was the Archives guy there that day, and they brought in the evidence. Well, before this happened, I went to Capitol Hill and met with Senator Kennedy's staff to say it's going to happen, you know. The Justice Department—thank God it was a Democratic President, because honestly, you don't want politics involved in this. But the fact that it was Bill Clinton who appointed Janet Reno, who turned this matter over to an Archivist of the United States, who had been appointed by President Clinton, and I'm going to Capitol Hill to brief the most powerful Democratic Senator in the Senate at the time. It, at least, was all in the same lane. I'm not saying it would have been different otherwise. I'm just saying it was easier, because I was able to go up there and say, \"This is the chain of command that thinks this is necessary and has to be done,\" because the position of the Kennedy family was always to leave well enough alone. I mean, that was always their go-to default position. And every time I ever went up there on a matter associated with the records, that was always the first reaction. So I went up, briefed the staff. And the one thing that Melody Miller, the long-time confidential assistant to Senator Kennedy, said to me that day was, \"Okay, here's the deal, John. We're briefed. I'll let the Senator know, but I can tell you from past experience what the Senator is going to say, and that is, ‘Are you, John, going to be in the room when this all happens so that you can come back and give us an eyewitness report of what went on?'\" And I said, \"Well, I don't know that I have a need to know, but I will go back and report that to my boss, the Archivist, and let them know that that's your desire.\" So that's what I did. I went back and told Carlin, and he said, \"Well, if they want you in the room, you're going to be in the room.\" So anyway, I was in the room when the exhibits were opened up and examined—I mean, I can't tell you what it was like to look at the blood-stained clothes and the, you know, all the things and the bullets associated with an event that had changed the world when I was 13 years old. They had one evidence box, one box for the President's suit and tie, and then a separate box for Connally's suit that had been donated by the Connally family to the National Archives and to the Warren Commission. It never really was a big deal or a part of the Warren Commission, but they felt it necessary to have all those things together. And so, the Connally family donated that suit to the Archives. So it's in an evidence box. The two boxes were identical. Well, we all sat down—there were probably 15 people in the room that observed this that day. Steve opened up the box showing the President's suit and tie and shirt and those things associated with that. It might have been more than one box. I can't recall. But when we moved on to the Connally suit, and they opened that box, all of the scientists that were there started laughing. And I thought, \"Well, that’s certainly an inappropriate reaction.” These not-to-be­ named scientists, you know, are all chuckling. Well, when I looked over their shoulder, what I realized was, Mrs. Connelly, bless her heart, before she donated the suit, she sent it to the dry cleaners. And so it was still in a dry cleaners bag. And the smell of carbon tetrachloride, you know, wafted off this suit into the room. The scientists knew what the rest of us had no idea of, and that is, had that suit been exposed to carbon tetrachloride and gone through dry cleaning, there's no way they were going to be able to find any DNA in that fabric. So they're kind of throwing up their hands and chuckling about, \"Well, okay, the party's over as far as us being able to find any DNA off that suit. That's not going to happen.\" They knew then that it was going to all have to be from the DNA on the bullet fragments that they were going to have to rely on. And as it turned out, one of the things that we learned, that I went back and reported on the day to the Kennedy staff, is that while today modern handling of fragments and things at the scene of a crime involves people coming in wearing gloves, back in 1963, where DNA wasn't a big deal, blood was a big deal and blood analysis was a big deal, but not DNA. All of the detectives and everybody involved in law enforcement were touching all those bullet fragments over the years with their bare hands. So the amount of DNA that was on those bullet fragments was legion. And that created an inability to single out the DNA of the two individuals they were trying to trace. So, the sum and substance of it, when finally the scientists went away, it just wasn't determined that day in that room. They went away, you know, basically did their work and then came back with a combined report. And they were still unable to absolutely confirm using DNA the \"magic bullet\" theory. And so that was that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That must have been something to be in that room when they're getting those artifacts out." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "I'll never forget it. And one of the things about the integrity of the National Archives and the integrity of the National Archives process that I've certainly thought about recently regarding a previous President and his handling of records, is the integrity within the National Archives, even within the professional integrity of the Archives, of only looking at records on a need-to-know basis. You can imagine the number of people in the National Archives Building who would have been very interested in those exhibits, in that locked vault, and in those gray boxes, being examined and handled by their friends, who they were eating lunch with every day and were their colleagues and never ever saw any of that, because they did not personally have a need to know within the profession. And so consequently, that was a special day for me in that, first of all, I'm a non-archivist. And second of all, I knew that there were archivists in that room that day that had absolutely never seen those materials because of the integrity of the process within the Archives with national security information, with sensitive information, with very, very sensitive information such as the Warren Commission, that you didn't have a need to know. There was no way that anybody was going to even see any of those records, let alone handle them or be involved in them. And, I mean, I think that's one of the great things about the profession. Another occasion I can recount, I was involved in a briefing specifically with the Senator, Senator Kennedy, that was a matter of Jacqueline Kennedy's suit that she wore the day of the assassination, the famous pink suit that she had on and wore in the motorcade and that was covered in a significant amount of the President's blood. And the Kennedy family, obviously, never wanted that to be displayed. They knew its historic value, but they wanted to get it someplace that would hold it and hold it in trust, but not display it. I think they certainly knew that all they needed to do was walk up the street to Ford's Theater and see the derringer that John Wilkes Booth used, and the blood-stained pillow that had been recovered from the President's bed at the Petersen House across the street from Ford's Theater, where he was carried after he was shot and where he eventually died. Those are display items today at the Ford's Theater, many years later. While they never articulated this, I think they knew that at some point, in the distant future, there will be the public interest to display some of the JFK assassination artifacts, when not associated with the emotional pain that family members of the Kennedys or individuals who experienced that day and are still alive, would suffer. So the Archives has had, for some years, Jacqueline Kennedy's suit. But we never had a deed of gift for it. And so from the perspective of the National Archives, here we were kind of holding on to something that made us very nervous, because we did not have: A) paperwork or B) the interest or the desires of the donor written down. So, getting into the details of the deed of gift, which—because I know I'll leave something out and I don't want to do that—the deed of gift is the deed of gift, and it's in the holdings now of the National Archives, as is Jacqueline Kennedy's suit. We had a problem where the last remaining heir of Jacqueline Kennedy was—I guess her son, John Kennedy Jr., had passed away at that point—Caroline was the closest surviving relative. And of course, Ted Kennedy is a relation by marriage, but not a blood relation. But he had taken over kind of handling the family matters. Well, we needed the signature of Caroline Kennedy on this deed of gift, which had been around for months and had been a very difficult matter to deal with by virtue of the fact that we had sent all this forward and nothing had happened on it. So one of our tasks that day, in addition to talking about some appropriations matters, some improvements regarding the Kennedy Library, was to also talk about what Edward Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, was going to do with his records. He kind of wanted a center for the study of the United States Senate on the grounds up there adjacent to the Kennedy Library, which has since, in fact, been created and is now in place. It was the first discussion of that that we had that day. It was also a very difficult job for Governor Carlin, the Archivist, to bring up the deed of gift. And he did that, and I'll remember that Senator Kennedy said, \"Well, you can appreciate how sensitive a matter this is for the family. We understand the ...\" I think he used \"historic.\" He said, \"We understand the historic nature of this, but we also never want it to be displayed in the lifetime of any of the children or any of the nieces or nephews or whatever.\" And when you have a family the size of the Kennedy family, I mean, that was going to be a long time. So, he said he would take it up with Caroline, and the deed would, in fact, be signed. And I think within a month of that meeting, it was in fact signed and returned to the Archives. So that matter was taken care of. So it was things of that kind of sensitivity that, you know, we needed to talk directly to the Senator. And we never ever asked him for anything associated with the Archives or the libraries or anything that he did not help a great deal with to the extent that he could in terms of that. And that was an important, important thing. I also had a wonderful voicemail when I retired from the National Archives and moved over to the Legal Services Corporation as their lobbyist. My first week on the job, I came back to the office from lunch, and I punched in my messages on my phone, and this familiar voice said, \"John, this is Senator Ted Kennedy.\" And he said, \"I understand you've retired from the Archives. I want to just tell you how much your work at the Archives and what you have done for our family means to me and to Caroline and to the Kennedy family, and how much we appreciate your service. And I just wanted to give you a call and leave you that message. So thanks very much.\" Click. So I saved that message for a long time, and whenever I was having a bad day at my new job, I would punch in that message and listen to it again." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. What a great message to have, you know? [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah. Exactly." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Huh. Did you have any other high-profile cases, I'll say, during your time in that position?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Well, I did a lot of personal work with people that were in our leadership. I mean, Congressman Hoyer and I spent a lot of time together and got to know each other. Former members of Congress like—there were former members that we used for—Lindy Boggs, you know, was a great example. I mean, she was an icon of the appropriations world on Capitol Hill and was a very important and very high-profile member of Congress and somebody that we really enjoyed a great relationship with and was kind of our—if Steny Hoyer was our godfather, Lindy Boggs was our godmother for many years, even after she left Congress. And the leadership, I mean, Senator McConnell, who's heavily in the news these days, I had a lot of work in dealing with him over the years. Some members, like McConnell, had their own personal records. He collected writs of manumission from post–Civil War America, and he was interested in advice on how to preserve them or how to keep them from fading away. And so we had a personal visit with him on more than one occasion to, you know, talk about that and help him out in that regard. And Congressman, and then Senator, Roy Blunt, who was an important part of the leadership, we did a lot of work with him. So yeah, there were a number of members that came and went. One of the things that I would say that my theory always was that, when a member of Congress was out of power, when a member of Congress was in the minority and not the majority, they had a lot more time on their hands. They were not the chairman of a committee or a subcommittee. They were not, you know, in the leadership kind of creating the budget or creating the agenda. They were really reacting to what the majority was bringing, in those regards. So when you're in the minority on the Hill, you've got more time on your hands. You also have less power. My theory was that's the time we can get them and their family down to the National Archives for a tour. That's the time we can get them to spend time with us, because they've got more time on their hands at that time and are, frankly, just free more often than chairmen and people in power. And second of all, eventually, they will be in power. And when they got to that position, we wanted them to know us and love us and understand what we did for a living. And so we had a pretty regular stream of members of Congress that we would invite down for what we call vault tours. Cindy Fox was a wonderful, wonderful hostess in the—for lack of a better term—in our treasure vaults associated with State Department records treaties and those kinds of things. Other archivists, like Milt Gufstason that we worked with through the years, were just great at opening the vaults up to their tours. Mike Gillette and then Richard Hunt were wonderful in opening up the records of Congress to show members the kind of records that were associated with their branch of government. So we used those opportunities to really showcase the records. And so I always kind of felt like I was in the travel business part of my time—scheduling and all that, bringing the members in, greeting them, and getting the Archivist to tailor tours to the local interest of a member of Congress. What records do we have from their home, their district, their state? We wanted to show them that the records that we preserve in the National Archives are federal, they originate from, you know, a member's district. So when a member thinks of the National Archives, and so that's where the laws go, that's where the Declaration of Independence is and the Constitution. Well, yes, but it's also where things that happened in your district are documented through photographs, maps, court records, and other transactional information. That's where all that's from as well. And so to make them understand how local the history is, I'll never forget. I mean, one of the sets of records that we did a lot of very good things with were the records associated with the Mormon Church, you know, when they created the state of Utah. One of the things in the birth records of the state of Utah were Joseph Smith's diaries and Joseph Smith's records that really became the creating records for statehood. Well, when you bring a Mormon into those vaults, and you hand them records showing Joseph Smith's actual handwriting, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, they've never seen Joseph Smith's handwriting. They've never seen that before. And you put that in front of them, you really—I mean, they have a moment. And there were a number of very important members of Congress through the years, Majority Leader Harry Reid among others, that would see that, and that was a bonding moment for us with them. So that was important. That was an important part of what we did. And one of the things that's interesting in terms of the longevity of that, when you now go into the main public exhibit at the National Archives, the main exhibit is called the _Public Vaults_ . And that tagline came from the fact that it was the vault tours that we used to do for members of Congress and key guests that we used to introduce people to the National Archives. And that was back in the day that all we had was the Rotunda. When I came to the National Archives, the sum and substance of exhibit space for the National Archives was the Rotunda. And those exhibit cases that surrounded the Rotunda were the only space we had for rotating exhibits. So when the public vaults were created and the museum was created, and then the Lawrence O'Brien Gallery and the O'Brien contribution to that, and basically what it is today, that was all brand new. And so a lot of this concept came out of what Mike Gillette and Richard Hunt and Cindy Fox and Milt Gufstason had done through the years of opening the vaults up, which has kind of a mysterious vibe to it, you know. It wasn't the stacks. We went down the list of things that we could open up to the public. The stacks, you know, not so much. But the vaults, oh oh oh. There you are talking about something that's [LAUGHS] sexy. You know, you want to see behind that door." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "[LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "So, a lot of that kind of came out of that over the years. We also, when members of Congress—and we had to be careful about this, but we did it, and we did it a lot—when members of Congress would bring key constituents—I mean, there are constituents that are going to the doors of Congress on Capitol Hill every single day. You know, they're knocking on the door. They're going in. They're stating their case and, you know, they're lobbyists that are doing that every day. But there are a certain number of people back in the home district or the home state of a Senator or the home district of a Congressman, that are, shall we say, constituents of high value, meaning that they are the people that write the checks. They are the people that are the financial backing for members of Congress to run for reelection. With the internet age, that's a much broader group of people than it was back in the day. Back in the day, it was a very relatively small—comparative to today—a relatively small number of check writers, and members of Congress would invite those people to come for a special week or a special weekend or a special visit to see them in their office on Capitol Hill, to be toured around the United States Capitol by the member of Congress. This was before, again, the Capitol Visitor Center opened. And it was all, kind of, personal tours and things back in those days. And they were always looking for things for those people to do in the course of their time in Washington. Well, John Constance [WAVES HAND] had an idea what those people could do. They could come down and get a very special tour of the National Archives, usually accompanied by either the member of Congress or the Senator or the member's spouse. That would be their tour guide or person kind of taking them around. The White House would typically be opened up to them through a special tour. The diplomatic rooms of the State Department would be opened up to them for a special tour, and the Smithsonian, obviously, would do things for them. But the National Archives was a big deal as part of that visit." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "We would often start in the Rotunda before the public came in and be there when the Charters—back in those days, they would come up from the vaults. I can't tell you. It's top secret now how they get onto the display now. But back in the day, they came out of the vaults that had been produced by the Mosler Safe Company, up on scissor jacks. And they would appear in the encasements. Well, it was pretty damn cool to be there in the morning with nobody else in the Rotunda except you and your special guests and turn to the guard and say, \"Raise the Charters.\" And the guard would push the button, and the Charters would come up out of the vault, and you'd see the Declaration of Independence appear and the Constitution appear and the Bill of Rights appear. So that was a big deal. And so for these special guests, that's the way their morning would start. And then we would take them into the vaults to see some other records and, after an hour or so, would send them on their way. And the next time I would see that member on Capitol Hill, they would say, \"Thank you, John. That was the nicest thing that anybody has ever done in Washington for my people. And they will be talking about it for the rest of their lives and wonderful and ...\" And, again, so it was like, \"Remember the National Archives. [LAUGHS AND WAVES HAND] Remember the National Archives.\" So, I mean, that was all part of the deal, and the things that I—you know, it wasn't rocket science, but it was very enjoyable. And it relied on a very capable group of archivists who knew their records and knew how to present them and tell the story of the records and tell the local story that might be of interest to an individual member. Milt Gustafson knew the records of the Supreme Court. He knew the diplomatic records. And these people, when they would come to the Archives for a tour, it wasn't always at a" }, { "speaker": "convenient time of the day. They would come sometimes at 5", "text": "30 or 6:00 p.m. at night. And I" }, { "speaker": "always remember one night holding Milt over until about 7", "text": "30 at night waiting for a member to come off the floor so he could come with his staff and his family. And, you know, I never forgot it in terms of what Milt did for me that day. And this member of Congress never forgot it either, and for 20 years, was a friend of the Archives on Capitol Hill. So, you know, it works. It works. Doing things for people works." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, it sounds like. I mean, you're essentially marketing. Yeah, you're essentially marketing the National Archives to members of Congress and to the appropriations committee, then constituents and that sort of thing. I think it's really interesting, like you're giving them essentially a personal touch, you know, whether you're having them on hand to see the Charters of Freedom come up into the Rotunda or if you are personalizing tours. So, you know, you're having items available for them to view that are from their own district or something like that. So you're really showing them the value firsthand of what the Archives is all about and making it important to them." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Exactly. I mean, I think a lot of lobbying. Can you still hear me?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "My AirPods are getting low, I think." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "One of the things that I would say about lobbying as a profession is that you better be telling the truth. Okay, let's start with truth-telling. You know, lobbyists who have a very short shelf-life are the ones that go to Capitol Hill for the cotton industry or oil or you name it, and don't tell the truth. Those are the guys that you call former lobbyists, because they don't last very long. All you gotta do is say something to a member of Congress that isn't true and have them go to the floor of the House or the Senate and repeat that on the floor of the House or the Senate, and then find out what they're saying is not true. You're toast. So, first of all, you’re a truth teller. The main thing that all lobbyists do is provide information. You are channeling and targeting information to a member of Congress to help them make a decision. And, you know, whether they were going to add to our appropriation or subtract from our appropriation or leave our appropriation level to the next year, I at least wanted to have the confidence in myself that they knew what we were doing, that they knew what we would do with that money if they gave it to us. If they have to make a decision that another agency is going to get that money and we're not, so okay, we're going to live to fight again next year and we're going to go after that money again. But the first goal was to have them understand what the National Archives is, what we do, how important it is, how complex it is, and meet the people who are making those decisions every day. And all you need to do is meet an archivist who lives in these records and loves these records and understands that, wow, I mean, this is the real deal. I mean, these people are not doing this for, you know, for an hourly wage. These people are doing it because they love it. That was a big part of that communication, that we always wanted to keep going with them, that they got us." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So, I'm looking at the clock. We've got about, I think, seven minutes or so left for today. There were other things I wanted to talk about in terms of—again, when you were in congressional and public affairs—in terms of topics that you might have run into in that position in terms of theft of national treasures, preservation of electronic records, access to Presidential records, if you were kind of a point person on issues that would come into the media, you know, if someone was found to use personal email to do government business and things like that. I don't know if you want to start to talk about any of those things or if you want to hold it for the next time?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah, let's hold that for the next time, if you will, and I'll think about it. I can also kind of make a list of happy stories and scandals that I can lay out. Scandals is too pejorative a term. I mean, more often than not, it was something that would happen that we had a story to tell. And I was there to get the story out. Happy to chat about that and to go into that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "And every one of those controversies was also an opportunity to, through the press, explain to people what we did. And so a lot of that was kind of taking a ... you know, and turning something around from a negative to a positive. That was certainly a goal and maybe an interesting one to put down on tape. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Yeah, kind of that educating the Congress and the public on really what our mission is and what we actually do, it sounds like." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah, that was a part of it. And that then moved over into the whole web. The world of the World Wide Web in terms of trying to figure out how to do that most effectively through the electronic means, which we can talk about as well." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Okay. Wonderful. Well, let me go ahead and stop the recording. Just hang on just a second here." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Okay. [END RECORDING PART THREE] [BEGIN RECORDING PART FOUR - October 6, 2023]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Welcome back. This is part four of an oral history with John Constance. Today is Friday, October 6th, 2023. And I just wanted to give a short recap from our last session. We talked about, or you talked about, the combining of Public Affairs with Congressional Affairs into one office. You mentioned fielding questions from Capitol Hill and the press, the public affairs website, financing the construction of AII, and getting agency appropriations, in general, for—you named several drivers for our appropriations that are probably still very current today: ERA funding, the preservation of records, and the construction and maintenance of buildings. And then you also talked about bringing some of those appropriations committee staff and some members of Congress around to National Archives facilities around the country and giving them a show-and-tell and \"this is why we need the money and this is why it's important to you and you should care,\" and then also working alongside the Kennedy family—and especially Ted Kennedy—and then being in the room when they took out some of the assassination artifacts for analysis and, you know, what an experience that was for you to be in that room. So that's kind of a recap of some of the topics that we talked about last time. Do you have anything in mind that you want to go over again or something else that you want to talk about in regards to those?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "No. I mean, I've thought about this. I'm doing some fundraising right now for a nonprofit, and I'm starting to feel a little bit of the pressure again of coming up and meeting funding goals that I had kind of put aside after retirement. And I'm starting to feel some of that again. And I would only say that I felt a very, very personal responsibility in Congressional Affairs to figure out a way for us to get the money that we needed. I mean, I think everything that we did, whether it was the tours and the visits and the, you know, the information that we would provide, everything was focused on getting the money. And I felt fortunate. I think some of my colleagues in the world of congressional affairs in larger agencies were not a part of the full run-up, shall I say, or the development of the budget. And therefore, they were kind of handed something to go and advocate for. I always felt fortunate at the National Archives that the Archivists that I worked for always ensured the fact that I was part of the discussions regarding budgeting from the very beginning. So I had heard all the background. I had heard all the debate internally as to what the priorities were going to be. And while I didn't set those priorities by a long shot, I was in the room when those priorities were set. And so I had a very, very good underpinning, shall we say, of information for the advocacy that I then got to do for the budget, and other people fought for the budget to the administration, to the President's people and the administration at OMB and whatever. That was kind of on a separate track. But the way it works in the real world is that no matter what the President recommends in his budget, we were somewhat independent players to go to the Hill and advocate, in many cases, for more money than was even in the President's budget. So you had to be careful about the way you handled it. But we were talking to people on the Hill that were really advocates of the Archives program, which I think we worked on, ensuring that over the years. And so we were generally in friendly territory on our committees, which was good. But anyway, I always felt a personal responsibility and a personal goal of seeing that we got as much money as we possibly could for the programs, for the agency. And that was kind of the orientation of the job no matter what function we were performing. That was really the ultimate goal. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Mhm. So even though you weren't setting the priorities, I mean, you were still able to advocate for and help us get more appropriations for the agency. And you're working with congressional members and committees. What do you think was key in forging some of those successful relationships?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "You know, I think at some level—and I don't know whether this is the case today. In fact, I've been scratching my head recently regarding Congress and what it is today. But when I was up there advocating for the Archives, I ran into a lot of people that had a respect for history. I ran into a lot of people that had a respect for tradition, and I ran into a lot of people that understood the importance of preserving the past. As I jokingly said to you, I think at one point, that what you're trying to convey to them is you are preserving their legacy as well. I mean, they see themselves as key actors on the stage of American democracy. And by preserving their records and the materials about the agencies that they are working with and working for, you know, we achieve goals that put a good light on them as well. But I think it's very, very hard to come to Washington as a member of Congress and be sworn into the chamber and stand there on the House floor or the Senate floor and not have a sense of everything that's come before. And we really, really worked hard on that. When new members would come, we would have, as I think I said, orientation for them at the Archives, where we showed them really what we did. And once they understood what we did, the reason for it and the need for it became pretty evident. So for the most part, I would say the majority of people that I worked with over the years had a—even if they didn't have an interest in history—they had a respect for it and that really was the key." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Interesting. Okay. Do you have any lessons learned from your time as the Director of Congressional and Public Affairs?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Okay. You know, I think the most important thing, as in a lot of things in life, you work on skills and you work on this and you work on this ability and that ability. It really all came down to relationships. I mean, it all came down to very personal relationships with people. And if you're interested in people, and you're interested in their lives—you know, I would typically go up there with the sense that I was calling on friends. I think that becomes very, very important. I had at least one Archivist of the United States, whose name I will not mention, who left one meeting once scratching his head about the interchange that we had with a staffer up there who said, \"No, I'm not going to get you this number [SHOWS LEVEL WITH HAND]. We're going to try to get you this number [MOVES HAND UPWARD].\" And he just couldn't wrap his head around how in the world it was that they were as welcoming and as willing to work with us as they were. And I remember in the car going back to the agency saying, \"They like us. They like me. They like our mission. We have a great relationship with them. And at the end of the day, you know, they want to support the mission. And they also, the next time they see us, they want us to be happy.\" That sounds so simple and simplistic, but I think it is about relationships, and it is about, you know—they knew that if there was something negative at the Archives, if there were something that was going to make them or their boss look bad, I would be the first one on the phone with them to tell them, \"Boy, we really screwed up, and here you go. This is going to be embarrassing. It's going to be in the press. This is our answer. This is what we're doing to fix it.\" Whatever, as well as telling them, \"Boy, this is a success we just had, and this is really a breakthrough, and this is wonderful, and, you know, I want your boss to come down. I want you all to be in the photograph when we celebrate this,\" whatever this was. And so it's both sides. And they always knew that I was going to be an honest broker. And, I think, that was the key." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So relationships, kind of building rapport with them, and building trust, it sounds like." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah. I might have told you this story, but I had a cousin that was in the banking business, and I always remember that he required his tellers at the bank to know the names of every dog that came into the bank with their owner. This was in a posh area of Carmel, California. And, again, if you do that and you're not interested in dogs and you're not interested in people, it's kind of fake. But if you really are interested in people, and you go in and say, \"How's your daughter doing at Clemson?\" or \"How's your dad doing? You said that he was in ill health, and is he getting better?\" I mean, if you're faking that, you can see it 400-miles away. If you are interested in people, it comes across as genuine. And you develop a friendship over the years. And so, you know, that was something that was probably the most enjoyable part of the job as well." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Mm. Okay. Yeah, just getting to know them as people and their families and making those friendships." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "It sounds like, so you were kind of the point person when something would come out, say, for example, like in the media? Like they may hear that an agency deleted their email or somebody's using a private server or private email for government business and things like that. Classified records. So were you the one that was the point person that handled those questions, those cases?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah, the information about those, I would handle it as a first point of contact. I mean, what my goal was, was to always get the subject expert to touch base with the staff person, because the subject expert was also the one that knew the issue with the most granularity and also what we were going to do about a particular issue or a particular violation or the theft of documents, which was, you know, a lot of times. Those were the things often that got the biggest press. I mean, the press might not understand the Archives, but they do understand someone stealing something from the government or from ... yeah. And so in those cases, the inevitable cases that would come up, you know, I would be the point person, but I would quickly try to transition to the people who ran the search room or who were responsible for the records management program that had been violated or whatever. Because I never, internally, wanted people to think that I thought I knew more than they did, which frankly, I never knew more than they did. They were doing their job, their task. They've been professionally trained to do it, and they were doing it 10 hours a day. I was coming in as the messenger, and so ... One of the biggest battles I think I had with the Archivists of the United States over the years was my feeling of the need to get negative information to the Hill very quickly. And a lot of times, the Archivists would say, \"Well, we don't know what we're going to do. You know, we haven't investigated this enough.\" And my point always was, \"Well, yeah, but it's going to be public possibly before we are prepared for it to be public. And the Congressman or the Senator is going to get a phone call from the press and say, 'What do you think about this?' Well, if we have gotten in touch with them early, and I have gotten a subject person in touch with them early to say, 'We know we've got a problem. We're going to fix it. And this is the timeline on which we're going to fix it,'\" then, you know, you basically have created a space of time for you to work in, because if a Congressman was caught flat-footed on something, then suddenly they were the ones in control of the timetable and not us." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Okay. You're kind of a point person, and then you turn into more of a facilitator, in a way, and getting that subject matter expert involved." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Exactly. Exactly. And again, it also helped preserve my relationship with the folks on the Hill from the standpoint that I wanted to get them the best information possible. And they knew that they were going to get that. One of the things that I learned over the years is that there are some archivists who can—how should I put it?—describe what they do with a very, very good ability to explain. There are other archivists that can't. And one of the things that I was constantly doing was trying to assess which ones were the ones that I wanted to put in front of the Congress and which ones I was—I was ultimately also the broker with the press, and my Public Affairs director, Susan Cooper, for many years, she and I were trying to figure out, okay, we need to tell this story. Who do we want to put in front of the camera to tell the story? An awful lot of the Kennedy assassination interest in the country and the people in the country who were, you know, everything from the conspiracy folks to the people who were genuinely interested in that being released. They wanted to talk, once again, to the expert and thank God, I mean, we had in Steve Tilley, who was the custodian of all those of the Warren Commission and all those records. We had a guy that not only knew everything inside out, but, as we say in the business, the camera just loved the guy. He was very good on his feet. He was very good. And he was very diplomatic and extremely knowledgeable. So we had him, and I could list dozens of other people that we went to over the years in various areas of the Archives that could really tell the story." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, I could see that it would be good to get the right person in front of the camera to tell the story." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Oh, yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Did you want to talk about any other high-profile cases that you had to deal with in any fashion while you were the director? I don't know. I had a few things listed here, like access to Presidential papers, preservation of electronic records, theft of national treasures. Anything that you want to speak about?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah, I mean, we certainly had all of those. I mean, I would say that one of the things is the preservation of electronic records. Unfortunately, we were in the same subcommittee that had oversight over the Treasury Department and the IRS [Internal Revenue Service]. And one of the things that was a very large challenge for us as we were entering into the whole funding of the ERA, the whole thing came right after there had been some very large and very public screw-ups—for lack of a better term—by the IRS with their electronic systems and their electronic recordkeeping. And the IRS had dumped a whole lot of money into some systems that turned out just not to work and became obsolete in a short period of time, and it put the Congress—it put our subcommittee in a bad light. So on the heels of that, in terms of their failure, here we are coming in and asking for in the neighborhood of a half-a-billion dollars for the development of the ERA system. And I can tell you, to say that they were wary of entering into a funding relationship on a large system would be the understatement of the year. And so a lot of it was a negotiation with them to come up with a way that we could get the money, but they would feel comfortable. This drove people in the agency just nuts, but the only way that we could get the money was with an agreement. The GAO would come in and really do a parallel audit as we were spending the money. I mean, GAO was very regularly onsite. In fact, they had, in the early days of ERA, office space in the building kind of right next to us. And our subcommittee staff and the subcommittee were adamant that they wanted eyeballs that were reportable to the Congress—GAO being their investigatory arm. They wanted to be sure that they had that kind of oversight. And that was the only way we were going to get the money. And so we said, \"Okay.\" GAO ... they were scratching their heads, because their expertise is coming in after a project or after something has been done and, you know, investigating and auditing then. One of the things that I told our people is, \"Look, if this screws up, GAO has got money in the game as well. I mean, they're looking out for themselves just like we're looking out for ourselves. So with them in the room, we have a new kind of credibility in terms of the moves we're making and the way we're spending the money.\" So, GAO had a pretty sophisticated group that just looked at IT systems, and they were the ones that basically camped in with us. So that was really, I mean, that was the way that that was accomplished. And eventually, as I think I mentioned earlier, when Lockheed got the contract, then all of a sudden I had all of the horsepower of Lockheed Martin and their lobby organization working alongside of me in order to ensure the money kept coming and the money kept flowing. They had a corporate interest in that at that point. And as is the case with weapons systems and a lot of things not quite as noble as ERA, in my humble opinion, that's what they do. They know how to get the train on track and continue the money flow for the development of those systems. And that also worked to our advantage at the Archives for ERA. So ... I think, obviously, a lot of the document theft issues over the years—the whole Sandy Berger fiasco, the much smaller but still no less aggravating disappearance of records over the years— was difficult. And I won't go into details on this because some of these people are—I think they're good people, and they've been punished, and they've paid their dues. But the thing that was the most aggravating, I think, to most people in the Archives was when employees would be associated with the theft of archival materials. And there have been some high-profile ones of those over the years as well. And those are even more difficult, because no matter what you try to do in the search rooms and no matter what you try to do with the interaction of the public, if you have a member of the staff who has fallen in love with a certain document, group of documents, or a category of records, and takes them away, they have numerous opportunities to do that, you know, undetected and undeterred. And those were, oftentimes, the most difficult and the most hurtful, I think, to people in the agency. And I had a couple of those to deal with as well in my tenure. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "In your position as the director, then, were you doing the same thing? Were you talking with the media and getting those subject matter experts or whoever in there to sort of explain or smooth over what was happening?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah. Yeah. And, again [LAUGHS], a lot of times you were dealing with the inexplicable. I mean, a lot of times with something like that, you were staring at this and staring into the abyss, and they would say, \"Well, so what are you going to do about it?\" And again, there's some of those things that just are not answerable. Fortunately, they were very, very rare. And that's one of the things that you tried to explain to people, but from a staffing standpoint, you know, it's difficult in business. You always have the checks and balances associated with not one person handling the money, but more than one person handling the money and signing off and all the approvals and sign- offs having to do with petty cash or whatever it is in a business. In the Archives, by virtue of how thinly we are spread, ofttimes, I mean, it's one person by themselves in the stacks. I mean, it's not somebody with somebody looking over their shoulder. It is one individual. And we are an organization that truly relies on the integrity of every individual to do the right thing, particularly given the fact—and again, this was a matter of even when things aren't explicable in terms of why they happen, things like the fact that we do not have an item-level control over textual archives. We know that that box contains these files, but what specifically is in each one of those files? We don't know that. And so if there happened to be an Abraham Lincoln signature that somebody came across, or if there happened to be a piece of Confederate money that was part of a serial set and invaluable, and if there was something that was very unique, we did not have an inventory that said, \"Oh, here it was, and it's not there anymore. And so who had access or contact to it?\" So when you don't have that item-level inventory, it's very difficult to do that. So again, I have the highest respect not just for the National Archives, but for—in spite of what we're talking about right now—for all the people that work there, because by and large, 99.9 percent of the people that I worked with in my career loved history, loved archives, loved who we were and loved working for the agency. And when you had the occasional rogue, it was tough. It was tough for everybody. And once again, if you've established a relationship with people on Capitol Hill, and you go in, and you express true regret and true angst and true heartbreak over these things, they get that, too. You know, that's the other side of those kinds of personal relationships is when I or one of my colleagues would go up there and say, \"Boy. I mean, this is bad. This is really, really bad.\" And one of the things that I might have mentioned earlier was that, back in the day, when you were relying on if somebody took a document—if they take a document, and they want to take it home, and they want to put it in a desk drawer, and they just want to keep it—that has always been a problem. But if they want to monetize it, if they want to take it and sell it or get money for it—back in the day, you really relied on just a handful of really good rare document dealers. That was the name of the game. They were the people, the guys in Boston or Philadelphia or New York or Los Angeles. There were a handful of people where the top dollar came from if you walked in the door and said, \"I got a signature. I got ...\" whatever. They had an integrity where they would pick up the phone and call us and say, \"Hey, I think we got something that's yours here. It looks like a federal document to me. It certainly looks like the chain of custody on this at some point came through you guys. And I got a guy here who is coming back tomorrow and wants to sell it to me.\" So that would bring us into a scramble to kind of try to figure that out. And oftentimes, those things ended well in terms of getting both the document recovered and also the punishment meted out. What changed all that, of course, was the internet and eBay, where somebody could put a document on eBay, and maybe they would not get top dollar for it, but they would get a lot of money for it so quickly that you couldn't keep up with it. And so consequently, that really became something that was damaging. Eventually, both our IG shop as well as some third- party sleuths in the history world caught on to this and were regularly reviewing eBay and regularly reviewing all that. And so that, in those cases, was what we went to the Hill and said, \"Here's the solution. Here's what we're doing is trying to be out there shopping right along with everybody else so that if something comes up that looks like ours, we'll be able to get in the game and get the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] involved early on as to the fact that this is federal property.\" So anyway." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Huh. Interesting how technology has changed and how that changed our processes both externally and internally." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "That person-to-person commerce that eBay created, while very convenient if you're dealing in stolen goods, is also very problematic. And so that was that. But just in summary regarding all of that, again, I thought the responsibility was always first and foremost, to be honest. I mean, once you lose your integrity, you can never get it back with people. And so always, always being honest in terms of what we were thinking and what we were trying to do was really the key. And in turn, that would help us be put in circumstances and situations by the folks on Capitol Hill that would enable us to be successful. And, you know, they respected that. I'll tell this brief story—one case where Senator Stevens of Alaska staff reached out to us and said, \"You know, we're going to Alaska for the 100th, for the centennial, of the Alaska Gold Rush, and we are taking with us a delegation from the U.S. Postal Service. We're going to be doing first-day covers, stamps that are associated with the centennial.\" And they asked me, \"Do you happen to have any records that would be helpful to that effort, records that you could take color facsimiles of and, for example, present to local officials in Alaska as part of this effort?\" And we said, or I said, \"Let me check with the experts.\" And so I went back and sure enough, within 24 hours, we had identified a number of territorial records and things that we had that we were pretty certain that were not existing in public libraries or local archives within Alaska, and that would be something from which we could make color facsimiles and present to local officials. And so I went back. I had some samples, and I pitched this to Senator Stevens' staff, and they said, \"Oh, my gosh. This is exactly what we're looking for.\" And so they arranged charter transportation for the Archivist of the United States and I to go to Alaska to do a multiple-city tour associated with this centennial, to present these things to local officials, and to be part of just this joyful celebration in Alaska. And Senator Stevens, who really was a hands-on politician—I mean, I'll never forget. We went to Nome, Alaska, and we sat there, and we watched this long line of Native Alaskans out the door at a restaurant called Fat Freddy's. And there sat Senator Stevens, along with his staff. And these people came in one at a time and told him about some problem that they were having with the federal government, some issue of the U.S. mail or Social Security or whatever. He listened to every single person for an hour and a half and then would turn to his staff, and they would solve these problems one at a time." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Huh." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "The rest of the story is that we established a very personal relationship with Senator Stevens—not an easy guy to get to know. And the Archivist established a very good relationship with him. Wind the clock forward about a year, and I went to a hearing and in a nighttime kind of cabal where our Senate appropriations subcommittee was looking for a big chunk of money to be shifted from one agency to the other, our Electronic [Records] Archives money went away. And I'm sitting there at a hearing, a bill markup, the next morning, and I pick up on the fact that there's a line item on this chairman's mark that's missing. And what's missing is all of our ERA money. Well, there were two people on the subcommittee: the chairman at that time—Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama—and the vice chair was Barbara Mikulski. The ranking member was Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, someone who I thought we had had a pretty decent relationship with. But obviously, she was willing that night to cut a deal and to cut us out. So I ran out the door, called the office and told the Archivist that we had a problem and suggested that he get on the phone to Ted Stevens. Ted was going to be opening the Senate that morning. He was President pro tempore of the Senate at that time, and he was going to gavel the Senate in at 10:00 a.m. that morning. This hearing, this markup, had been at 9:00 a.m. And so Governor Carlin got on the phone and was able to get Ted Stevens in his car as Stevens was going to the Hill. John basically explained to the Senator what had happened and Stevens said, \"Don't worry about it.\" He said, \"The bill is going to come up this afternoon before the full appropriations committee. By the time the bill comes up, your problem is going to be taken care of.\" Well, so that afternoon, I go to the full committee markup and, all of a sudden, I get a progression, and I mean a progression of Senate staffers from both the subcommittee and the full committee seeking me out and apologizing for what had happened. They all conveyed the fact that Senator Stevens was extremely angry that this had all come down. They assured me that the money had been restored to the bill. And they wanted me to get back to John Carlin with sincere apologies for the fact that our money was wiped out in a nighttime deal on this bill. And I mean, I'll never forget that. And again, if you draw a line back to how we established that relationship with Senator Stevens, it was the wonderful Hill staff who I was calling on that thought of us and said, \"Hey, you know, here's an opportunity in Alaska where you can spend five days with us, you know, one-on-one with the Senator.\" And it was really through that then that you wind it forward a year or so and boom, there we are needing a favor at the 11th hour and getting it. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Oh, my gosh. What a story. Transitioning a little bit... . I'm not sure if this is at the same time or at some point towards the end of your career, but you were appointed to the Senior Executive Service [SES]. And I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit, maybe the process and some of the pros and cons for becoming an SESer?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah, it was really when I took over Public Affairs as well as Congressional Affairs. The job got larger, and it paralleled with an awful lot of colleagues in other agencies, other independent agencies, that wore both hats and they were typically SES. So I went to the Archivist—again, John Carlin at that time—and I said, \"You know, I'd like to explore this and, you know, no harm, no foul. Can I look into it?\" And he said, \"Yeah, sure. Go ahead.\" So I looked into it. I got the information from our personnel shop. They in turn got the information from the Office of Personnel Management. And this process started. Essentially, what I had to do was write a pretty lengthy justification. They had a number of categories, and I don't remember now what the categories were, but it was managing change and, you know, a variety of things that really paralleled all agencies. And I had to write like I hadn't written since I had been in graduate school. I had to write these long, long justifications. And again, that exercise was—while I kind of railed at the process—I understood that they were forcing anybody who was going to apply to become a member of the SES, they were forcing you into kind of an intellectual exercise that really helped prepare you for the wider responsibility or the bigger responsibility. And, you know, I will be honest with you. I don't remember... . Each agency had a certain fixed number of SES slots. And my recollection is that the agency itself had to recommend my appointment to both the White House and the Office of Personnel Management, as I recall. And then, you know, you wait to see, and you get the word. I don't remember getting the word, but I do remember being sworn in at the White House. Judge Roy Lamberth was the federal judge that swore us in, and the swearing-in was in the Indian Treaty Room at the White House. It was pretty cool. I mean, it really was one of those days in my career that I fondly remember and think to myself, \"Boy, something special is happening today: One—going to the White House, and two—having a federal judge swear you in for the SES.\" And it was good. I mean, and again, a lot of people just associate it with the pay aspect of it. That certainly helped, and it certainly helped in my retirement. But just the honor of being part of that community was good. And then there were training opportunities and things that I was able to take advantage of that were just for the SES. And that was fun as well. So, you know, that was clearly a good moment as I think back on it. Thanks for that question." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. I had no idea that you would be sworn in at the White House and that each agency had a certain number that they could appoint. Wow." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "And they had a very nice reception for us. The reception included these little White House cocktail napkins. I think I might still have some of those here at the house. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Well, that was a big moment. Of course! [LAUGHS] Speaking of the White House, did you notice any differences when there's been a change in Presidential administrations?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "In my career, the answer was no, because each White House had the common sense to let the records management folks in the Office of Administration and the Office of Records Management within the White House really take charge. I mean, they understood the continuity of that expertise. All administrations in my career were usually very open to having the Archives come in and provide advice and training. The Archivist of the United States, being a nonpolitical appointment, facilitated that. And there was always this openness in that. Once again, I'm sure there are people that had that specific responsibility in the Archives that would probably answer this question differently. But as someone who is looking at it from a distance in terms of how it impacted me with any battles with the White House or any, you know—no. And that was what was so disappointing, certainly with the Trump administration and all the very high-profile things that have come out of that lack of understanding or lack of respect or lack of ... \"Lack\" is a good [LAUGHS] ... Just cover the waterfront with that term. Everything that has come as a result of that, up to and including federal felony charges, I think, like a lot of things that had become very routine and should have been routine through the years were no longer routine in the Trump administration. And that has been the result. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. So over the last four sessions that we've had, we've covered a lot of ground. What do you think are your most, like, proud moments or your favorite accomplishments throughout your time at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "I would say groundbreakings, plural. Certainly Archives II. That day was very, very special for me and my colleagues. I mean, and there were many, many, many people whose hard work made that day possible. And I'll never forget that. I still, in my library here, have photographs of that day and, in fact, a souvenir paperweight that's somewhere here on my desk. Jim Megronigle, Adrienne Thomas, Michele Pacifico, and others should have their names engraved on that building. I was a bit-player by comparison, but certainly played a role. When we opened a new building for the Georgia regional archives ... I mean, that was great in that there had been a lot of hard work associated with that. By virtue of the way that Presidential Libraries are at least initially funded, those were not things that—I mean, they are funded by their foundations—so while the ribbon cuttings of Presidential Libraries were always a very fun social event, for us in terms of any individual sense of accomplishment, that was different. And I would say that, you know, the day that I retired from the Archives, they had a reception for me in the Archivist's conference room and—I'm going to try to say this without getting choked up, but that might be too much to ask—I looked around that room at colleagues internal to the Archives that I had been honest with and worked side-by-side with all those years, people on Capitol Hill that came when they didn't have to, but came to the reception in numbers that, to me, were significant, and having my family there that had kind of seen the other side of this up to and including my daughter Brittany, my younger daughter, who was then getting ready to go to law school. She was the one I took to Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, who disgustingly said at the dinner table one night to the family, \"All Dad does is talk for a living.\"" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "[LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "[LAUGHS] But she got to see a room full of people that I did talk to for a living over the years that had enough respect for me and what I had done that they came out that day. Yeah, those are the ones that stand out and all of the small moments that people reached out and thanked me every year for a number of years. It was a battle to keep NHPRC in business, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. They would get zero funding, and we would fight and fight and fight, and we'd get them funded again. And every year, I mean, those folks at NHPRC never, ever failed to say thank you. And they were there that day as well and gave me a gift recognizing that. So that was a real poignant kind of moment in my life, in my career, and one that I'll really cherish. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. It must feel very nice to know that you were appreciated that much, that that many people turned out and gave you their thanks." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Yeah, exactly. You know, you can get carried away. The first thing I said that day when everybody had said all the nice things about me, and I looked at this room full of smiling faces, I got up to the podium and said, \"I'm announcing today my candidacy for President of the United States.\" [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Of course you did. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "And I thought, \"Whoa! Hold on a second. I've [LAUGHS] gotten a bit carried away.\" So, anyway ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "[LAUGHS] That's awesome. So you retired from the National Archives, but then you went into the private sector, correct?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Well, yeah, semi. The organization that I worked for was Legal Services Corporation, and they are a government corporation, a nonprofit. They're set up very similarly to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, CPB. And Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS [Public Broadcasting Service] are kind of, you know—they get federal money, but they're a nonprofit. The structure is somewhat the same. And I went to work for them as their public affairs and congressional affairs guy, able to call on a lot of the same people. And I euphemistically said as I was retiring, that I had worked for 35 years for an agency that preserves the United States Constitution, and I was going to work now for legal aid, seeing that low-income people have the ability to get counsel in the courts. And now I was going to work for an organization that tries to make the U.S. Constitution work for everybody. And that, for me, was the connection. A lot of the subject matter was different. I had to learn the subject matter quickly, but the skills were the same. In fact, one of the people that I called on regularly in the appropriations committee was the one that picked up the phone when he heard I was interested in possibly retiring and saying, \"I'll tell you the people that need your help, and that is the Legal Services Corporation.\" He said that they've just lost their congressional affairs guy, and he said, \"Call this guy, and ask him about the job.\" And so once again, because of my relationships with people on the Hill, they looked out for me as I was retiring and suggested this job, which turned out to be a good five years. I really enjoyed that, and I learned a whole lot more. I met hundreds and hundreds of new people in that job, and I can proudly say I took them to their high-water mark of appropriations. We got them $420 million for appropriations in the year before I left, and it was the highest appropriation that they had had in their modern era. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "I felt really, really good about that as well. And again, I made some new friends on the Hill by virtue of some different committee assignments. But when you have a network like that, people would, unsolicited by me, call the new people I was calling on Capitol Hill to tell them, “This guy is a good guy. You know, he's honest. You can believe what he says,” you know, whatever. So, they really paid that forward for me. And that was something again. I regularly stay in touch through Facebook and my blog and other means with all of those people. And on the rare occasion I get back to Washington now, I go see them. And all those folks on the Hill from both my Archives years and my Legal Services Corporation years are still friends." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's great. Is there something or someone that you miss most about NARA, about your time there?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "You know, one of the people I've thought a whole lot about the last couple of years is Deb Wall. Debra was a very young staffer when I first met her, and she worked for a guy named John Scroggins, who I'd worked for also. And just to see her career advance through the years and then take over the positions of Deputy and then Acting Archivist of the United States in maybe the most challenging year of the Archives' modern history, and the way she handled it, and the honest way that she was the broker for that whole year. Very impressive. And I've stayed in touch with Deb, and that's been just great to see that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "The guy that I recommended for the job, John Hamilton, head of Congressional Affairs, he's still there. And Shawn Morton and Kate Slaugh, who I hired and who worked for me in Congressional Affairs, are still there. They are good people. So it's very nice to see that continuity. An agency like the Archives needs that continuity. They don't need one guy like me in there for too long, but they need people who've kind of learned in the vineyard and, you know, continue the legacy. That's very important to a place like the Archives. And one of the things about archivists and one of the things about people who like history, they hate change. [LAUGHS] So consequently, they're so averse to change. The benefit of that is that you get people who don't want to move, who don't want to, you know, they certainly want more money and they want to move up in their career, but they look around at the landscape and they say, \"Well, who's doing what we do?\" And the answer is nobody. And so it's like, this is a nice place to be, you know? I mean, if you're a walrus, you want to be in the water, you know. You want to be up north where it's cold. They look around and say, \"Well, I'm a walrus. I don't want to go to Miami Beach. You know, I like it right where I am.\"" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "[LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "So consequently, it works out well for everybody. And the people that it worked for the best are the people that are the least likely to understand and the least likely to say thank you, and that's the American public. That's stuff that's—you have to carry your “attaboys” along with you in an agency like the Archives because, unfortunately, the pats on the back are, I think, sadly few and far between. But you all do very, very good work and important work. And that's why everybody kind of stays in place." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of long-timers with the agency, for sure. Yeah. Well, believe it or not, I've run out of my questions. But was there anything that we haven't covered that you would like to talk about or any words of wisdom or anything that you wanted to add to the interview?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "No. I just want to thank you and thank the History Office, and the fact that the agency has this program of oral histories says a lot about the National Archives. And from what I know of you and your leader, Jessie Kratz, I mean, you got the absolute right people doing it, and you've got them doing it for the right reasons. And because you're in an agency that understands the past is prologue, it's a good thing to do this. And I just want to end by congratulating you and your colleagues for your patience and your preparation and your time, because I've genuinely enjoyed it." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Good, because I've really enjoyed it too. So I'm glad that you enjoyed it also, that it wasn't just a long exercise that you were putting yourself through. So this has just been wonderful. It's been so interesting over these past four sessions, and I appreciate you taking the time out to do this, even though, you know, you're traveling around the world and whatever you're doing, a lot of other other projects that you have going on. So I appreciate you taking the time out to talk with me about everything." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Well, Stephanie, it's been a genuine pleasure to meet you. And I will [CROSS­ TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Thank you. Thank you." }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "You're another person whose career I will now follow. So congratulations. Yeah. And congratulations Archives to have somebody like you in this role. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, thank you. Well, hey, I'm going to stop the recording now, okay? And then I just want you to hang on just for a second, okay?" }, { "speaker": "John", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. [END RECORDING – PART FOUR]" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MS. REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "This is Rebecca Brenner, today's date is June 29, 2015, and I am conducting an oral history interview of Susan Cummings on her second to last day at the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "MS. SUSAN CUMMINGS", "text": "Thank you." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Thank you. Could you start by telling me some background about your education and how you got to NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "That's a story in and of itself. I actually have a Master’s degree in classical archeology from Indiana University, but as I was approaching my Master’s degree, my Mom got sick and I needed to come home. But it actually worked out just as well, I choose not to go on for my Ph.D. because then I would have to study something like animal motifs on red figured pottery of the 3rd century, of the 3rd quarter of the 5th century B.C. So, I got home to Maryland, I'm a native Marylander in the Northeast part, north of Bel Air, and I had to start looking for a job. So, I went to the YWCA job fair and they said, well here's a job for an archivist at the Maryland State Archives, is that what I do? And I said, sure. And I went for a job interview, and surprise, surprise, they hired me. And I was there for a little over 12 years and I started looking around to get a job at the National Archives. I needed to go back to school and take some history credits because NARA had the history requirement to be an archivist, and I had plenty of history, just I didn't have five courses in American History. So, I went to the community college, got my history and applied and got a job at the Washington National Records Center in 1994." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Wow. What were you first impressions of NARA when you came here?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Well let me tell you about the Maryland State Archives first. The Maryland State Archives was founded, was started in 1935, earlier than the National Archives, and Maryland has wonderful records going back to 1635. So, we thought, we're a little proud of our history at the Maryland State Archives. The job I happened to get here at the National Archives was at Suitland at the Washington National Records Center, and its kind-of took me by surprise. Number one, I was working in a records center, not in an archives, and it really made a difference. Also, at that point in 1994, the National Archives was still using typewriters and I came from the Maryland State Archives, where we were already putting our inventories into computers. There were some computers at the National Archives, but they were really being used by the records centers, not by the archives. And when I got to Suitland in 1994, they were in the middle of the move to this new building, to Archives II, which opened in 1994, so I was part of moving, I don't remember how many, but it was something like, I don't remember how many thousands, hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of records from the records center here to Archives II. For us in the records center it was a little bit easier because we could print things out because we had a data point system that we had inventory control over our records. At that point Suitland had two halves, one side was records center, the other side was overflow for the archives, and they were typing the box list for the records to come to the new archives. So, what struck me is just because you're the National Archives didn't mean you were the most up to date technologically. The other thing I really was struck by is size does make a difference, because at the Maryland State Archives we were, of course, much smaller, and everybody was on a first name basis and although we certainly had a hierarchy, we all worked together almost as if we were one. When I came to the National Archives there was a real distinction between, not your supervisor, my supervisor was Judy Barnes who still works here, she was very opening and friendly, but as you started going higher up there was definitely a chain of command that needed to be followed more than I was used to." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Did you, speaking of supervisors, did you have any mentors early on?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Well, I've been very fortunate, I've had great supervisors and they've all taught me something. Judy is very practical and Judy, if you give Judy a challenge, she'll first say, no it can't be done, but then she'll figure out how to make it happen. Just very down to earth, practical, and not so much theoretical, but just, this is what we have to get done. Who else? Lori Lisowski who was my supervisor when I was in Policy and Planning staff. Lori has a reputation for being very tough at the National Archives, but she is the one who made the connection for me between the strategic plan and the work that we do. Everything that we did had to be linked to the strategic plan. And that became a very clear, kind-of, is this the right thing to do, or not the right thing to do if it matches with the strategic plan." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "And could you clarify what's a strategic plan, what does that mean in this context?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Well I guess most organizations do some soul searching to start with. They figure out why do they exist, what are they supposed to be doing. For those of us in government, it can be clear because our mission and what we're supposed to be doing is defined by law and by regulation. So, then a strategic plan says, okay, this is the basis, this is what we're supposed to be doing, what are our goals and how are we going to get there? So, you establish goals, as far as I know there are usually 4 or 5 goals, and then you establish pathways, or initiatives to get you there." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "When you first got to the National Archives, what kind-of training did you receive?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "It was very much hands on, person-to-person, kind-of training. I don't remember at first going to any training classes, although I was sent to some national conferences and in my experience at the National Archives, up till the recent budget problems, NARA was very good about sending people to a professional conference, maybe once a year, and then sometimes maybe something else that you're interested in as well." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Which conferences have you attended? Which ones have you liked, can you speak more to the conferences?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Well for archivists, the main one is the SAA, the Society of American Archivists annual conference. It's our colleagues, it's our professionals, traditionally it's a lot of private corporations and academic, a lot of academic. In the last five years or so they've recognized they have a lot of government archivists too, so they actually are doing more to take advantage of that knowledge that we have, and the increase in that population. We also around the country have local archival groups, I'm a member of MARAC the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. Today people tend to go more to, they go to those, but they also do more technical things like IT conferences and yes, that's it." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What successes come to mind when you think of your time here?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "I have one major thing I'm really proud of, I know there are other things I've been involved in as well, but I'd like to talk about the records management initiatives. And I did prepare some documentation that you can take with you if that would be helpful." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Absolutely." }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Back in 1998 the Deputy Archivist, Lou Bellardo brought together a group of people to look at the scheduling and appraisal process. Scheduling and appraisal is the way that NARA works with agencies to identify what records are permanent and should eventually come to the National Archives, and what other records can be disposed of when the agency is finished using them. In the early '90s NARA had a backlog, they weren't getting the schedules processed and approval as quickly as the agencies wanted. Another tidbit of information there is that a Federal agency cannot destroy any records without the permission of the Archivist of the United States. And the way the Archivist gives that permission is by approving a record schedule, a request for a records disposition authority. Meaning, how long does that record need to be kept for the agency? Is it of enough value to be permanently valuable and come to the National Archives? So, we were not keeping up with the backlog, and so we got a lot of complaints from the agencies, so the Deputy Archivist in 1998 brought together a group of people to do a business process reengineering, a BPR on scheduling and appraisal. And I was fortunate enough to be one of the people included in that. And we worked on it for about a year, doing research, coming up with some ideas and working on the business process, reengineering. We actually had a very bad contractor for that, and it caused a lot of problems for us, and it just got to be, no one was happy with where we were and where we were going. So, the Archivist, John Carlin with Lou Bellardo the Deputy, said “stop, we're going to rethink this.” And the team dispersed, went back to their home units, and then about, that would have been 1999, a new initiative was announced, which came to be known as the Records Management Initiatives, or RMI. And at that point I was working in NPOL, the policy and planning staff. And my permanent assignment was to work with the Deputy Archivist on the RMI, and this was so cool, we had a multiple approach to gathering information from a number of sources. So, to backtrack just a little bit, what the Archivist and Deputy said was, we can't focus just on scheduling an appraisal. That is one important, but one small part of records management in the entire Federal government. We need to understand what's happening to records management in the 21st century. It was the 20th century, but we were thinking 21st century. So, in the RMI we hired a contractor who went out and interviewed General Counsel, Chief Information Officers, about what their needs and wishes were for records management. Our own staff did a series of 12 records systems analysis, which basically means we identified 12 different work processes in the" }, { "speaker": "Federal Government", "text": "passport application, border patrol policy, the mine safety administration. The agencies volunteered. We went out and looked at a single work process that was key to their mission and we studied exactly what they were doing, what records were created, were the records being captured, and how did the people doing the work feel about records? What was absolutely great about this process was what we found out is that the Federal employees—I'm very big into protecting and standing up for Federal employees—they get a bad rap, but what this project showed us is that almost every single Federal employee we interviewed and worked with was proud of what they did, kept the records because they knew it was important. We had veterans, VA employees whose job was working on veterans’ benefits, which is kind-of an echo of today, isn't it? They cared about those veterans and them getting their work. So, we did all this and we went to public interest groups, we did a lot of data collection, brought it together and with a contractor's help, we wrote a report about what we found. And then with that report the Deputy Archivist with some key senior leaders at the National Archives, our CIO at the time who was Ren Cahoon, our Head of Records Management, Mike Miller, and Tom Mills who at that point was Head of the Office of Regional Records Services. We took that information and brainstormed and came up with a whole set of goals and strategies and tactics and measures of success. And that first document is called Strategic Directions for Federal Records Management. And I'm very proud of that work, to have been the Deputy's primary assistant on that, and the link with the staff and the contractor. When you look at the 27, I think, 25 tactics that we came up with, many of them are actually key to what we're doing now in the modern records program. And under Paul Wester and other leaders, NARA is at a really critical point working with the Office of Management and Budget, and the administration to get electronic records under control, get the records in here, helping the agencies manage their own records, and a lot of the things they're doing come straight out of this paper. Like expanding our general records schedules, which are the way we get more schedules, we get more records scheduled quickly, without having a lot of one-on-one on them." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Could you speak to the immediate results of the RMI versus its legacy now?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "The immediate results, well that's interesting because as I recall, there wasn't a lot of jumping up and down and cheering for it. During the process, again, people thought it was perhaps taking away time from their regular work, you know, getting their own work done. Also, with those records systems analysis I talked about, the RSAs, the appraisal archivist said we'll never have time to do this again. It's really not a good learning tool for us in the future. Once we came out with the strategic directions and the Archivist and Deputy Archivist really started trying to implement some of these tactics, like flexible scheduling. Flexible scheduling means it was expanding the general records schedules, it was also creating big bucket schedules. Big bucket schedules is a way of putting different kinds of records, but related records, putting them all together and scheduling them once, as opposed to taking each type of record and scheduling that. People didn't like that. They resented it; they thought it was not professional—it was taking away from their knowledge and their authority." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "You mentioned a certain attitude that people have about Federal employees, versus their attitude about the work that you do, could you speak a little more to that? That was really interesting." }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Okay. So, with those records systems analysis and every day when either the appraisal archivist or the people at Suitland, at the Federal Records Center, talk to people in Federal agencies, people always want to do the right thing. They care about the work they're doing. They care about doing it to the best of their ability, but also being aware of the budget and tax payer dollars being spent. So, again, I'm really proud to be a Federal employee and to know that this is a service. It's Federal service, and nobody went into Federal service to get rich. A few of us managed to get higher grades and do okay, but that's not why we went into it." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "And that transitions perfectly into my next question. What aspects of the work do you enjoy?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Well, the cliché, I'm a people person, so I always like the part where I'm interacting either with my colleagues, or with the people at the Federal agencies, or our customers, our researchers. Either online or I've worked more with the people who come into the actual research rooms. In one of my lives here I was the Director of Access Programs, that's pre-transformation. And so, I would get involved as there were problems, and sometimes when there were praise. When we had visitors, people wanting tours, I got to do that and I love that." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "For clarification, could you just go through the different positions that you've held here and describe what they were?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Sure." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Kind-of like an oral resume. Or, you have a paper." }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "I wrote down all my different careers here. As I mentioned, I started out at the Washington National Records Center, and I was there for about three years. And then I actually came to this office, 3600, where we are, which at that time was the Office of Regional Records Service, and I helped send information out to our regional facilities about record schedules. From there I was chosen for the Policy and Planning staff, which was affectionately known as NPOL. NPOL was not well loved in the agency, it was seen as the office that just said no, because everything had, at that point, that's under John Carlin's time period and Lori Lisowski was the Head of NPOL or Policy and Planning. And there were tight reigns on how things got done. It was very much, as I mentioned, everything had to track to the strategic plan, and to make that happen there was a process that many things had to go through NPOL to be approved. And there was a lot of resentment to that and push back, particularly in the office that was doing records management policy. They hated to be second-guessed and questioned about what they as the experts were developing. I actually liked my days in NPOL a great deal, I got along with Lori and with the staff and I think we accomplished a great deal. Again, we became, I thought, more professional in that regard, that everything followed a process. From NPOL it was kind-of like divine retribution, I went from the office that set policy down to the office that had to implement the policy. So, I went down to the modern records program—that's the records administration part of the National Archives and Records Administration. It's the outward looking, working with the agencies, we talked about the records management initiatives, all the things that when I was in NPOL we came up with these great ideas, then I ended up down in records management where we had to implement them. From there Michael Kurtz who is the Assistant Archivist for Records Services, Washington, DC, asked me to become the Head of Access Programs. Access Programs basically was all the custodial units here in the Washington DC-area. This date must be wrong, maybe not, but I was there for maybe three years and then we had the great transformation of 2011, which reorganized the National Archives. And in that reorganization Access Programs went away, and the custodial units, the records part of the National Archives across all of our facilities, our archives, became Research Services. Bill Mayer eventually became the executive for Research Services, but it took them awhile to fill that job. A number of us applied for the job, including myself. It was the worst interview I've ever given. I took it as a sign that I wasn't supposed to have that job." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What was so bad about the interview before you continue?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "It was like I didn't show up that day. The questions were fine, they were what you would expect for that level of position, but I just wasn't there. I couldn't think of anything and it was almost like my mind went blank. And obviously I've had lots of jobs, I've done many interviews before, but there was something that day that just stopped me. So, I don't necessarily believe in fate, but I didn't get the job, we'll say that. And they didn't hire anybody the first time or the second time. It was a year after the transformation before they hired Bill Mayer. I don't think he applied the first couple times, I don't know that but I know the Archivist was doing a lot of outreach to try to find people because my understanding is the Archivist wanted somebody exciting and somebody who was really forward-looking for that position. Because our custodial units, Research Services, are so burdened by paper, you know? We have so many billions of pieces of paper that it's sometimes hard to get your head up out of the paper and realize, wait a minute, there's all that electronic records coming, oh and there's social media over here. So, the Archivist was looking, he looked at everybody, but he was really looking for somebody with new ideas from the outside. And so, it was in 2012 I think when he hired Bill Mayer who came in for Research Services. But as a result of the transformation, oh, and Bill, the way transformation left what became Research Services is the world was divided into five regions, or five entities called “access coordinators.” And what I used to be in charge of, Access Programs, here in DC, actually became RD, Research Services Washington DC. And Bill, for all the access coordinators, the five access coordinators, Bill of course did interviews and when things settled out, I didn't get the job. Bill was absolutely wonderful to me and kept me in Research Services. I became at some point called the Coordinator for Policy and Planning. But Bill was a different, is a different manager than Michael Kurtz was. He's much more hands on, he doesn't need or use an office staff except for the secretary, even that he does he own, a lot of his own correspondence, and one person to help him with technical things. The rest of us kind of sat up in 3400 with nothing to do. So, I wasn't bitter, but I was in a bad place, because I didn't have work to do. I was a GS-15 with a great deal of success, but I had no work to do. So, I was biding my time, thinking about retirement, and one day Jay Trainer who is the executive for Agency Services, came over and asked if would I be interested in being his Chief of Staff. And again, I don't believe in fate, but this is what was supposed to happen, because I actually kind-of came back to where I started. Because the Records Centers, Washington National Records Center, are under Agency Services, the Modern Records Program is under Agency Services, and other units I've worked with. So, to be Chief of Staff here was great because I knew a lot of the processes and I was also already friends with many, many of the people. And you asked me what kinds of things I'm most proud of, and I think my ability and my wanting to work so closely with the people as individuals and as units, was certainly one of my strengths, and this job lets me do that." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Can you, you keep transitioning perfectly into the next thing on my cheat sheet." }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Glad I can help." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Which I don't always stick to but can you describe a typical day in your unit? So, this one." }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "As Chief of Staff there are certain things that I do or coordinate. Policy, for instance, when NARA is developing new policy and it has to be vetted by the different offices, I get involved with that. I've been the coordinator for so many of the initiatives that come and hopefully go, like plain language and hiring exceptions. And another big area is internal controls. NARA has in the last couple of years really invigorated its internal controls program, so I coordinate those reports with the five programs within Agency Services. And, oh, strategic planning. What are we going to do next year, what are we going to do the year after that—I work with the five program offices and Agency Services on that. And then I'm just here whenever something comes up. So, I'm on the National Safety and Health Committee. And it was really important to be active in that because most of the accidents happen in the Records Centers, so I wanted to be part of the group that was looking at, okay, we need to work on ladder safety, we need to get better ladders. We need to train people. This year in 2015 the emphasis is on lifting, so how do we get the videos and the training out to the people? I've also been involved in the continuity of operations planning as well." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What are some accidents that have happened, increase the need for that?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Well, as it turned out, we had bought ladders some time ago, I don't remember how many years ago, that had a flaw in the welding. So, as people were stepping on the ladder with a box that weighs 50-60 pounds, the step would break, so people would fall off the ladder with the box. We also have bad habits. When you work in the Records Center sometimes you know you could just kind-of climb up one or two steps, or one or two shelves and put that box on the shelf. The shelves aren't designed to be climbed on." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "That sounds terrifying." }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Yes. When I first started at Suitland, I didn't have ladder training, and the shelving is 15 feet tall, the ladders are 15 feet tall, except you're not supposed to stand on the top one and I kind-of did to get the box where it needed to go, and I was scared to death and then I realized later, that was the wrong thing to do." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Oh, my goodness." }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Yeah. So, I could have been one of those statistics." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "A theme that's come up, moving away from dangers in the Archives, a theme that's come up repeatedly is the transition to newer technologies in the 21st century and more digitization of records and then also records that come in digitally that were never on paper. Can you speak to technological changes over the course of your time at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Well, as I mentioned, when I started at the National Archives, I was shocked by the lack of technology on the archives side. The Record Center, because of the volume of records and the constant movement, in the Records Centers records come in, they can be pulled back, they can come in again. And at Suitland alone we were talking about 20 stack areas, each the size of a football field, each holding 200,000 cubic feet of records. So, the need to have inventory control was paramount. So, they had the data point system that tracked that. And then the computers started coming in at that point, and we did our work, we switched to the PCs for tracking records and accessions coming and going, being either transferred or destroyed. Let's see, I can't think of anything else right away between my time here and our central office, and then when I went to NPOL, it's pretty much, I just remember PC use as we do it now. But when I went down to Records Management, and as we were trying to really promote ourselves to the Federal agencies and the requirements and the best practices and getting them out, at that point we had an annual conference called the Records Administration Conference, or RACO. And we would get 600 people to come to this conference. And as part of the PR we wanted to do a blog, and NARA didn't accept blogs, NARA didn't do any blogs, there were legal restrictions, there were technology restrictions, so I actually was one of the forces behind pushing through the changes that needed to happen with legal requirements and security requirements so that to promote RACO, this conference, I actually wrote NARA's very first blog. I was NARA's first blogger. I can't say that I've been extremely active since then." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "I have a blog post coming out tomorrow." }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Do you? Excellent. Excellent. And now it's such a part of what we do." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What was the response to the first blog post ever?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "There was more of an excitement that we did it, you know? It was not that big a deal in terms of content, but we did get it out to agencies and they saw it. It was really a big deal because our head of security was really anti-doing it. And then the lawyers, I forget what you call it, but there's a whole bunch of legal requirements for doing something like this, to use different software, or permissions and things like that. So, it was really a barrier that we broke through. And then it just kind- of exploded with people doing blogs." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "How do you view the progression of that online outreach?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "I think it's very critical. As we know, as I've been told and as we know, we reach far more people online then we do people walking through the door or even attending conferences. And I guess now we transitioned to digitization. I'm a real proponent of appropriate digitization. And I'll stop there on that." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What exactly does that mean though? I'm supposed to ask clarification of terms." }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Of course. In our strategic plan it says we will digitize everything." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Oh, okay." }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "And if we accept that that is a stretch goal, I'm perfectly content with it. I do know that we have many permanent records that should be the last thing we digitize, you know? There are limited resources and finances and we should certainly digitize the things that the public wants and asks for— the things we think they will want and ask for, but I'm not a proponent of digitize everything just because we can, because I don't think we can without perhaps taking our resources away from something else that's needed." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What are the priorities for what to digitize? Like both in your opinion and with the strategic plan?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "I can't speak to what's in the strategic plan. I can speak to what I think the priorities are. I think our mission is to preserve the records that document citizen's rights, provide government accountability, and document the national experience. So those would be my priorities for what should be digitized. The next priority would be what we know are going to be heavily used. Which, when you come down to it, is either citizen's rights or genealogy. They are the big drivers. We have perhaps thousands of cubic feet of NEH grants, National Endowment for the Humanities grants, I don't really think we need to digitize them. We can digitize them on demand if somebody asks for them." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What are, you've mentioned a few, but what are some challenges that you've faced here?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Well, I will start by saying I've been very lucky in my career. I've had a wonderful set of jobs here, and I've learned something from everyone that I've worked with and everything that I did. I think change is always a challenge and NARA, like every Federal agency, goes through its reorganizations, starting in the Records Center in the ‘90s and up until, I don't know, after 2000 I think definitely into this millennium, there's definitely been a bias against the Record Centers. That the Record Center people are just manual labor. And there are a lot of good, hard working people out there who work in much worse conditions than anybody in this building does, and again, they take pride in their work and they were looked down on for a long time, and to some extent, still are. So that's one of my causes, to always support the Record Centers. I think as a manager it's a challenge to be heard and not to be strident. I don't know if that's being a woman manager, or just being a manager that is not in the clique. In any organization cliques form for good and bad reasons. And if you're not in the clique, it's hard to have your voice heard. And if you're not careful, you'll be viewed as a complainer. So, I have this rule that I've developed that I'll make my comment once, if it's not listened to, I don't think it's been heard, I'll make it twice, and then I do my very best to drop it after that. But I also just believe, my personal philosophy has always been if the door opens, walk through it. So when I've had opportunities, I've taken them. And in all cases except possibly that move to Access Programs, it's really worked out well for me." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Are there other changes that you've experienced over time at NARA other than the technological ones?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Definitely. In the 90s when I started here and up until John Carlin, the archivists ruled the world. The people who worked in the archives, the archivists were the upper class. They were our elite and possibly the world revolved around them, because the records didn't mean anything until they got to them and they could share them with the world. When John Carlin came in, he's the one who really said, we need to help the agencies, we need to make sure they're doing what they need to do, we're going to build up our records management programs. And he got funding from Congress to hire more archivists to do what was called targeted assistance, they were supposed to work with agencies, especially with electronic records. And at that point what's now the Modern Records Programs, AC, got more staff, they got higher grades, and more influence. And the archive side has never recovered or forgiven that to some extent." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "That's very interesting. Any other notable changes over time?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Well, there's the big one, which comes back to digitization perhaps. The primacy of the web over in person research. Traditionally people come to the Archives to do research, and the focus and the attention was going to improve the experience of people who came into our buildings. Now we have recognized and addressed that by really building up our web presence and having our digitization strategies to try to get records digitized and online and make doing research online more possible. So that's another major change." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "How do you view your time at the archives over all?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "I think what we do is so important, I think well, when I would teach classes, records management classes at Archives I, and in a break, I’d take some of the people who came from EPA or Agriculture, or whatever, and I was like, come with me. And we'd walk around the corner from the conference rooms, and there we were in the Rotunda. And there was the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. How cool is that, you know? I feel like I have ownership of that because it's our responsibility to take care of those. And then you have to realize that yes, those are our Charters of Freedom, but so many records today are being created that need to be taken care of and preserved. So maybe somebody there will be another Star Trek episode where they'll find an abandoned spacecraft and it will have a copy of, maybe it won't be the Constitution, but it will be some other declaration of rights or something, you know? Something really cool." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "That just gave me chills." }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Thank you so much for your time." }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Oh, you're welcome." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Congratulations again on your retirement." }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Thank you." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "And is there anything you would like to add to the interview, such as anecdotes, words of wisdom?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "I don't think so." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Okay, well thank you again." }, { "speaker": "MS. CUMMINGS", "text": "Thank you, this was fun. ##### National Archives History Office ##### 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW ##### Washington DC 20408" }, { "speaker": "Tel", "text": "(202) 35 7- 52 43" }, { "speaker": "Email", "text": "archi ##### ves.historian@nara.gov ##### DEED OF GIFT TO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN ##### I, _Ju_ _.5_ _6_ _v_ _0_ #### o _i4'f_ _111_ / ~; do ##### hereby give to the t at ~ l Archives History Office the recordings and ##### transcripts of ##### my interviews conducted on ## {,t _7q_ _-f'AJ_ _l'i_ . ##### I authorize the National Archives History Office to use the recordings and transcripts in such a ##### manner as may best serve the historical objectives of ##### their oral history program. In making this gi ft I voluntarily convey ownership of the recording and transcripts to the public ##### domain. #### ' ##### Agent ##### Donor ##### Date NATIONAL ARCHIVES _and_ RECORDS ADMIN I STRATION 700 P ENN S YLVAN IA AVENUE . NW WASHINGTON . DC 20408 - 0001 _www._ _archives .gov_" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MS. JESSIE KRATZ", "text": "Today is May 14, 2019. I’m Jessie Kratz, the Historian of the National Archives and today I’m in the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, interviewing AJ Daverede. He is a senior [](https://www.archives.gov/files/about/history/alex-daverede.pdf) archivist at the National Declassification Center. Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. I also just want to put a note in the file that you did do an [interview](https://www.archives.gov/files/about/history/alex-daverede.pdf) , I guess, three years ago, with Erik Moshe, one of the interns, about your time in the Navy." }, { "speaker": "MR. ALEX DAVEREDE", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So we can cross-reference that. But I thought, well, since we started talking about the Archives—" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "[Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "—can you talk a little bit about how you ended up at the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "[Laughter] I ended up in the Archives out of despair. [Laughter]. I had gotten out of the Navy in the beginning of March of 1996, and I had been the information systems officer for Naval District Washington in the Navy Yard. And I thought that was my future, I was going to be doing IT work. Was not really looking forward to that, because I was not really into IT work, but since that was the most recent job experience. So I started throwing job applications out—federal job applications—I knew I wanted to be a Fed. So I started throwing job applications out, and as spring stretched into summer, it—I ran into more and more difficulties. I threw out over 60 job applications. And—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] And this was in ’96?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—and this was in ’96. And I became more acquainted with the civilian hiring process, because what I found happening is because I was a vet, I was not necessarily some agencies’ choices. And so I had announcements canceled on me, because I was not the one they wanted. And so back in the day—I guess nowadays it would be called an illegal hiring practice, but back in the day, not so. And so they would go ahead, and I would get the announcement cancellation notice and say, okay, well, I just wasted another application. And so that happened a few times, and then I saw this thing talking about declassification at the National Archives. And it was an archives technician position, and I applied for it. I didn’t know anything about it. I had stopped by College Park doing research, of all things, on a tank. I build models, and so you look for accuracy in your builds, and I had gone to College Park to get a picture of a tank. And that was my only knowledge, this was a place to visit for research. And I didn’t have any idea of any of the underlying jobs that went with it, what various people did. And so I just, you know, threw in the application, got an interview, and I ended up being chosen by the Initial Processing and Declassification Division Director at the time, a lady by the name of Jeanne Schauble. And Jeanne took a chance with me. Not all veterans had a great reputation with her. But she took a chance with me, and she hired me as a GS-5 archives technician. And you just start learning the business of declassification. The very first thing they do is they gave me a set of guidelines that basically define what’s still classified and what’s not. And your very first job, at the time, as an archives technician, is to make a copy of these things. So you’re given a stack that’s about the better part of a foot high, and you just go over to the copy machine, and you make your own copy of State guidelines. And what was nice about the State guidelines was that they were historic. They gave you a time period, they gave you a region, told you what’s going on, told you what’s still sensitive. And I miss that kind of directness, because agencies who create classified documents today don’t really provide that clear guidance anymore. It’s just—it’s much fuzzier, to use a term, much fuzzier way of determining it. But that’s how you got broke into the declass business, was making a copy of the State guidelines and then reviewing it. So I did reviews of a variety of different records. What comes to mind—I’ve done State Department records, and Immigration and Naturalization Service had classified records. So, it was kind of a variety like that. And I worked with civilian records primarily for a year and a half or two years. And during that time, you have to wait about six months to get your clearance. So we are in a situation where technicians have had to wait the better part of two years to get clearances, and hopefully that’s on the mend. I just—I don’t know. But I waited about six months. So by February of ‘97, I had crossed over to the dark side and started working with classified documents and learning the trade. And at the time, we were all co-mingled in spaces up on the sixth floor. It was us and it was the agency people. And we were all co-mingled in the same space. And declassification was kind of simple, because you’d go through documents and you’d read documents, and then if you saw something suspicious, you’d go over to a representative of an agency and say, hey, you guys worried about this? And they’d come back and say, yeah or nah or whatever. And you would process it accordingly. And of course, the more times you do that, the smarter you get. I mean, you see similar things in other records, and you just start getting a knack of understanding what all that stuff is. And that’s, in essence, how training was done. It was just one big oven, and the technicians and the archivists and the agency reps were all kind of thrown together, and everybody learned from each other. And that’s how it came to be. And so, shortly thereafter, I was able—like ‘98, I guess, they were hiring for archive specialists. And I was able to go to my true love, which was military records there to stay. And I just started working on military records. I became a team leader. I had technicians working with me to handle stuff. And I was kind of teaching them if they could stand the lessons, because as you can tell, I can tend to dominate a conversation if I need to. And learning how to censor oneself so that it doesn’t overwhelm took me a while to figure out. So, yeah. I tended to—you know, the firehose effect is—I’m there. So I was doing that for a while with military records, primarily Navy records, because it came from the Navy, and I could work that, but I could switch channels fairly quickly, and once I got into a record series, I got a good sense of what the records were. And from there, you can kind of say, okay, this is going to be sensitive for this time period and whatnot. Kind of an extension of the State guidelines. Once you got into the ballpark, it was easier to figure out what seat section you were in with regards to equity, which is the information agencies wish to protect, is generally known as equity. Not necessarily stuff that’s in your house. It can be classified information too. And so once you get into the ballpark, you can get into the seat section, and then to the seat and actually start to be very specific about what’s a concern. And so that went on for a couple of years, and then I was chosen for what was known at the time as the Career Intern Development System, or CIDS, which was a GSA construct, I understand. GSA originated that, so when NARA was a part of GSA, the agency inherited that. And, you know, in most bureaucracies, processes tend to stick around for a while. And so the CIDS process was around. All the archivists that came in in the ‘90s, ‘80s, ‘70s, they were all processed through the CIDS program. And CIDS—have you heard of CIDS?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I’ve heard of CIDS. And I’m glad you said what it was because every time somebody asks me what CIDS stands for, I always forget. But you did say it, so—" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "[Interposing] I spelled it out in there, didn’t I?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "—you did, yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "All right." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "But yes, you can talk about the CIDS program." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And CIDS was a unique program. Once you were selected for it, it was two years. It was a two-year program. And you basically, for lack of a better term, interned with a variety of parts of the agency. You just went around the horn. And you set up rotations, and it would be specific assignments with the units you were with." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Some of them, you could kind of call job equivalents to elective courses. So occasionally, you were allowed to pick one. But normally, the rotations were assigned. And so everybody had to come down here to do a round in the research room. Everybody had to do the research room at College Park, everybody had to go to Suitland. Everybody had certain things, and because it was a two-year program, you kind of had a junior session and then a senior session. And so you’d do those rotations twice. You would come down here twice, you would go out to Suitland twice. You would do—so the first year, for example, you did research room at, say, College Park. So you’re doing a face-to-face thing. And they’d figure out whether you’re good with people or not. [Laughter] The second year, you would take a turn in the back, so you would be doing research letters and stuff like that. And you would just do the reference requests. So it kind of balanced like that. So you’d do special media, you’d do—I did a couple rounds back with declass, because that was part— of the thing, but there were more focused lessons—or work products that were involved there. And it was coordinated by a senior executive. In our case, it was Gerry Phillips. I don’t know if that name rings a bell." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yep." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "I did it for Gerry, and then they just monitored progress and saw how you went. I learned a lot of things. Learned how not to be confrontational. For example, at one of the rotations, I didn’t score well. And I didn’t understand why, and I couldn’t get the manager to explain to me why I got the grades. In fact, he went out of his way to avoid me. And I guess, based on my successive management experience, I sort of get how some people would be gun-shy if they did not have good experiences in their own background about debriefing, evaluations, and whatnot. I certainly can understand it. At the time, though, I was very puzzled. I didn’t know what I did wrong to try and fix it. And perhaps he didn’t like my approach to find out why. So it was good things, bad things. At Suitland, I remember the first year—the first rotation at Suitland. You’ve been out to Suitland?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I’ve been to Suitland, yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Okay. So in one of the stacks—I forget which one—in the corner of one of the stacks, evidently, some boxes had broken down. And there was just a pile of index cards. And so—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Oh no." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—fix that. [Laughter]. [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And I get that. That’s your free labor to whatever unit gets you. And you just make the best of it. Sometimes it’s paying dues." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "That’s just the nature of the biz. I’ve known people who’ve not had good experiences, because they wouldn’t necessarily react well to assignments of that sort. But after dealing with the Navy—you know, show me something hard to do. If you want me to be sorting index cards then so be it. I was with cartographic for a period of time, and one job they had me do was sorting US geological survey quad maps. Now, if there’s anything more boring—I mean, it’s just these quad maps, and there were piles of them everywhere. And they just get them by the pallet-load, and they just need to be dealt with, and I was there to do the dealing. So you do that. But the next year, I was dealing with ship plans and ordinance plans. And so it just comes around. You wait around long enough, and, pardon the expression, your ship comes in." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Laughter]." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And so you just got to work through the system and the time will come. Part of it is just judging how you react to the assignments you’re given. And if you have—act like a prima donna, that every assignment has to be of equal quality to you, then you’re not exactly selling yourself well to the various units. And that was—part of the CIDS thing was to expose you to as much organization as possible and shopping around. I mean, you’re taking a look—do I want to do this work? Or hells no, I’m not ever doing that ever again kind of thing. And fortunately, I never had to make that call. I’m one of the few people that I’m aware of that got to stay with the same unit for their entire NARA career. That’s just—most people rotate. And there’s good reasons for that. A lot of times, it’s just chasing the jobs. Because my family situation didn’t really press for money much—I mean, we’re dual-income, no kids, dinks—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—and so I didn’t need to be running a ladder at breakneck speed. I certainly understand a lot of folks who get young families. They need to get some bread in the family quickly, and you just can’t wait around for those better-paying opportunities in the same unit. And depending on the streak, may not be available for months or years. I was able to pace it and was able to stay in the same unit. And that has really helped, because I have become, along with—a couple of others have done the same, but you’re the corporate memory now of things that have gone before. And of course, that’s also French for, this is screwed up, how did this happen this way? So that kind of goes hand-in-hand with it. And I was part of it. And I’m glad to be still part of that. Although when the problems appear, I don’t have much of a place to hide, so... [Laughter] And I have to admit, a lot of stuff has my name on it. So it’s hard to avoid. But the hard part is just going back and saying, what were we thinking? And then trying to come up with that answer. But I was able to work through the different CIDS experiences and was sad to see it go away. But at the same time, I understand why, because two years is a long time." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And the attrition was horrible. Of the CIDS class that I went through—and I’m trying to remember the numbers to give it some sense of—10 or 12 people who were hired into declassification, I’m the only one who really stayed with it." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Oh?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Everybody else is pretty much gone. There are others who went to other organizations within the agency, but even among them, there’s only three or four of them left. So the attrition rate was horrible. And that’s a lot of investment and not a lot of return because they just didn’t stay long enough to contribute. They had just learned things and weren’t in a position to really get some of the work done. And then they’re gone. So I can certainly see why senior management would look down on continuing the program. And the archivist at the time was John Carlin, enough controversy attached with that name. This was one of the things that he did, and the other piece that was not appreciated at the time was—and probably even now—is the subject matter expert label, because as Carlin was in there, there were a number of people who got senior grades based on their SMEs. And that, in essence, disappeared." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Mm-hm. It has." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "It was just—it was deemphasized. And I think the agency is less for it, because we need that expertise and stuff. And they tried to substitute and get more generically trained people to assist in some of these roles. But given the specialties associated with this stuff, especially with certain topics, you needed to have a World War II army guy or a Korean War Navy guy, or you needed to have a State Department 19th century guy or gal. And you needed to have that kind of expertise, and it’s just no longer there. And the difficulty that we have now is, especially on the military, political history side—not a popular area of study these days. You are hard-pressed to find military history courses anywhere out there. It’s just not deemed valuable. But when interpreting these records and trying to understand these records and trying to declassify these records, you absolutely have to have people who understand them. And since we’re not getting the scholarship from this—and I consider myself an amateur historian. My master’s is from distance education. The University of Maryland didn’t want to touch me. They said my academic credentials were stale. So—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Stale?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—they did not want me for their history postgraduate program. \\" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "So in order to get the archivist rating, since that job description is still based on a 1960’s OPM job description, and it’s hooked to American history I needed to do the American military university courses just to get the US history courses to line up. I had fun doing that, and since NARA was picking up half the tab, it worked fine. And what I loved about it was being able to write papers without having to leave home. ‘gCause I could just—I would write the papers, and then I’d go look up my books to see the citation so I could put it into the paper. So I didn’t have—I reversed the normal process—research then write. Well, I could write and then justify the research. And so that was fun. I liked having to go through all that. My wife helped me a great deal. She’s the engineer in the family. She’s the right side of the brain and I’m the left. And so I would show her things that I wrote, and my favorite three words from her are not, I love you—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—they are, what’s your point? And she went ahead and instilled in me some discipline on the writing side, because gee, I—you think I might ramble a little bit in my writing? [Laughter] Well, no. My thought processes definitely go that way." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And so I needed to focus that stuff, and so she helped a great deal. And that helped in my professional writing, especially when I would be bombarding poor Jeanne with memos of various types of stuff. And so the academic side helped me from a very pragmatic side along with the knowledge piece that went with it. But the fact that I had to take such a route, there’s not a lot of people who are going to follow that route. I mean, if you take a look at—it’s incredibly boring stuff. In a lot of cases, it’s dead white man history, which is not a popular topic these days. And it’s a lot about campaigns, battles, weapons systems, weapon systems development, all of this stuff. And who’s interested in that? I mean, there’s just not a lot. I’ve tried to gin up interest within NWMD and the NDC over the years. And people have come and go, but it’s never been a sustained effort. And I totally get it. I mean, it’s just not something that’s promoted at the undergraduate level, and so it’s not surprising that at the graduate level, you’re not going to find a lot of people involved with it. So it’s self-taught. There’s lots of information out there. It’s just winnowing out what’s good and what’s bad. And then being able to apply to the records—in some cases, reversing it, the records inform." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And I get a lot from the records; some neat stuff that I’ve been able to share in the NDC blog." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "That’s been a lot of fun to write. And that’s just little exposés, little tidbits that come through that I need to share. But if you’re trying to light a fire in somebody else, it’s just—people get intimidated by the writing piece or the research piece, or they feel overwhelmed by it or whatever. I’ve been striking matches but not able to get a fire. And it’s understandable, but I don’t know what else to do about it. I’m doing the best I can. And the leadership’s doing the best they can. It’s providing opportunity, because they’re willing to have people be exposed to me [laughter] for the period of time to learn this stuff. And it just hasn’t caught fire. And I’m pretty sure that that’s a problem that’s reflected elsewhere in the agency. But where it’s really critical is the flipside, because the relationship between the agencies that create the classified materials and then we who, for lack of a better term, curate it afterwards, after we assess the records—the creators are going to be all on the side of security. It is very difficult for them to come in and say, oh no, we can let that go. Seldom—it happens. It has happened. But, in a lot of cases, you have to make the case to say, that’s no longer sensitive. We don’t need to protect that. Let it go. On the agency side, they’re hiring fewer people who know this stuff. In a lot of cases, especially if they use contractor workforce to do declassification review, they don’t know. A lot of these—they’re kids. Maybe their first real job out of college, and they’ve got to start paying the bills. And so they qualify to be a junior analyst at CACI or any of the other big companies that do this work. And so the agency puts them through some sort of training, and then they set them loose on the records, and the agencies are going to err on the side of caution. And so you tell them, you hold on to all this stuff. And it doesn’t have an expiration date. And so, on our side, they’re saying, oh, you bet your sweet bippy it has an expiration date. But the people that they’re able to hire are generally people not exposed to this kind of information. They don’t have an intrinsic interest in the history, because that’s not what they went to school for. They need a good-paying job to start paying off their debt, and if it happens to be in declassification review, so be it. But that doesn’t mean that they understand the history behind the documents that they are reviewing. And so instead of pushing the envelope on declassification, they’re going to hold the party line when it comes to holding the equity. And NDC’s job, and its predecessor organizations, has always been to kind of push the envelope, because we’re the advocate for the research public. If not us, who? And so that’s why our motto has been “release what we can, protect what we must.” As we have to walk that line. The agencies are always going to err on the side of protect everything. And they don’t need to. And when you have educated conversation, you can make the point. And I’ve had any number of knock-down drag-outs with those folks over the years. And I won a couple. I’ve lost far more than I won. But that’s an important part of the NDC’s function, is being that advocate. And the only way we can really advocate well is to be educated. You need to be able to call them on what’s in these records. And even then, I lost some of them. Had them dead to rights on a couple of things, and they just—they didn’t trust me or they didn’t want to believe, and so they would hold onto things anyway. There’s a great sea story, but I’m not going to inflict that on you. [Laughter] Or anybody else who might have to—because it would take about 15 minutes just to set up. But it’s one of those things that you have to go head-to-head with them on the advocacy issues, because nobody else will. It’ll just stay closed, and there’s enough records in circulation. When’s it going to come back around for consideration once again? When’s it going to have the chance to be looked at again? I mean, I’ve seen some record series in there that have been reviewed three or four times over the last 25 years. When’s it enough?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Can you walk us through the declassification review process, just to get an overall sense of what it’s like?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Okay. Under the current Executive Order 13526, the way we have it set up and the way the NDC is set up to function at about the 25-year point of the age of the records, agencies are supposed to do a systematic review of the record series that they created. This is prior to accessioning. And so they go ahead and do the review, put it back in the Record Center, and at the appropriate point, they’re offered for accessioning. So what we get, right outright, is a set of reviewed records. These records will have a telltale tab that the reviewing agency will place, and the tab will either exempt some information, because the agency feels it will refer other information that doesn’t belong to the creating agency but the creating agency thinks belongs to somebody else, so they’ll refer it there. Or if the information falls under the Atomic Energy Act, then it is what we term excluded from review and it’s not looked at. There’s a separate process for dealing with that. And so that’s how we get it. So you get a box with more stickers on the front of it and these tabs sticking out of it. And it enters the NDC—and I said, we’ve got to the point where we accession one year, and then the following year, it goes through the NDC process. Back in the old days, it just built up into a backlog and we ended up with a 400 million page backlog of records. It eventually got computed down, since we weren’t very good at stats, it eventually distilled down to more like 360 million pages but it’s a bunch of paper that needed to be processed. And the NDC was pretty much set up to eliminate that backlog. So to make sure a backlog doesn’t happen again, we now have a process where, the year after accessioning, it enters our process, and we do a quality control check to see, did the originating agency do a good job of reviewing the records? We have parameters of sampling those records to see, okay, did they miss things or not? If the quality is not there, we actually have an interagency evaluation team that does that. So it’s not just an NDC thing that determines the quality, it’s an interagency effort. If the quality’s not up to snuff, then another interagency branch, the Kyl-Lot evaluation team, will go ahead and basically re-review the records and they do this in the stacks. So they’ll look at it again, and then if they’ve added any—or missed anything, tabs would be added at that point. And following that, it could be sent to the processors, because we have to determine—well, we have to capture information about the tab documents, because they’re not going to stay. The documents that have to be referred, or those that are exempted or excluded, need to be withdrawn from the record series. And so our data entry people do that whole bit of processing. So they go ahead and capture salient information about the document, and that results in the creation of the red-stripe sheet. And that’s the remnant. When we withdraw a document, we put in a—what we call a withdrawn item notice and that lets a researcher know that yes, there was something here. It was removed, and if you wish to FOIA it, this is the information you need to make that FOIA request." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And so they’re just substituted. We then set up separate boxes just with the withdrawn material. They’re stowed separately and they’re periodically re-reviewed, or they’re requested under FOIA. And we have a FOIA mandatory declassification review shop under Don Mcilwain and they go ahead and they process those research requests. But meanwhile, the original boxes from which the documents have been withdrawn now become available. They can go down to the research room and people can look at them to their heart’s content. So that’s, in essence, the process. The items that are withdrawn for referral are then sent to a place called the Intra-agency Referral Center, and that’s the clearinghouse. So we have all these agency reps, and they would go ahead and look at this stuff. We have a classified database that sets up queues and they can go head, look at the actual document, then they make a decision on whether classification should be retained or not. Those things that are declassified are then re-filed with the original series. So yeah, a convoluted process, but there you go. That’s the essence of declassification work." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And since you started, have you been doing that similar sort of work—" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "[Interposing] Yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "—since the very beginning?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "I mean, the NDC iteration is new. The big change is metrics. We didn’t know what we had. I have heard the previous process that I did for, you know, from a decade—or more than a decade as kind of a boutique work because you would handcraft the reviews and they never seemed to get out." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "They would just keep going in. And for a period of time, up until 2008, the agencies actually had free access to the stacks. So they could go in there and do re-review work on their own, and we wouldn’t know anything about it until the series had been pulled and then you say oh, we’ve got a new sticker and a new set of tabs in there. And it wasn’t until Michael Kurtz went ahead and shut the door on the agencies in 2008 that we started to get control again. And understand, the NDC didn’t get set up until 2010." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "So—I mean, at the end of the 2000s , you started to see some change in how things were done, and so that was significant. But what setting up the NDC allowed us to do is to focus on eliminating this stuff, and to do that, we needed to track what we had. And I had done metrics for Jeanne Schauble. We would have meetings with Michael Kurtz, and we would laughingly share these stats because I have—you know, I’d had numbers, but whether they actually reflected reality? You know, NARA is a liberal arts place. I mean, we have our niches in the business side for—and on the Records Center side for dealing with business metrics and whatnot. But when you’re dealing with a bunch of archivists, archive specialists, archives technicians, it’s about liberal arts. You’re not dealing with numbers. Oh, God forbid that you deal with numbers. So we were—yeah, we had stats—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—but they just weren’t [crosstalk]." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Meaningful?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "So when we got Sheryl Shenberger from CIA—I mean, she was key in their declassification process. I had met her, actually, when she was working for CIA and she had led the CIA group at College Park for a couple of years. And we didn’t necessarily get on very well, but—you know, when she came over, obviously, I was one of her managers. We were going to get along well. But her thing—she wasn’t into history, she wasn’t into anything but metrics. She got into metrics. And when she brought in somebody that she had used at CIA to just wrestle with the number issue, we didn’t know what we were talking about. In terms of numbers, we would use the standard okay, if it’s a Hollinger box, it’s 833 pages. If it’s an FRC, it’s 2,500 pages. And that’s the only thing we knew, and that’s how we came up with a 400 million page backlog. Well, when we brought in somebody who’s specialized in metrics, we found out oh no, no. We have a lot more container types and the page counts are a lot different than that. And so when we started actually capturing accurate container and page information, that was like the first victory on the step, so we could understand all the things that happened to the records. That was a very convoluted process I explained to you." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And because it’s so convoluted, nobody really knew what was at what step at what time. And so the—bringing in metrics allowed us to segregate stuff. We did a business process reengineering, broke it into steps, and then we tried to assign—okay, what’s the state of the records in those steps and how did you define those steps? What qualifies a record to be in this bucket as opposed to that bucket? Those kinds of questions, we never asked. And so it was a key victory for us to get our hands around it. Jean Schable just never—she was a classically trained archivist. And she had specialized in declassification, but we never looked at stuff that way. And sometimes it’s kind of painful to think, oh my God, look at all the years we did this and that. But honestly, you’re limited by the knowledge of your leaders. And so you have to—sometimes in starting anew, you get a fresh eye on things—and the thing about the business process reengineering that we did to set up NDC, it involved other agencies. We had to be open to other ideas. Now, we’d been in—we’re in constant tension with the agencies all the time." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "That’s just the way it is and that’s the way it should be, because they have to advocate on their side, just as we have to advocate for ours. But having them in on a business process reengineering was a critical thing because we—we just need to hear that from somebody else. And it worked. I mean, we have something in place where we’re not going to have backlogs like we did before. We have educated people and processes. We took archivists who were traditional processing archivists and they were able to retrain so they could be shepherds in this process, to manage both the agencies, the records, and the process themselves and keep track of the state of all that stuff. And that’s a remarkable achievement, especially if you know archivists. I mean, this is totally out of the box thinking and they did it. We have a number of people who made that transition. It may not have been easy at times, but they made that transition and they made this thing work, so that was something I’m very proud to have been associated with." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well, I was going to ask you to talk more about the creation of the NDC." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "There was some rumbling about the quality assurance issues. I had done some preliminary work that was initially called the National Declassification Initiative. That was in like, 2007. And that was our first dive into seeing, what was the result of all that agency review work? All this—the modern—what I termed the modern era of declassification was based on the Clinton Executive Order 12958 that got signed in 1995. And it originally set up a deadline that all the stuff, not only that the agencies themselves owned that was at Suitland or in their own spaces. They had to look at all the stuff that we had by December 31, 1999. They had that deadline and some of them didn’t take it seriously. We had an election in 1996 and there was a sincere hope in some circles, especially in the Department of Defense, that Bob Dole would be the President of the United States in 1997 and that he would rescind Executive Order 12958. And so a lot of agencies sat on the sideline and they said we’re going to wait this out. And then, by gosh, Bill Clinton won. And they said, oh man, we actually have to do this. And they had two years to do it—two and a half years to do it. And so you could see a scramble in 1997 of agencies trying to sort out how to get all of this stuff done. And what a lot of them did, it turned into a time/volume equation. We had X amount of records, we had Y amount of time for the deadline, and so we need to review at this rate. Well, it was never really that simple, and they took shortcuts. They made some questionable decisions independently. They didn’t bother to talk to us. So they—you know, this is where the contractor reviewer came in. In years before, it was actual members of that agency. So, for example, the Army declassification activity used both active duty and reserve and retired people to extend what was originally known as the Gulf War Illness Project, because they—we had the Gulf War illness syndrome. And the Army had started a comprehensive declassification program to review Gulf War records to see about releasing them to help these veterans. And when the Executive Order came out, they just transferred that effort from—or expanded it from Gulf War illness to a general declassification review. When they got the word though, that this thing’s really happening with 12958, it’s not going away, they had to expand to a contractor operation. So it had civil service leadership and then contractors operate out of Reston. And at one point, there were over 200 reviewers doing this work. And they had to run the records from College Park to Reston and return. So this was the days before holding security was really an issue. And there was no way we could accommodate that number of people at College Park to do this review. So the records kept going—it was a shuttle run from Reston to College Park and back and forth. And that’s actually how some of those Army records got their identification, because we had not bothered to put on our traditional archives box labels for the stuff that had been reprocessed, then it’s in Hollinger boxes. They didn’t have any of the traditional identifications on them, like finding a type and entry number and all that. That wasn’t on there. You would end up with just a plain textual box label. So the Army, using a database, realized that there was no way that they could do this. So some of the boxes had—they had put barcodes on the boxes, and some of the boxes had numerical designation. And in some cases, it went full circle. The Army identification ended up being in the Holdings Management System, HMS. And so, ironically, NARA is using an Army identification system for undesignated NARA records. So I—you know, any port in a storm. You’re in the middle of trying to get, in essence, a factory going. And the volumes involved, it’s a factory. You have to use factory methods, and the Army was one of them that had to figure out how to do that. And each of the other agencies did their own kind of thing as a result of this fallout. But what we found out by the mid-2000s is that it sucked. I mean, there was really bad reviews and they over-tabbed, they held too much. And in other cases, they missed equity and they—it just wasn’t done right. And then what really kind of set this off was the 2006 reclassification incident. Does that ring a bell?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "What was that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "In 2006, there was a researcher, and damned if I can remember his name now. He had come to College Park for State Department records, and he found that records that he had previously requested were now no longer available." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Oh." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "So if there’s any way that’s going to raise a red flag, is that. And so what was found out is that—and this is a story that appeared in the _New_ _York_ _Times,_ that there were secret memoranda between CIA, Air Force, and NARA that allowed their people to go into the open stacks and pull stuff that had been available to the public." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And were there slips?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Well, no. There were no slips." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay. Oh." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "There was nothing. It was just—the records were just not available." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "They were just not there." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "They were not available. So there was a little fallout from that." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes, I can imagine." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And this is where Weinstein showed up in the midst of all of that. We had to transition from Carlin to Weinstein. And so—of course, Weinstein, full of outrage—we’re not doing that again, let no more classified memorandums amongst agencies anymore, stuff like that. And part of the fallout with that was to take a look at what agencies were—really had done. And so I was part of that pilot to try and figure out—so we started to take a look. I set up a process—an intra-agency process, because everything we had to do had to be interagency in order to have the buy-in from—once we started to do stuff unilaterally with just NARA assets, we would lose credibility. So we had to have the cloak of interagency cooperation and we began to see with our own eyes and we had to set up mathematically sound sampling processes to allow us to go into these previously reviewed things. And go see—and by those sampling standards, make a call as to the quality involved and what fate would fall those different series. And so they started to get a look into that, and I think at that point, between 2006 and 2009, you started to see an impetus towards we need to revise how we did business. Under Jeanne Schauble, the declassification and initial processing shop did exactly those two things. We did declassification of classified records. We also did initial processing of classified and unclassified records. Now, as sort of an apprenticeship for those without clearances, especially if it was going to take a while longer—and we found, as time went on, that it was taking longer and longer for people to get their clearances. So it was good to have unclassified work for them, but we were also being diverted. And when you had split responsibilities between initial processing and declassification, we just weren’t—we were falling between two stools. The processing folks, the research—what’s now Research Service’s side, were coming into conflict with trying to process classified and unclassified stuff. And so they needed to impose an order in there, and they finally decreed okay, well, initial processing and declass, you’re just doing declass. You’re no longer doing initial processing. Not a core function anymore, because we steadily attrite people anyway on this. We had a hard core of people that would stick through it, but we would have terrific turnover, especially in the archives technician. Because—I mean, data entry is just not everybody’s cup of tea and nobody wants to stick at doing that for a long period of time. So, you know, how do we go ahead and jazz this thing up? And so we tried to intellectualize it as being more than data entry. There was the agency interaction piece and all this other stuff. And so what started as the NDI, it then rolled into the NDC precursor, business process reengineering. Our current deputy is David Mengel and David led that business processing reengineering. I don’t think there were enough chairs around the table for that, because everybody and their grandmother just wanted to be a part of that. But over many months, they hammered together a process that everybody could agree to. And that sort of became the source document for how the NDC would do business. And so Jean Schable was deputy; Sheryl was selected as director and that gave us a different level, because as a division, we sat fairly deep in the NARA organization, and Jeanne was just a GS-15. By elevating it to an SES position, it gave us a lot more visibility. Sadly, that said, Jeanne was ill with terminal breast cancer at that point, so we lost her not long after the establishment of the NDC. So David fleeted up to be deputy and Sheryl ran NDC and got the factory rolling. I mean, those early rocky days in 2010 where we didn’t—we couldn’t even estimate what the backlog was, because we just were not sure about any of the numbers. But we had well-established relationships with the agencies though, and were working to redefine those relationships. And that was a big part of what I did. I did the interagency liaison business. And so I’d be the front-man for a lot of stuff, or I would sit with the leadership on stuff that would involve the more senior people from the agency and just kind of work—I was the day-to-day grunt guy because I—you know, if they had clearances that needed to be passed, ID badges, moving of records, hey what are you doing, that kind of thing. So I was the day-to-day kind of person, and David and Sheryl would deal with the much higher level stuff and I would get dragged in as appropriate." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And so that was created in 2010." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Can you talk a little bit about the successes of that program, and maybe some of the challenges that NDC has faced in these last, I guess, nine years?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "[Laughter]." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "It’s almost been 10 years. Is that hard to believe?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Well actually, President Obama set the deadline to eliminate the backlog by the end of 2013, and we met that. We went ahead and you kept chopping and dicing. I mean, you just keep doing it. We would have murder boards where we would actually take a look at our processes, and if people saw that there were issues, they could bring it up to the senior leadership and say hey, this ain’t working, how about that? We were trying to encourage a lot of critical thinking, that just because we proclaimed it this way doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. And so we were able to get a lot of teamwork out of what was going on, and that allowed us to declare victory at the end of 2013. And so after that, it was more a question of sustainment, where what I mentioned before, we were able to get reviewed accessions in the building and were able to start the NDC process the year following the accessioning. And so that has allowed us to avoid buildup of the backlog. Now that we’re in danger of that again because of the Presidential Libraries business, with all the classified records coming into the Presidential Library, classified coming here. And so that’s going to cause a bit of a—we’re trying to figure that one out still." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And all those records will come to College Park?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "All the classified ones." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And when is that scheduled? [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "You’re asking the wrong person. I—probably later this calendar year and into next year. And that’s just going to be a long and painful process, mainly because you’re dealing with the differences between presidential and federal. And as agency historian, you are no doubt aware of the tensions that have gone on over the years between the Presidential Libraries and the Federal Records side, because we went through those years where we’re the only important records there are, so the resources should come our way kind of thing. And this is not the solution that anybody envisioned. It’s just kind of complete capitulation, but—and those people aren’t coming with the records." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I was going to ask—" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "[Interposing] [crosstalk]." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "—so no additional staff? And they’re—that will certainly be a challenge." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "[Laughter]." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Do you have any idea how much the volume—" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "[Interposing] No. Don’t even have that. Don’t even have that. I’ve been poking at that. I’m the NATO guy, and so I need to know because they’ve got NATO stuff." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And nobody’s ever put anything out there about the volume of records involved. But the NATO thing’s special because you need segregated storage, and we don’t have a lot of classified storage to begin with, much less segregated classified storage. So there’s a lot of stuff still in play. Have no idea how it’s going to unfold. We’ll—it will get figured out. I’ll probably—if this phased retirement thing goes in, I will be dragged in on some of that and I’ll be happy to participate, because it’s a conundrum." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "I mean, that’s just something we didn’t quite plan on. But, you know, what we’ve been suffering from of late has been a de-emphasis on the creating agencies’ parts—what we’ve seen over the last—and it predates the current administration. It goes back to the tail-end of the Obama administration. It’s—we’re seeing retrenchment with regards to classification and declassification. Some agencies are de-emphasizing and it doesn’t seem to hold the same meaning, and there’s rotation of people. So people we have worked for decades with are now rotated into other positions, and so you see declassification issues being de-emphasized and we don’t have the same relationship with the newer folks as we did with the older. And it just—it just suffers—it’s all a big cycle, you know? We’re just happening to be on a down-cycle now, where declassification is being downplayed and resources are being diverted elsewhere. And what other agencies are priority—prioritizing, we can’t really do anything about, you know? And so if they have the wrong people set up in places and they reduce the resources they’re doing for declassification review and all this other stuff, all we can do is kind of hang on and hope for better days to come. Or is there going to be some sort of trip at some point down the line where they say oh no, we need to fix that now, and so on and so forth. I don’t envision that happening over the next couple of years. However, stranger things have happened. I mean, that’s kind of what we’ve been suffering from since. We used a couple years after reaching—eliminating the backlog to refine things, and we’ve kind of gotten to a steady state. It’s now crisis control, because you find stuff is out that shouldn’t be out." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "A great example is when we deal with the bulk moves from Suitland, and stuff that has been treated, say, as unclassified for decades comes in, and all of a sudden, you find stuff with classified markings on it. And so we have a process to deal with that. And some cases, you have to spin things up a bit depending on what you find, because it was improperly handled—NARA didn’t do it, but nonetheless, you have a violation of sorts that you’ve got—there’s a process for dealing with violations. You try to hang on with the other agencies to help. There’s one agency program in particular that I’ve seen—you know, built the program, let it run down, start it over again. I mean, we’re now going through cycles of this stuff with some of these agencies, because it—they have their own bureaucracy, their own personalities, and it just—the cycle seems to repeat and it’s up and down. It’s a sine wave. Well, I just have been around long enough to see it." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Since you need buy-in from the agencies, do you have any programs that you established to get agency buy-in? Or—" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "[Interposing] It’s—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "— is it just rapport? It’s..." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Exactly. You have to sit there and—what I thought was successful for me is just getting some mutual respect. Part of the issue we have with some of the agencies is, as they are creators of this classified information, they think they are the only ones who know its value and know its sensitivity. And what I’ve had to demonstrate repeatedly, and thanks to—thanks to my dear bride and my library, has been able to go back and co-op them and say I know that this is important. And what about this? And you start throwing some facts at them and you start getting into a dialogue about their program, their system, their history. And once you can get it on that basis, you know, now you’re on a level playing field. And now you have some mutual respect that they see your point, and if they can do something about it, they will. But it’s gaining that respect, and that was the—an important thing for me was I’m not just an archivist at the National Archives. I get what you do. I get what this did or what that event meant, but here we are 56 years later. Does it seem to have the same sensitivity? And pick up something from the internet or just use whatever I can use in a bag of tricks to get them to just say well, maybe you have a point, you know? Or something like that. Does it result in a document being declassified? I don’t know. What it does do is enhance the respect that we have for each other, and allows dialogues in other directions that may pay off better. So that’s what I found important." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So, not sure there is a typical day, but—" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "[Interposing] [laughter]." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "—is there a typical day in..." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "No. No, no. Each day is different—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—Because it’s what the young’uns bring into the office sometimes, because they’re going through this stuff. Sometimes they know my interest in things and they’ll say hey, what about this, and bring me a box. Or there’s something that a real stickler of a researcher has and—you know, I—they want me to re-review something that had been reviewed three or four times. And I’ll go back through it, and if the last time it had been looked at by a reviewer was, say, 2003, then yeah, it needs to be looked at again. I’ll take a look at what the agency did and what tabs they added. If needed, I will add tabs myself because they missed things. And if some of the tabs they added were incorrect, I’ll deal with those and just get a clean product back to that FOIA person or to that data entry person, and we’ll go ahead and just make it a better product overall. I can’t do that all along. I can’t do it systematically, but I can help people as it appears. On another day, it may well be somebody finds recordings, World War II recordings from wire recordings. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that technology. At one point—and that’s what kills me about these things—at one point, recording—sound recording technologies would use a metal wire. And there was a recording machine—big thing—and so somebody had a bunch of the stuff—wire recordings, and they actually had classification markings on them. And so even at World War II, you just can’t take any of this stuff for granted, and there’s a process to follow. And so I’ll be in on trying to do research on that stuff, on what it might be, what might be on it, and give background that others can take and work the more technical side to actually come up with a transcript or something that’s usable and saying yeah, that’s what I think is on here. Another time I can go down—it’ll be NATO stuff and I will deal with the Nixon people. And I have to go listen to a recording, because somebody and somewhere says NATO. And so—hey, can you come take a look at this? And in a lot of cases, especially if Henry Kissinger is involved, the assumption is it’s classified and I will get thrown in for that. So I’ll have to really bear down and try and understand what they’re saying, because a lot of that—have you ever heard some of the—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Oh, yes. I have. It’s hard." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "— [Crosstalk]—yeah. Oh, it’s..." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I’m amazed that they can understand..." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "So I can—I can do that. In other cases, I have helped—in fact, it’s the group that’s meeting now upstairs. They have the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, AKA the ISCAP. They’re in charge by—per the executive order, they keep track of how the agencies actually manage their declassification functions. And one of the things they do is they look at the declassification guides that each agency uses. And for the services, it’s been my privilege to advise the ISCAP on the declass guides, and I’ll actually get those guides and I’ll look at them myself. And this last batch, I will go ahead and assist in editing those things and getting back to the agency and saying, you need to fix this because that ain’t right. And you need to add this, and you need to think about that, and all that stuff. So it’s just using some—what I’ve got stuck up here and going and working with them to make sure that their guides are the way they should be, they’re usable and accurate. Or I could go stand in front of a crowd and start talking about declassification review procedures. I’ll be doing that for the camera tomorrow." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "I’ll have to put on a coat and tie, which I can’t stand, and I will get up on the stage and they’ll record me and they will have it in the can, and I can—people can look at it to their heart’s content. In other cases like—currently right now, deck logs—Navy deck logs—you know what they are?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Okay. Navy deck logs, classified ones may be impacted by some pending legislation on the Hill. There’s been this thing going on with Agent Orange and veterans and this tussle between Blue-Water Navy and Brown-Water Navy. Brown-Water Navy were the river and in-shore guys, and their exposure to Agent Orange in—of course, in the Vietnam War, is well documented. And so if you are a veteran of a unit from the Brown-Water Navy, you can apply to VA for the benefits. Blue-Water Navy, not so. And they’ve got a very comprehensive list of the ships—Blue-Water Navy ships that they’ll allow to do that. There’s pending legislation on the Hill to change that, and it involves some of the classified deck logs that we have. Some of the ships who are tagged Blue-Water Navy have logs in there. And, of course, to document this stuff, they need to be able to have the record. And so I’ve got a project rolling right now to review those deck logs and see how many of them can be busted loose." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So has technology played any role in this process of... [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And that’s ironic, because I started out that way. When I started as a technician, we were recording stuff in a database that was written in FORTRAN, okay? And we had monochrome monitors and ancient keyboards. And the company that created these units went out of business, and so every time you fried a monitor—and they came either in the green or amber variety. So that’s how old that stuff was in the mid-1990s. And ironically, I had suggested to Jeanne, we need a modern network with data—modern database to handle this stuff. And ironically, just a couple years before, David Mengel had suggested the very same thing. The only difference is there was no money when David put his proposal—and it was a CIDS paper proposal that he did. I didn’t have a CIDS paper proposal on that, but when I pushed this up to Jeanne, they found money. And so it’s all in the timing, you know? And so we ended up with the Archival Declassification Review and Redaction System, or ADRRES. And that helped streamline the data entry process and allowed a much more friendlier process, because working the old mini-computer system, which we call Prime, after the company that made the mini-computer was the Prime company. And it was not a very tolerant system. So if you were looking at data to analyze and say you always have to type in the agency that you were holding something for, well, there was no standardization. People would type in State, State Department, Department of State. And so all those data variations would be in there, and there’s no rigor in enforcing data entry standards at the time. And so what I advocated for, what David Mengel had advocated before me, was just a modern database system where we could enforce some rigor in data entry, and it would be a lot easier to manipulate the data. And that laid the groundwork for the eventual success that we had with the NDC. But the rest of it is what I would term the Mark 1/Mod 0 eyeball and the brain that goes with it, because it’s all about reading the document, understanding the equity and acting on it, or getting a better read on it or trying to get agencies to bend on it or whatnot. We’ve not been at the forefront for electronic records. Part of that is because of the magnificent failure that was ERA. I was in on some of the initial efforts for dealing with ERA back in the early 2000s and just saw that whole effort crumble. And there was supposed to be a declassification component for it, but they ran into so many problems with what they ended up that it—we just never got that far. That’s why agencies are creating classified electronic records and we can’t do a damn thing with them, because you need a system that we can ingest and scan, and be able to scan reliably. Now, it’s not that the problem’s been ignored. For example, the CIA had partnered with the University of Texas for a number of years to come up with kind of an AI solution that—it would beself-learning on what the equity is. It just—they never generate the reliability figures that the intelligence community or Department of Energy would trust, because if they come back with a number like 95 percent or 96 percent, they won’t do it. I mean, it’s got to be like 99.98 percent, because what you’re trying to do is, you’re trying to use a system to queue human eyeballs. So it’s going to take this mass of data that—and filter all of that, and then you’re going to end up with some hits. And out of the—those hits need to be looked at by a person, and that way you cut the odds down. But you can’t rely on a system that passes by things that may need to be looked at. And so they just—they’ve never developed the trust factor involved on that. And how much are we willing to spend? Because there’s some obscure IT technology rule that what you would spend to get like a half-percent efficiency—you know, it’s some obscene number. You spend $10 million to get to 95 percent, and you would need $20 million to get to 97 percent, and nobody wanted to lay down that much money or take the leadership. And, of course, NARA taking leadership on any IT related anything would be looked at suspiciously these days, and rightfully so." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well, if nothing exists, then how does this 2022 deadline for electronic records impact classified records?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "They’ve been trying to keep that separate. I mean, honestly, we’ve just not been talking about it." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "It doesn’t apply to classified records?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Well, it certainly applies. It’s just that the stuff’s going to get put into some sort of buffer, some sort of storage and just stay there. Or it stays with the agency and takes its chances when media migration concerns—you know, I just—I know there’s been discussions at higher levels that the director and deputy director—David Mengel, I know has been involved with these discussions. But they just haven’t amounted to anything that we can point to a calendar and say by this time, we’re going to have a system to ingest and do something with, because there’s no underlying anything to do review of the—no automated review." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "We have been able to use ADRRES in weird ways, because we can actually load movies and sound into ADDRES and treat it similar to textual records, so that you can listen to an audio file in that classified environment and actually make decisions on that. But it’s only in those cases of special media, not in general electronic records format. So that’s what we’re stuck with right now." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "That’s really—" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "[Interposing] It is. I agree, and it’s going to require a totally different field and some of the young’uns are getting into that. And that’s—we’ve got some digitization folks who are—who—we just don’t have the tools in place to actually do the work we can do now with textual." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So, how did you get involved with the blog?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "[Laughter] I enjoy writing and I—it was just a way to highlight things that we would release and, you know, we’ve developed a small—there’s 120 followers now. And that’s up a couple dozen from when I started." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And it’s just—we run into the most unique things. And being able to share that stuff is—and I enjoy doing the research and I just love sharing what we do." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And so it’s just a natural extension of the other things I was doing, and what—nobody else in NDC wanted to write, so I threw my hat in the ring." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Do you have any interesting finds that you could share? Memorable, I guess?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Memorable ones—well, they’re all memorable. I mean, that..." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "True." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Don’t get a lot of responses on stuff. I take a look at the comments and sometimes you get touched by some of the veteran stories, because I—one of the things—as a veteran, I like to think that our stories mean something. That the service means something. And in a lot of cases, people belong to classified things over their careers, and they don’t feel that they can share that. I remember meeting a veteran who worked in the communications intelligence business for the Navy after World War II. And I met him at a conference and—somebody approached me; they knew me. And he wanted to know if he could share what he did with his family. So this is a man who’s in his eighties, or maybe even nineties, and he still felt obligated to withhold this information 70 years after the fact. And while we’ve kind of let go of World War II finally, post-World War II, no. Not so much. And so in this case, with communications intelligence, you have the National Security Agency involved, and I had to come by and say no, no you can’t really share that openly. You would need to contact the agency on that. However, I know what you did and your service is very much appreciated. And because this was a young guy who was bringing an older gentleman to this conference—and so he’s not independent anymore, but there was a smile on his face when I was able to share that with him. That felt really good. And that’s a motivator for me, is being able to share those kinds of stories. They don’t need to be hidden anymore. There’s a story I’m working on right now that was dealing with a bunch of ships." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Laughter] Ships." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "It’s going through these decks—it’s dealing with these deck logs, the classified deck logs." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right, right." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And there was a class of four ships that the Navy didn’t have much else use for. They weren’t successful at what the Navy has built them for. So the Navy found something for them to do. 300 foot-long, it was 175 guys on them. And so they would go out, be based out of Pearl Harbor, and they would rotate between Pearl Harbor, Midway Island, and Johnston Island. And of the three, Pearl Harbor was the best that they were going to come up with, because Midway was a fly-speck of an island, just like Johnston Island. And their job in between those little trips, they would hang out in the North Pacific and Central Pacific. And they would actually wait for a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile test, and they would actually get warning of a launch of a Soviet ICBM. And their job was to catch the debris from the reentry vehicle when the thing came down, and they were close enough to hear the sonic booms of the reentry vehicle—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Wow." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—which would have been the sound of Armageddon, had they actually had warheads on them. But they would—and they would triangulate—being in the proximity, they would triangulate where the thing went down and they would steam rapidly over to where that location was to see if there was anything in the water to pick up of intelligence value. And so nobody knows that. You’re the first—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] That’s so interesting." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—the second person that I’ve told. Hopefully I will have the time to go ahead and get that in that article. And 175 guys and weeks—I mean weeks at a time on a 300 foot ship in the middle of the freaking Pacific Ocean. One time, the weather was so poor out there that the ship was rolling 30-45 degrees. And so when a ship is rolling that much, the intakes, the suction for the fire pumps—which are a very important part of a ship, because you need to have water to put a fire out. And when the suction for the fire pumps is out, they have to turn off the smoking lamp. So you can imagine being in a small ship in the middle of a big ocean in a storm and you can’t smoke, and it’s 1967 and everybody smokes." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "So—that—and that’s the part that touches me, is we’re able to get that log out and it will be available to those veterans, and I will blog about this with that article that’s in the hopper right now. But that’s a story that would go unknown unless—you know, I saw it and I told it. And I appreciate what that story means to 175 guys, and multiply by four. And it’s being able to have an impact like that, uncovering the history for it and just allow it to be seen. I—whether to commemorate, celebrate or whatnot, that’s not up for me. That’s for the beholder to see, once it’s available. But at least let’s make is available, you know? Because I have been that guy. I was on a 600 foot ship and the conditions were never nearly that bad, but I know what it’s like to be out in the middle of no place— —and just—with a thousand of your best friends and no place to run. And they’re on something half the size with a fraction of that number of people—that’s a motivator for me, is just making that kind of stuff available." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So you’re retiring soon. What do you think you’ll miss the most about working here?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Oh, the access. [Laughter]. It’s getting to the good stuff. They can’t allow you to retain—if that option opens up for me on the phased retirement certainly that will come in. But it’s just being able to get to the good stuff. And because the reason my wife asked me on my earlier writings is what’s the point, is because I’m the kind of guy that—this is neat stuff. And the paper would just be about the neat stuff. And as Heidi correctly pointed out, there has to be a point to it. You have to present this information with some objective in mind. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do with my writing ever since she gave me those famous three words. But it’s just being able to work that—the other piece is being able to share. And I have accrued enough wisdom now that I offer my office guests the choice of long or short, you know? Because I know my own foibles and I know it’s not for everybody. But some people will take the long version and others won’t, and there’s no—in my past, I have exposed people inevitably to the long, and that’s not been appropriate. Sometimes they just want to come in, get an answer, and go back to what they were doing. They don’t care about the other stuff and it’s not my job to make them care. If they can’t pick it up on their own, I’m not going to force them. And in a lot of cases, it doesn’t matter. It’s just—let’s get the job done. So I’m—I know enough, at least, to offer the choice. And I miss being able to do that, because there are some folks who enjoy it. And even if they don’t, they leave with a smile on their face anyway." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And a good story, I’m sure." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And my poor wife is the one who’s going to have to deal with it in the future, so..." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well, I know we’ve been—we’re about an hour and a half now—" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "[Laughter]." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "—which I—this is fine. I just—I know you probably need to go—I know you wanted to go to the gift shop, but I just have a couple more questions—" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "[Interposing] [laughter] No, no. That’s all right." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "—and then we’ll wrap up." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "It’s your job to focus this discussion." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah. No, it’s been very helpful. So I was just curious to see, how do you view your time here at the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "This has been such a neat experience, because I—my Navy experience was not the best." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right. I read your oral history." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And it—sometimes a guy just ain’t mature enough. You’ve probably met one or two in your time. And I was fortunate enough to be married to a woman who had the patience to work with me, to allow me to get to—what—that state of grace. And NARA allowed me to get to that state of grace, because I was not feeling very good about myself when I left the Navy. It was not the best circumstances. And in retrospect, there are lessons missed that I hoped to apply again if I had that opportunity, and I had that opportunity. And I was blessed to be able to get another leadership position. Most people don’t get that chance. A lot of times, you’re just gun-shy and you don’t even want to approach it again. But I was given that opportunity to try again, and I think I was much more successful the second time around. God knows I made enough mistakes then too. But I survived long enough to get to the—get the mission done, be an asset to NWMD and the NDC over the years. That—I think I contributed to mission and was able to survive long enough for Sheryl to see—need to make him a SME and because what was happening to me was, I was a functional supervisor, a functional manager and SME at the same—I was just—I was not doing any of those jobs well." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And so she just said okay, you’re just going to do the SME business. And business has been booming ever since. And they found another manager. M’Lisa Whitney—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—had—has my job—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—and so she and I have regular conversations, even to this day, about how to work things and stuff like that. So it’s—that mentorship piece has really been helpful. And—which kind of leads me to—NARA has tried over the years any number of mentoring and it’s really not taken off, mainly because you can’t really regulate a mentoring process. That’s a natural thing. A natural chemistry thing between two people, and it either happens or it doesn’t. I was first exposed to the forced stuff in CIDS where I was paired with an archivist of some seniority, and it just didn’t work." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "The relationship wasn’t there?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "It just wasn’t there. And so, you know, you have to build that relationship over a period of time. And one has to be willing to share and the other one’s got to be willing to listen, and you just can’t force—I mean, at some points, you had enforced reporting in the mentoring environment where people had to submit weekly reports and stuff like that. Saying—oh my God, no. No. The Navy does it quite informally. You—they just call it the Sea Daddy. You would have a Sea Daddy—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Sea Daddy. [Laughter]." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—one of the reasons why my career didn’t work well was I didn’t have a Sea Daddy. My wife had a Sea Daddy—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Oh, okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—and was of some benefit to her—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—and she maintains some of the—she still maintains some of those relationships. It just didn’t happen for me, but that’s the Darwinism that goes in a selection process. And as a Navy officer, it’s up or out. So, Darwin, here you are. If you don’t get selected, you’re out. You’re no longer a naval officer. And the same thing, just generally this should apply all the way around. You just can’t force people into mentoring relationships. And I don’t know what the state is—I volunteered when it was a voluntary program a couple of years ago—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Mm-hm. I remember that." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—and, you know, I just never got picked. I was available, just wasn’t picked, mainly because I was an unknown in that awkward sixth floor up over College Park—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—and nobody wanted anything to do with that. So when people voluntarily get into those relationships, I’m all into that. And so—and I finally have the discipline to regulate how long I take of people’s time, how much time I take— so that the mentoring is not a punishment; it’s something someone would look forward to and maybe want to repeat. So that’s something that I would miss, and I’m trying to see how else I can do that on the other side, like with a museum or something like that." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah. Well, I think I could talk to you all day, but I’m wondering if there’s anything else you’d like to add that we didn’t cover. Any antidotes or words of wisdom or anything that we missed?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "I have to put this on the record." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And so that’s—it’ll be the last thing. I am the guy that put red turret tops on the USS _Arizona_ on December 7, 1941. I found as obscure a piece of paper as anyone would find, not even looking for it because there’s always been some unknowns about how the ships appeared on Battleship Row on that date. And it’s only monochrome photography that exists, either on the US side or from the Japanese." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And so nobody really knows what the ships looked like, and there’s still arguments—were they blue? Were they gray? But one thing I found that categorically establishes a color was a memo that the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet at the time, a guy by the name of Husband Kimmel, put a memo out in March of 1941 that mandate that the turret tops of the battleships were going to appear in a certain way with these colors, depending on what organization they belonged to. And for the _Arizona_ , that meant that the front two turrets— it has four. So the front two turrets were colored red on top and the third one—or the fourth one, would be colored red as well. And that was to allow the ship to be seen from very far away, because that’s how the guns were being aimed. You needed to be up high in an airplane over the enemy, and you needed to be able to see 20 miles away at your ship to see if it’s firing. That’s how you corrected the fire. And you had to be able to positively—to identify it, and they did that through the use of turret top colors. And so, the _Arizona_ now has three red turret tops. I needed to share because you can Google Arizona models, so when somebody wants to build one, and since I am a modeler—but I’m not well known for the models I build—but—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Yet." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—yeah, I will have more time. But now, those exist. And so...we’re...yeah. See, this is the instructions." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "That’s the instructions on a model kit that’s telling people to paint it that way." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "To paint it red. That’s..." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "So if—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] And you found this—" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—a modeler has to be famous—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] That’s you." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—and—well, it doesn’t have to be. I—a lot of people don’t know me. I shared it with a modeler who actually built the big one. It’s a 196th scale, so it’s like six feet long or something like that. So we’re in Pearl Harbor at the visitor’s center for Ford Island, and he built this. And I shared with him that piece of paper and asked, have you ever seen anything like this before? And his eyes just popped, and no, he had not seen anything like that before. And that’s a claim to fame. I will—I’m happy about that one. I kept it low-key because you don’t want that modeling community to be calling on you on a regular basis, because they—can you look this up for me?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Oh, yeah?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And all of a sudden—no. I didn’t want to do that, but I—for this purpose, I want to go ahead and get that down on bits or whatever—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Record it forever." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "—it is. [Laughter]. But, I mean, that—it’s just neat stuff like that that really—it makes working at this place so neat." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "And even though you can go through some rough spots and have bad days, just like you can have bad days anywhere it’s when these gems occur and you can do that, that’s what I love about it." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah. Well, thank you and congratulations again on your retirement." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Thank you." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I hope your phased retirement—" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "[Interposing] Yeah, well..." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "—works out for you." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "We’ll see." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. JONATHAN DICKEY", "text": "Good morning. My name is Jonathan Dickey. I am an intern with the National" }, { "speaker": "Archives and Records Administration History Office. It is 9", "text": "00 a.m. on January 22, 2016. This interview is being conducted for NARA’s Oral History Project at the National Archives Building in Washington, DC. Please state your full name and spell it for the record." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILLIAM H. DAVIS", "text": "William H. Davis. W-I-L-L-I-A-M H. Davis, D-A-V-I-S." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "What is your affiliation with NARA at the moment?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "I’m with the Center for Legislative Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. What is your position?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "Archivist." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "Some might say unofficially a senior archivist, but officially, the title is archivist. There isn’t an official job title of senior archivist. We’re all archivists. Whether you’re a 13 or a 12 or an 11 or what have you, you’re an archivist. There isn’t a job title that reflects one’s longevity. There are archives specialists, there are supervisory archivists, but there aren’t senior archivists. I’m an archivist. But since I’ve been here for over 30 years, sometimes people will say senior archivist just to be polite. [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Now, for some background information on you before we get into the meat and potatoes of your time here. Where were you born?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "New York City, Manhattan. Raised on Long Island." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Quite a bit of distance from there to here. What got you interested in the archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "I did my undergraduate work at Washington and Jefferson College in southwestern Pennsylvania. Then I went to the University of Maryland as a graduate student. I learned about what was called the Hills Program, where one can earn a degree in history and library science in the Library School. So I enrolled in that, and one of the classes I took was taught by Frank Burke, who was then an adjunct professor there. I learned about the National Archives through him. I could’ve done an internship anywhere in Washington at the time, but I wound up doing an internship here at the Archives. While I was an intern here in the fall of 1982, they offered me a job as an intermittent archives technician. I accepted it, and have been here ever since." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. So why were you interested in that specific program at the University of Maryland?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "When I was graduating from college and going into graduate school, I was told that teaching positions in history were very difficult to find. They’re even more difficult to find now. When I learned about that program, where the emphasis is on archives and manuscripts and special libraries, I thought, wow, that’s fascinating because I love historical libraries. I knew that others were involved in it. I just thought it was something to try, and I loved it from the start. I knew that it was a very good fit for me because I loved history and historic libraries. History was always my strong subject, and it was always my main interest throughout my growing up years. It was a foregone conclusion that I would major in history." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Was there a specific time period of history you were interested in, or just history in general?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "I was always particularly fascinated with the Age of Enlightenment, 17th-and 18th-century French history in particular, the early modern period. I always enjoyed American history also. But certainly since I’ve been with the Archives, I’ve learned a great deal about all of American history. It’s all fascinating to me." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Have you come across any documents from the 17th-century or 18th-century in the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "No. Of course, our records at the Archives go back to 1775 in Record Group 360, the pre- Federal records, Records of the Continental Congress, Confederation Congress, and the Constitutional Convention. So our records go back to the 18th-century, but none from the 17th-century. I have not spent a great deal of time working with original documents from that period of time. Now that you mention it, when I was a graduate student, one of my favorite classes was on doing exhibits with rare books from the (University of Maryland’s) McKeldin Library Rare Books Collection. I think the books were 17th-century, I don’t remember exactly, but it was quite an experience working with those. We had to create book cradles, and I had no idea how to do it, and the instructor didn’t really give us a great deal of instruction on how to do it. But we had to figure it out and somehow we did. We mounted exhibits that went on display in the McKeldin Library. We also had to make placards for our exhibits. So that stood out as quite an interesting experience. I enjoyed that. It was a real learning experience on how to do something that you really didn’t have any background or experience doing. That was a long time ago." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Do you work on exhibits here very much?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "I help the exhibit staff if they have questions about our records and need to find an interesting document for an exhibit. So yes, I have helped many of the exhibit staff, and in the education area. We all do what we can to help our fellow staff members who are working on special assignments. We’ve played a role in all of the major exhibits going on here. They usually include legislative records— which are the records I work with—because Congress is involved in every conceivable subject. That makes working with congressional records interesting." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "You said that initially you were an intern. What was the first position you had here after the internship?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "As an intern, I was assigned to what was then called the Legislative and Diplomatic Branch, and I worked with State Department records. When I was offered a position as intermittent archives technician, intermittent means part time, I believe I was assigned also to what was then called the Legislative Diplomatic Branch. But I worked with State Department records, which were very, very interesting. I enjoyed that. I worked with Record Group 59 and Record Group 84. Record Group 59 are the General Records of the Department of State. Record Group 84 are the Consular Post Files that document activities in the different posts around the world and the countries as they existed then. So I learned a great deal about the internal affairs activities of all these countries. It’s quite interesting. I was assigned to the Legislative and Diplomatic Branch to work with diplomatic records. Legislative was a part of that unit. Milt Gustafson was the branch chief in those days. Ron Swerczek was the diplomatic record supervisor, and Ken Harris was the legislative record supervisor. There were other staff members, like Dane Hartgrove, and I can’t remember the other names right now. My mentors were Frank Burke, Milt Gustafson, Ron Swerczek, and Dane Hartgrove. I learned a great deal from them and I liked the way they focused their work here. I used them as examples to follow in shaping my role as an archivist, which was a more historical approach. I think they thought of themselves more as historians working in an archives more than as archivists in the pure sense of the word. I don’t think that they were as interested in archival theory or what a series is, versus a subseries, and all of those technicalities. Other archivists here were pure archivists, fascinated by the technical aspects of what an archivist does; how an archivist arranges records and describes them; and what’s a series and what’s not, and what’s a record group and what’s not; and how to divide things up and all of that. So my mentors’ approach was pleasing to me." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "And how long did you work in that department?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "I was there from 1982 to 1984." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So what were the most interesting records that you came across during that time?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "I can’t remember anything specifically. I remember I did a lot of microfilm publications, which were done a lot in those years. I surveyed records and prepared them for microfilm publication. I wrote little descriptions about them for a microfilm pamphlet. I put in target pages that let the film person know when to stop a section and to start another. I must’ve done other processing as well. But I always found the Consular Post files to be absolutely fascinating. The State Department records have their own classification scheme that they devised, so you can study it and see how things were arranged so you can focus on the areas that interest you the most. The State Department records were very well organized. They had good records management practices. The General Records of the State Department also were very interesting, but I don’t remember much about those. I remember the Consular Post files were particularly interesting." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "I was listening to an interview with another archivist here last week who currently deals with State Department records…" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "David Langbart?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "No, it was Paul Wester." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "Oh, yes, yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "And he was talking about the problems they’re having with Hillary Clinton’s emails, not just hers, but the early years with emails, and how they were being handled, what to do with them. Were there any similar kind of problems with records, whether people weren’t necessarily keeping them, or filing them like they’re supposed to, or—" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "Yes. I’m thinking back about State Department records, which I haven’t worked with in many, many, years. I remember in the early 1980s, the newer State Department records that were just coming in to the Archives, that classification scheme that had worked so well for State Department records up through the early- to mid-20th-century, was no longer being used. So that presented problems for the archivists here on how to decipher them, how they should be filed. The fact that the old classification scheme was no longer useful, was presenting a new problem. We didn’t have email issues because there was no such thing. To organize the newer records, we needed a new classification scheme, because the old one was no longer useful; it had broken down." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Were you involved in decisions about how to start reclassifying this stuff when it was coming in, or was that at a higher level?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "That was a higher level—but I know certain discussions were going on. I don’t think I was involved in anything that important. But I know that those issues were going on at the time. There are always new issues, new challenges to what we do here, no matter what records we’re working with." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So in 1984, you left that office?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "Yes. In 1984, I was an intermittent archive technician position. I think you could work as many as 39 hours in a week. It was flexible. You could work 30 hours or 20 hours, whatever you chose, but no more than 39. So I wanted a permanent position, and applied for one. I remember in those days there was difficulty, not just with me but with many intermittent archives technicians who wanted to become fulltime career archivists. And so they created, with OPM (Office of Personnel Management), something called Schedule B, which was a mechanism to transfer someone from being an intermittent archives technician, a non-career government employee, to being a fulltime government employee as an archivist at the Archives. So I applied in 1984 and in January 1985, I became a fulltime archivist. They had some difficulty and controversy about the Schedule B mechanism, but it worked out. We all became archivists at that time. So I became a fulltime career employee. Not a career conditional or a temporary career status, but a permanent government employee with all the benefits. At that time, I was assigned to what was then called the Library and Printed Archives Branch, if I remember correctly. And that was a unit where the library here in this building; everything was in this building. This was it. There were other satellite facilities but this was the heart of the whole agency. So there was the Archives, there was the Library, and part of it was called Record Group 287, Publications of the U.S. Government, and I was assigned to that unit. I don’t remember why, but I was. There must’ve been some reason. I think there was an opening, and I thought it’d be interesting. In those days they had a CIDS Program for newly hired archivists. It was not very formal, and much less formal than what it became in later years. And so you were assigned to take some classes, and then you were assigned to do what they called rotations to different units in the agency so that you became familiar with how the whole agency functions. So that was very interesting. You would do a month or two in one place, a month or two in another place, then come back to your home unit and spend some time there, over a two-year period, if I remember correctly. As a beginning archivist you were automatically promoted from a 7 to a 9 to an 11. The 11 was the ceiling. I remember my first salary as an archivist was $17,500, something like that, back in 1985. I did these rotations, some were more interesting than others, but I got very good exposure. I learned a little bit about military records. I did a rotation to the Preservation Unit. I did a rotation to the Administrative Unit that was then called NA, the Office of Administration. NN was the Office of the National Archives, where all the custodial units were located. Jim Moore was the head of that office in those days, and then Frank Burke became the head of it temporarily. When we became independent in 1985, Frank Burke became Acting Archivist of the United States, and I think Trudy Peterson became the head of the Office of the National Archives. I did these rotations to different units, and it was very good. I remember one interesting class that I took with Frank Evans, a long time archivist who was really into archival theory. He liked to focus on things that archivists used historically, like “respect des fonds” and “provenance.” That was quite an interesting class because not too many other people focused on that. He was an interesting guy. He’s long since retired. When I was with the main Library Archives Branch, my desk was downstairs in 3E2A. This was long before the renovation. We had stacks going down to the first tier. The building had 21 stacks. Our area was underneath the Constitution Avenue steps. They had installed what they called movable shelving, a new, very innovative thing in those days, the first example of that in the Archives. They installed a special floor, and then movable shelving. They used that area to house Record Group 287, Publications of the U.S. Government. My desk was in a little office area down there among the stacks underneath the steps. It wasn’t anything fancy. The building has changed over the years with the renovation, with shuffling, wing shelving, and other things, some of which I’m not happy about. I’ll give you one example. The renovation was well handled; they did a beautiful job in the Rotunda, although I don’t think that was necessary. I thought that the building was already wheelchair accessible. It wasn’t the perfect situation. You just had to come in the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance, take the elevator, go through the gate, and you’re in the Rotunda area, with a little ramp to the Charters of Freedoms. So I thought that worked out fine. Anyhow, they’d renovated the building and they made the Rotunda the way it is now, and it’s okay. It looks fine. People are pleased with it, and it still has that beautiful grand look. I’m sad that they did away with the entrance coming up the steps into the Rotunda area. That’s the way the building was designed for people to enter, so I think it’s a shame that they did away with that. But I understand for security reasons they had to restrict it, and change the way people enter the building. But I think that they really cut corners in the stacks areas, which they shouldn’t have done. It’s a shame because the stacks were beautifully designed with terracotta tiled walls, and they replaced those with drywall, which is just not as good quality. The light switches that they put in are very inexpensive and so they’re breaking all the time. I know there was a big discussion over the years about how staff would leave stack lights on. Now, with the new switches, the lights are still on, as they break so easily. They are just very poor quality. So those are two objections to things I don’t think were handled very well. But it’s okay, everything worked out just fine. While we’re on some negative things, I could never understand why, after they built the new building at College Park, they did not handle the space issue better. We quickly ran out of space. Archives II stacks quickly filled up over the years much faster than they ever expected. Of course, this is still very much a paper-based government. People don’t realize that. Although everything’s done on computers, people still print things out. Less so today, but still it is. But they’ve never gone to Congress and honestly said that we preserve the historically valuable records of the United States Federal Government; we’ve got to have more space; this is still a paper-based government; we’ve got to have another building. They didn’t want to admit that they miscalculated. I never quite understood that line of thinking. So now, we’re still scrambling for new space. This is a very serious issue for the Archives. That’s unfortunate." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So how do you deal with this space issue here in this building?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "We’ve run out of space and one way we’ve dealt with it is what we call wing shelving, which is another thing that I had strong objections to. This is the National Archives; we are supposed to set an example; we’re supposed to do things correctly. So, to make the most use of the space that we do have, they devised this wing shelving practice. Normally, you have seven boxes to a shelf in a stack area. You have rows of shelves divided into compartments, and each shelf can accommodate seven boxes. That’s three linear feet. But sometimes, you can push those seven boxes back and get two more boxes in the front, to make nine boxes to a shelf. They did that to save a lot of space. But the problem with it from an archival and preservation point of view, is that in order to see the boxes behind, you have to take one or two boxes off, and not often is there a place in the stacks to rest the boxes, so it’s extra wear and tear on those winged boxes. It’s not an ideal situation. After all, we’re the National Archives, not just an archive. It’s unfortunate that we’ve had to resort to that. But it’s okay, you do what you have to do." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So once you started in your permanent position, doing the rotations, was there any particular division in the rotations that was more interesting than the rest?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "I remember one interesting assignment, when Japanese Americans were writing to the Archives for confirmation from our records that they were, indeed, sent to specific internment camps out West during the war. They needed documentation so they could get compensated for that terrible situation. Congress had decided that the Japanese-Americans were going to be compensated for being interned in these camps. So I was detailed to that unit for a while. We would take these letters and look up their names in registers for each of the internment camps. There were four or five or six or seven of the camps out West. That stands out as an interesting assignment. I met people I would not have met otherwise, Mary Walter Livingston, and Bill, I can’t think of his name, and others. I remember another quite interesting rotation, to the Office of the National Archives, learning about the administrative running of the agency. I remember the preservation unit stood out, but the others are vague in my memory, but it was a good experience. Later on, the CIDS Program became more formalized, where the archivists were asked to write a paper and try to publish it, but that wasn’t expected of us in those days. We took those classes. I think we wrote a paper for one of them, but nothing came of that. Once we were done with that program, I think that’s when we graduated to the 11 Level. Also in that period of time, I learned about Record Group 287, Publications of the U.S. Government, which was quite interesting because it has publications from all the different agencies, like all the annual reports, and it has its own classification scheme for government publications. So that was interesting. And I spent some time helping out at the library. Then, in 1987, after I finished the CIDS Program, I was assigned to what was then called the Archival Publication Staff in the Offices of the National Archives. That was very interesting. It had an over-arching responsibility for description in the National Archives. Virginia Purdy was the head of that unit then. That was very good. I was very happy about that. That was very interesting because computers were just starting to become part of everyday life. I don’t remember the name of the computer system. My job was to take descriptions of records from all of the different units in the Archives and enter information about them into this database. That was very good experience because I learned about all of the different record groups, more than I had been exposed to before, and I learned about this database. That was a very interesting because it gave me an over-arching view of the Archives. I wasn’t focusing on just one unit, I was sort of at an administrative level, receiving information from all the different custodial units in the Archives, whether they were in the regions or here in this building, whether military or courts or legislative or diplomatic, what have you. So that was an interesting assignment. Description’s a whole other area that’s evolved over time since I’ve been here. There’s been quite a progression or evolution of description practices here at the Archives. Every step of that evolution has been the greatest innovation of all. Then something else comes along that’s even better, so it’s the greatest until it’s overtaken by a new greatest. What we’re doing now is the best thing to come along until something else comes along that’ll subsume it. But that’s human nature. It’s hard to improve upon the traditional PIs (Preliminary Inventories). Those old PIs were pretty much before my time. They were the main way to understand our records when I started here. PIs were very well organized. You’d see what records we had. All the series were lined up, and they had indexes. Then, that started to break down. As computers started to come in and become more part of our lives here, different systems were developed. At one time, there was a Format X, a Format Y way to describe records. Format Y was the organizational unit. The Format X was the actual series or subseries, and there were other things that I’m not remembering. Now, we call them file units in the National Archives catalogue. A file unit is basically what we used to call a series or subseries. That’s where you get to the actual description about the records, with these file units that we enter, send out to Archives II, where they review it and it’s entered into the National Archives catalogue. So that description has really evolved over the years. The Archival Publications staff also had people working on what was then called the Guide to the Records of the National Archives. It was a hard copy publication that described every record group in the National Archives. That was a big project, in addition to what I was doing. We were entering description information about the records into this database. Other staff members were gathering information on every record group in the National Archives for this publication. That would be a big, multi-volume guide to all the records in the National Archives. That still exists. It was quite a big thing at that time. Now it’s on our website and you can access it" }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Now, these catalogs are used for researchers coming in and trying to find information?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "Yes. The National Archives catalog is how people find out about our records. It’s a beginning. It has a lot of information, but it’s not comprehensive. Nothing is ever comprehensive, that’s why they used to call it preliminary inventories. Preliminary because the ideal was that they were never complete, so that’s why they were called PIs, Preliminary Inventories. Even though they were published, they were never considered complete. Continually, more information is always being entered into the National Archives catalogue. In Legislative, where I work now, we’ve been adding information into the National Archives catalogue, about the records previously described in the PIs. That’s all the older records, plus the newer records that are just becoming available to researchers. When I was with the Archival Publications staff, I was an 11. One had to apply for a 12. One didn’t automatically become a 12 in those years, when a 12 opening occurred—now…I have to interrupt that story because at the end of that period when I was with the Archival Publications Staff, I was assigned to the White House Office of Records Management on a detail with other archivists here in the building. We were assigned in the latter part of 1988 to the White House Office of Records and Management for an eight- or nine-month period at the end of the Reagan Administration. That was a wonderful sojourn for me. It was just great, being at the White House; learning how the White House functions; being in what was then called the Old Executive Office Building; becoming familiar with the web and with the computer system that they had there. A bunch of us were to begin the processing of the Reagan materials before they were to be sent to the temporary Reagan Library in California. He was still President, of course. We were given groups of records that we processed and entered information about them into a database. We did that for a number of months. Toward the end of 1988, when the Reagan Administration was coming to an end, our job was to help the various White House offices with the packing process. That was very interesting. Many of the staff didn’t realize who archivists were, that we were professionals. I think they looked at us as sort of box boys, people who just boxed up things. But still, we had exposure to the different offices and we helped them out, but the bulk of our time was spent processing these. The bulk of those months we spent at desks looking at these materials, entering the information about them. I remember one series of records was very interesting to me because they were letters on various topics, sent to the President, from various state capitals. So it was interesting to see the various state seals. The Old Executive Office Building was a beautiful building to work in, and very historic. It had beautiful terra cotta tile floors, and marble, so that was a very nice experience. Of course, we got to eat in the cafeteria in the basement, and I ran into the President on occasions, and Vice President Bush. I almost ran into him in the hallway. Also, we were invited to some White House Head of State welcoming ceremonies, and we got to go to a Christmas party for the staff in the White House. That was a very nice experience. When Reagan left office, we came back to the Archives. I think it was at that time that I got the position as a 12 in what was then called the Legislative Archives Division. I wanted a promotion. I wanted to be a 12. Lew Bellardo was the head of that division in those years. Shortly after that, legislation was introduced to give Legislative Records more prominence, which it deserved, not just part of Diplomatic Records or just a division within the Archives. They created the Center for Legislative Archives in 1989 or 1990. I’ve been with Legislative since the end of 1988. That’s what you call stability. Now, some people might say, ‘Oh, it’s not good to stay in one place too long.’ But on the other hand, I always thought that gaining subject area specialty, knowledge about a group of records would be a good thing and would result in some sort of promotion, but that hasn’t happened. But I have developed a great deal of knowledge, and I think researchers appreciate it. And I’ve always enjoyed working with the records and I’ve always enjoyed helping researchers. I get a pleasure out of that. You never know what a researcher is going to ask you. So I’ve enjoyed that aspect of it. At some point, I thought I would enjoy getting into management, but then I learned that the grass always seems greener. I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed it because, especially nowadays, there are so many meetings and discussions, and so little really changes over time. So I’m glad I’ve been able to work with the records and the researchers. That’s worked out very well." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "You said you work with researchers a lot, and in my research for our interview today, I noticed you’re acknowledged in several monographs. How does that come about?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "Researchers come to the Archives and our job is to help them find where we think they’ll find the materials. Or we tell them that we don’t have the information that they’re looking for. We are not adequately staffed to do research for people, but we do what we can. We’re able to give a higher level of assistance in this office than people in other units are able to do because we don’t have as high a volume of researchers as do archivists working with military records or with all of the civilian agency records. Researchers are usually writing a book or an article or a dissertation. They usually acknowledge the assistance that they’ve had from the Archives. That’s how my name has wound up in the acknowledgement sections of many of these books that have been published over the years. I’ve never kept a list, or kept track of all of them, but it adds up over time. Usually, there isn’t an acknowledgement section in scholarly articles, so they wouldn’t have acknowledged people, because they just don’t do that. But yes, over the years, I’ve worked with many, many, many researchers here. Sometimes we can be quite busy, and other times it’s slow. There’s usually a pattern to how busy we are, although that’s broken down now with the computer. I think there’s a level of busy-ness that’s steadier now over the years than in the past. Now, it seems that we’re busy all the time. With the computer, more and more people know about us, more and more people see what we have through our description on the website, so that’s brought in more business, which is good. In addition to helping researchers, I do other things too, although reference always has been my main focus because I enjoy that. But I have also done description, I do preservation work, organize the preservation activities that go on here with our records. And I have advised them, guided them, given them an introduction to our holdings and such. So, I do a whole variety of things." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "For the researchers you’ve helped, were there any areas of interest that have stood out more than others, or places where you think you did more work helping them than others?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "We have many genealogists who come in here. I’ll focus on two things that have stood out over the years. Number one are the petitions that we have here. Few people realize that one of the main activities of Congress, from the beginning, 1789 up through the mid-20th-century, was responding to petitions. Petitions can take the form of expressing a viewpoint about an important issue of the day, or requesting compensation of some sort, either a pension, or because of disability, or their property was stolen during wartime, or a land issue with the federal government. We’ve had many, many, many researchers over the years looking at these petitions in various ways, either as a broad examination of anti-slavery petitions, for example, or petitions relating to Indian issues, or petitions relating to navigation or irrigation, commerce, all of these things can be touched upon. That’s been quite interesting to see, because these petitions can cover such a broad wealth of topics, as could Congressional records generally because Congress can examine any conceivable subject, and they have. This makes it quite interesting. We have all of these petitions. A huge part of our collection is petitions. Another area that has stood out, it’s not just these two, but I’ll focus on the investigative records that we have. Before the 20th-century, Congress did all of its work in the Capitol Building. That’s all there was. But in the early 1900s, congressional office buildings were built. The House Office Building, the Senate Office Building, all of a sudden Congress had committee rooms available to them. They had more space, and they began to hold more and more hearings. And they began to have more and more investigations because of the big issues of the time, mostly dealing with crime, and anti-Communism, and all the child pornography. All kinds of investigations were held. These so-called investigative records are very interesting, the details, the level of investigating, the level of examination that these Members of Congress and their staffs, the committee staffs, would go into is just amazing. And our records reflect that in terms of their organization and the indexing. That level of indexing you just wouldn’t see today. These investigations covered a full range of topics, such as airmail, labor issues, unions, crime, pornography, among other things. So we’ve had researchers looking at these records. The other issue is our access to these records. Basically, Senate records are closed for 20 years, and House records are closed for 30 years. In my early years here, all congressional records were closed for 50 years, but they liberalized the access rules. The Senate decided 20 years was adequate, and the House decided 30 years. Each decided its own rules of access. Also, the National Archives’ relationship with congressional records is different from our relationship with the executive agency records. When the records from any executive agency, whether the State Department, Labor, Commerce, Agriculture, Defense, War Department, and the other executive agencies, come to the National Archives, and are deemed to be historically valuable, the National Archives becomes the legal owner of them. But that’s not so with congressional records. Congress continues to own the records that they have sent to us. The House and Senate committees decide what to send to us. It’s completely up to them. We have no control over that. We have physical custody of them, but the House and Senate retain legal ownership of their respective records. So we have a little less latitude in what we can do in terms of disposing of them or rearranging things. House records come to us in a little more organized fashion. For Senate records, it’s a little more complex because each committee makes its own decisions. On the House side, at the end of a Congress, which lasts for two years, the various committees send their records to the Office of History, Art & Archives. They will have organized the records, boxed them, labeled them, and we receive the whole two-year Congress at one time, as what is called an accession. The Senate side is different. Each committee does its own thing, its own boxing, its decision when to send, so we receive accessions from the Senate committees all the time. It’s up to them completely. So that’s a difference between the House and the Senate. We have the 20 years of the Senate side, 30 years of the House side, and then for investigative records, they are closed for 50 years. Many of these investigative records have become available in recent years because a lot of these investigations were done in the 1950s, and these records have been heavily used by researchers such as the McClellan Committee, which focused on labor and union practices; and the Kefauver Committee, which focused on organized crime; and the Special Subcommittee to Study Juvenile Delinquency in the U.S., in the 1950s and 1960s, that focused on juvenile issues. These are the sorts of records that researchers want to get into to see what Congress was studying; investigating; what their conclusions were; what the interactions were between staff members and executive agency personnel; or what kind of correspondence they were receiving from the general public, or all of these things. So our records are organized. We have these petitions, and we have what we call committee papers, and sometimes these records can be very substantive, and other times they’re not. It depends on the Congress, and it depends on the committee. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. You can’t say, oh, yes, all of these records are going to be useful, or substantive. It just depends on what we have or don’t have, and it varies greatly from Congress to Congress, from committee to committee. But generally speaking, in terms of the investigative records from the mid-early to the 20th-century, these records are very substantive. As I said, they had a great deal of authority to investigate whatever the issue was; and to gather information on whatever it was, whether it be an individual or an organization or a practice, or what have you; and those records are very substantive. The committees provided us with very good indexes to them. For example, for the McClellan Committee on organized labor and unions, we have this huge three by five index card file. We can’t make that accessible to researchers because it has information on records that are still closed. But the level of indexing is amazing, that these committee staffs were able to maintain an index of this volume and quality. We have about five filing cabinets with little three by five cards, four rows to a tray, to a drawer, filled with these index cards arranged alphabetically. It’s absolutely amazing. You wouldn’t see that today. They’re all on cards. A secretary would take the card out, type the information on it, and put it back in. That’s all there was, that’s how things were done in those days. It’s interesting that things were done so well in that regard. I don’t know if a computer can improve upon that." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So are the McClellan Committee records the ones that seem to be used more than anything else right now?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "We get a fair number of questions about it, but we also get a fair number of questions about other committees, such as the Kefauver Committee, which looked into organized crime, and the Juvenile Delinquency Committee from the 1950s and 1960s. That was a subcommittee of the Government Operations Committee, if I remember correctly. We get a number of questions about that. We have this collection of comic books from it. That’s up in the vault. The hearings looked at all these practices of society’s influences on food, and on children. That was a particularly interesting thing. Over the years, we’ve created a treasures vault. It has items that are extremely valuable and have great historical significance. They were culled from our regular stacks. The treasures vault has all of these very interesting documents from the records of the Congress, the House and the Senate Joint Committees. And we conduct tours of those treasure vault items for people, Members of Congress mostly, and committee staffs, to build good rapport with Congress. Congress gives us our money, our budget, and so we give them tours and show them our historically interesting documents. It’s a way for us to show off our more interesting items, and hopefully build better relations with the Congress so that they’ll give us bigger budgets. We’ve been doing that for quite a few years. That’s grown into a bigger part of our operation, having a larger number of materials in this treasure vault area, giving these tours. We used to do very little of that. I think is a good evolution. When the Center for Legislative Archives was created, Mike McReynolds left, and Lew Bellardo, who was also Deputy Archivist for a while when we first became independent, became the first Director of the Center for Legislative Archives. Then, Mike Gillette became the director after Lew Bellardo became Deputy Archivist. He was considered to be Archivist at one point, but he wasn’t chosen, he didn’t get that position. Don Wilson became Archivist of the United States after Frank Burke had been the Acting Archivist for a while. Lew Bellardo was our first director, then Mike McReynolds came back and expanded this treasure vault area. I think that was very good. Another issue that we deal with is the expanding concerns with electronic records. I am not so involved with that, but it will impact me somewhat as we start to have to preserve electronic records. That’s a whole other ballgame, how do you handle that, how do you process these records, how do you save them? Is it on a disk? What computer do we use to do that? How do we screen the records to protect personal privacy? That’s another issue that we deal with, screening records. We have to protect personal privacy information and national security information for records that are less than 50 years old. For example, the records of those two investigative committees, the McClellan Committee and the Kefauver Committee, require screening because some of the people mentioned could still be alive. The Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee records could have a very personal story about a juvenile’s being mishandled in some form or fashion. We have to protect that information if we think the people are still alive, so we use our good judgment. There are no hard and fast rules to these things. You have to trust your good judgment. And even if a record is old enough and you think the person is not alive anymore, you can make the record available. But we use our good judgment. Screening income tax returns from the IRS, those have to be closed permanently, no question about it, no matter how old they are—if they are from the IRS. But if the income tax information comes from an attorney or an accountant, it can be released. Federal Grand Jury information has to be withheld permanently." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "For the electronic records, how do you deal with screening them and taking out information, because 30 years ago when you first started working, you had mainly tape drives but now you have all this digital stuff, and it’s instantly available." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "Yes. I haven’t personally had to deal with much of that. But we have recently received a great many records on disk, electronic records, electronically born records, and we will have to start to process those. They are going to be open, and researchers will be requesting those in the near future. So we’re discussing how to do that. I assume that these records are all on a disk, a CD of some sort. They’ll be organized in some way. I will have to put it into my computer, look at it, see what it is, what screening issues are involved, because these are very recent records. One example is the records of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, I think was this congressional investigation, [a legislative branch commission; independent, 10-member panel composed of private citizens, according to NARA press release 3/11/16] examining the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Normally, they would be closed but there’s a special rule with these that they can be opened now that we have them here. They were sent to us immediately after the commission went out of business. So there are always exceptions to every rule; very few things are set in stone. Like with these financial crisis records, I haven’t seen any yet but I know we have them and they’re going to become available soon and a lot are in electronic form, so we’ll have to figure that out. I assume we’ll have to figure out how to segregate the things that we can release versus the things that we can’t. We may have to redact information if we think personal privacy is an issue. We’ll have to learn to do that on the computer. I have not done that before. I am still thinking of retiring this year, so I may not have to worry about it. This is for the future archivists to worry about." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Why retire now?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "I’ve been here for, all told, 32 years officially this coming April (2016). Some people say I’m too young to retire. But a change might be a good thing, we’ll see. Nothing has been signed yet on the dotted line. But I’m thinking I might do some volunteer work, maybe do some tour guiding? I’ve done a little of that and always enjoyed it. I love Washington. I love the Capitol building in particular. It would be ideal to give tours in the Capitol building. Years ago, Washington was much more accessible than it is today. You could go into the White House; you could go into all the agency buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue. The buildings were not as restricted as they are today. You didn’t see all the concrete flower pots. September 11 really changed Washington in a negative sort of way. Washington was just prettier, because you didn’t have all these bollards, and the flower pots and such, but I know security is important and you have to protect the buildings. We used to be able to eat in the Justice Department building. They have a lovely cafeteria in the basement. I understand it’s not what it used to be either. We used to be able to go into these buildings by showing our badge to the guards. We could even use the library on the upper floor. These buildings are beautiful. In those years, you could walk up, get in line, and take a tour of the White House. You didn’t have to reserve it months in advance like you do today with your Representative. Tours were given during certain hours each day, except for Saturday and Sunday. You got on line and went through the White House. That ended with September 11. So it’s not as easy as it used to be to give tours in Washington. It’s more of a logistical thing, you have to make sure people are at a certain place at a certain time. The Capitol, though, has the advantage that once you’re inside, you’re there, you have groups of people in there, and there’s so much to talk about in all of the spaces. So I think giving tours in the Capitol is sort of an ideal situation. Anyhow, we should focus on the archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Yes, what about this building, with the changes that came up, that—" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "I think the renovation wasn’t handled very well. I just think that in the stack areas they took some cost cutting measures that I think went too far. I think that could’ve been handled better, but there’s always the budget situation here, so they had only a certain amount of money to use, so they had to cut corners. I understand, but it is unfortunate that the renovation was handled as it was in the stack areas, that left it less than what it was before in my opinion in certain ways. But it’s okay. It works, it worked out just fine." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Yes, was the Archives’ renovation done to try to make more space and modernize, or was it done because of security after September 11?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "Oh, no, it was done to make more exhibit space available, and to modernize certain infrastructure systems, such as air conditioning and lighting, and to improve wheelchair access to the Rotunda. It wasn’t for security. One change was that the Charters of Freedom now are put into a vault every evening. That was reconfigured. But security wasn’t the main goal here, it was not the main reason for the renovation." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. How would you describe the intellectual and institutional value of the records that you work with?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "All of the records are very valuable, especially congressional records. I’m sure you can say that for all of the records here. That’s what an archives is, it reflects the organization that created them. The archives reflects the structure of the government, and the administrative handling of it. You can look at the archives’ records, and see the way the government is organized; how the government was structured over the years; what the agencies were called; what their subcategories were; the bureaus; what their functions were. The records in the archives are described in inventories and our databases. The quality of the records varies from record group to record group, and from time period to time period, but overall, the records are very valuable. That’s how we differ from a library. A library has various subjects organized according to a classification scheme. An archives has a specific mandate to do a specific thing. In the case of the National Archives, our mandate by law is to preserve, protect, and make available the historically valuable records of the U.S. Federal Government. The Library of Congress is a Library of Congress. It can collect whatever it feels a Library of Congress should collect, and it does. And because of that, the Library of Congress has become the largest library in the world, and has some of the most magnificent collections you can imagine. But it’s a library, and it can decide what the Library of Congress ought to hold, and it does. The Archives has a specific mandate. We can’t just decide to do whatever we want. There’s a law saying that we preserve the historically valuable records of the U.S. Federal Government. And that’s what we do. An archives has to reflect the way the records are created so that people can go back and understand how they were created, and what activities were undertaken by the people who created them. They are very valuable." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Is there anything that we haven’t touched on that you’d like to discuss?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "To be honest with you, I think we’ve touched upon a lot of things. If you have other specific questions, that may jar my memory. But at the moment, I don’t have anything specific to say. What haven’t I touched on that I could? I’ll say this, I think this is a great agency. This is a wonderful place to work. We do very important work here, and I think that not everything has been handled well, but as I’ve always said the positives have way outweighed whatever negatives there have been. One of the negatives—and I know I’m not the only person who says this sort of thing—the National Archives was part of the General Services Administration, the GSA, for many years. Before 1948, when they reorganized the government, the National Archives had been an independent agency. In 1948, it was subsumed under the GSA. They didn’t know where else to put the Archives. They had to put it somewhere relating to the handling of paper, and so we were part of the GSA from 1948 to 1985. That was not a good relationship. That was not a good place for us to be, administratively speaking. That suppressed the Archives in terms of its potential to be a leader in the archival community and an innovator in archival practices. Once we became independent, which was a hard-fought battle, it took us a long time to evolve into an innovative, ground-breaking, leadership agency. Bob Warner was Archivist when I started here. It was he and his deputies who really fought for the independence of the Archives, and thank goodness President Ronald Reagan finally agreed to it, and we became independent in 1985. That was a very good thing. Then Bob Warner left, Frank Burke became Acting Archivist for two or so years, and then Don Wilson became Archivist. It took us a long time to overcome the mentality of being part of GSA, and I think we’ve made great strides in that regard. I think our current Archivist is probably one of the best-prepared archivists we’ve ever had, and certainly in my time here. He did wonderful work at the New York Public Library. This is a very entrenched agency, with some very long-held practices. It’s hard to overcome that. Of course, it’s slow because of budget constraints, but we’ve made good progress. But it took a while to overcome some of this inertia because people tend to stay here a very long time. That is not unusual in the government. Some people have stayed here for many, many, many years, even longer than my 32-year official stay. But change is sometimes a good thing, and I think good strides have been made, and I think that we’re moving forward. They say morale here is very low. Morale is known to be low here at the Archives. It was very low here when I started in the early 1980s. When I started, I thought, do I really want to be in an agency where the morale is low? But I was so excited to be at the National Archives, working with the historically valuable records of the U.S. Government. So I wound up staying. Nowadays, morale has continued to be a problem. The main reason is lack of promotion potential. But even with the low morale, people stay, because they recognize the uniqueness of what we do here, and the importance of our work, and they enjoy it, because people who work here usually have a love of history, or a background in history, so it’s a very good fit for people who like history. And of course, you have a government job, and good stability and good benefits. As archivists, we do very well here. We don’t want to tell OPM that, but compared to history faculty in academia, our salaries are equivalent to a full professor’s. Very few archives can pay as well as the National Archives can. It’s good to keep that in mind. But the lack of promotion potential is a big issue here. Over the years, decisions were made that appraisal archivists’ work with agencies was considered at a higher level than the work of a reference or description archivist, and that rubs some people in the wrong way. I never agreed with that decision. I think the work of a reference archivist and a description archivist is just as high a level, just as intellectually challenging, just as valuable as the work that an appraisal archivist does, with an agency records manager deciding what series of records are valuable, which series of records are not valuable. So there have been those kinds of issues, where certain areas have seen more promotion potential than other parts of the agency." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "What would you say has been your biggest positive accomplishment, personally, for the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "For me personally, the work I’ve done with researchers has been a very positive part of my job. I’ve always enjoyed working with the researchers, seeing that they’ve been successful with what they’ve done, seeing my name acknowledged in publications. That’s all very positive. And also giving tours. Those have been the highlights of what I’ve done here. On a more general level, I think it’s very good that the Archives is better-known that it used to be. To this day, some people still think I work for the Library of Congress or for the Smithsonian. People just did not know about the National Archives. The Library of Congress and the Smithsonian are so much better-known. But more and more people now know about the Archives, and understand what we do. So the public outreach has really improved here. They’ve expanded the exhibits area. That was a good thing. There is much more activity in terms of lectures and such, and we give tours for Members of Congress and their committee staffs. But for me personally, working with the researchers is my biggest positive accomplishment." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. Is there anybody else that you would recommend that I interview for this oral history project for?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "I think my colleague Rod Ross has already been interviewed. I heard that Bruce Bustard is going to be interviewed, or was." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Bruce?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "Bustard, B-U-S-T-A-R-D. He works in the exhibits section. He’s been at the Archives just about as long as I have. My colleague Richard McCulley, the historian here in the Legislative, I believe he’s going to be interviewed or already has been. He’s very nice. David Langbart, who has been here longer than I have, works for State Department records. I would think he would be a very good candidate for an interview. All of the long-term employees here you can consider. Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler is the head of Preservation, a supervisor there. Greg Bradsher is another long time staff member. I forget his name right now, Jessie will know. But I’m sure interviews have been done with them. Bill Cunliffe, has been here for over 50 years. He still works out of Archives II. I’m sure an interview has been done with him. Or maybe he’s not interested, I don’t know. Richard Hunt, in our unit, has been here a very long time. I don’t think he’s retiring yet. I think you want to focus on people who are thinking about retiring. He’s probably going to work another five years or so, although he’s older than I am. He is 60 or 61. But the others in our office are still mid-career. Janet Davis I know is planning to retire, but I don’t know if she’d be interested in doing an interview. She’s been here a long time, longer than I have. There are other people in other units, I just can’t think of their names at the moment. So, is there anything else that I’ve left out? Have I rambled on too much?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "You’re not rambling on too much. If there’s nothing else, then that would conclude our interview." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVIS", "text": "Wonderful. Wonderful." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "This is Rebecca Brenner at Archives II, and I am conducting an oral history interview of Michelle Dozier on June 30, 2015. So, could you provide a brief overview of your background and education?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Sure. I was actually born at Fort Meade, Maryland, an army brat. My dad retired around the time I was in first grade. We ended up moving to Ayer Massachusetts, or Fort Devens, which I don’t believe exists anymore. So, all my elementary, middle school, and high school education was in Ayer, Massachusetts. I then graduated high school in 1977, and went to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. My degree is Hospitality Management. I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Hospitality Management. I did that after I graduated in 1981. I worked in the industry, probably about a year and a half to two years, and I had a boyfriend at the time and decided that I would move to Iowa, working for Marriot Corporation, and they were getting ready to move me to Nebraska. And I decided that I really didn’t want to work in an industry 365 days a year, 24-7, and came back over to Maryland, where my husband-to-be was stationed at Fort Meade. So, I ended up back at Fort Meade." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "And what positions have you held at the National Archives, and what did you do in them?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Okay, I started at the National Archives in 2001. I came from the U.S. Department of Labor, where I had been there since 1983. I came into the government as a clerk typist. So, in 2001, I was hired as the Archives.gov team leader. I had also competed for the web manager position, and I was a finalist but did not get selected for that position, which was absolutely the best thing because I don’t think I would’ve done very well in that position at the time because I did not know NARA. So, in 2001, NARA established a web program staff, and I think I was the fourth or fifth person hired at the time. And we proceeded to hire a total of eleven people to manage the Internet and Intranet websites, and to also support the Presidential Libraries websites. So, I was a Team Leader, and then in 2007 I became the Web Program Manager. Jennifer Nelson left, and I became the new manager for the group. And then in 2012 we had a reorganization where the Office of Innovation had a new position for a digital analyst, and that’s what I’m doing now. I didn’t officially start that until 2014 because they had trouble filling my position, so I was still doing my old work for that period of time, and then we did hire someone but they only stayed for about nine months, so I continued to do that web program manager job for a lot longer than originally intended." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "When you first started at NARA, what were your original impressions of the agency?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "When I first came here, honestly, I thought I had made a mistake, and the reason was: it was very quiet, compared to where I had come from, it was a very quiet agency, and people didn’t seem to be very friendly at the time. One of the reasons I took the job, or applied for the job, was that where I was, I had started the first Intranet at the Department of Labor, called Labor Net, and I was kind of getting bored and wanted to do something different. There were no opportunities for me to work on the public website. So, when I applied for this job, here at NARA in 2001, it was to work specifically on the public website. So, when I came here, all the people that worked in my group—two of them had worked for NARA before, but nine of us had not. So, we didn’t have the NARA, you know, we weren’t archivists, we weren’t historians, we weren’t preservationists, so we had to learn a lot about the agency. So, there were plusses and minuses to that because not knowing the agency we could bring new ideas, and then the disadvantage was we had a lot to learn in terms of what the work was in the agency. So, we did a lot of rotational assignments and details, where we would work in a research room, or we would work in a different area, so we could learn about the different jobs. So, that was interesting, and it took me about six months to think that I didn’t make a mistake in coming here. I immediately got into creating a design and managing contacts, and the work became very interesting. It took us a lot of effort to kind of get people to trust us to represent them on the website—there was a lot of reluctance to put things on the website back then—and then we also did some training, which was in my background. We would train the staff because the way that the web program works is we centrally managed the content of the website, and we rely on staff all over the country who are subject matter experts to provide content and to update the content." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Could you speak more to that transition into the website and the web program staff, and what was the general attitude towards that?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Well, the interesting thing about us, again, we were from outside, so there was a trust issue, but we used to have a lot of fun, and I guess I would see we were kind of noisy, and boisterous, and things like that, which was kind of a new thing, at least I felt it was, but we used to do a lot of things together. It was a lot of good team spirit and we enjoyed our work, so it was just really going out and meeting with people and explaining, you know, what we were trying to do, and to get offices—you know, we felt like we were just constantly pulling teeth to get people to give us content to put on the web. And we reached another point, where they wanted to put everything on the web, and everything doesn’t belong on the web, so it was kind of a tipping point right before that started to happen. But each staff member was assigned to a certain area of content, and so they built relationships with people in the agency, and you know, over time I think it just really built a good reputation. We did a couple of redesigns, which were kind of challenging to do, where you try to get people to really review their information, and decide whether it’s up-to-date or necessary. Sometimes people were resistant to getting rid of things. But when we did our first redesign, in 2002, and we did a content audit and discovered we had 18,000 files on the server, and by the time we got done we were down to 8,000. There was a lot of excess stuff that had never been removed, and so we went from there, and now there are probably 25,000 files on the website now. But yeah, so it was an interesting time—I think they started their website in 1996 originally, and it was one or two people who were kind of working, so by the time they actually made that full staff of 2001, all of that stuff had just been sitting there, you know, things were getting posted, but none of it was coming off." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Did you have mentors early on?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "No, I think what it is that we did rotational assignments where we, for 120 or 180 days, we would go into a different office. We obviously had IDP’s, Individual Development Plans, and some of our elements of the IDP were to actually do a rotational assignment, and you had to take a class called Archiving for Non-Archivists. I can’t remember—that’s gone away and come back—it’s kind of interesting, so we could learn more about, you know, what this agency does, and the different aspects within the agency. So, you know, we didn’t really have mentors, per say, but we did try to do rotational assignments and get to know other people in the organization." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What successes have you achieved here?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Well, I think we established a good reputation for providing good customer service, and for representing the agency very well. As I said, in 2002, we did one redesign. We did another one in 2005. We did another one in 2010. So, we’ve also done two on NARA@Work, the Intranet. So, I think each time we’ve done a redesign, we’ve brought best practices into our work we’re doing. On staff, we had a lot of staff participation. I think the first redesigns we did were paper-based, for example, the way to design a website is to do cards or post-its, and you put topics on them, and then you would just organize them, and that became the basis for your websites, so you’d group them together, and this became one topic, and you’d group this together, and that’s how you did web building from the beginning. Or if you wanted to do a redesign, you know, you called the card sorts, so that was the way that we did them, and we did them on paper. Well, by the time we did the last one, those were done online, so we had staff participating. They could do the card sorts online, and we did a lot of user testing. They were usually paper-based, and by the time we finished we were able to do all that stuff online now, which meant we had participation from across the country. When we were doing paper-based stuff it basically had to be AI and AII. But by the time we got to the very last one that we did with everything online, everyone across the country could contribute and participate. So, I think that was one thing I could say too was that we invited employee participation, and they voted on the name. NARA@Work was a vote by the staff. The design of Archives.gov was a vote by the staff. So, I think we always took into consideration— actually we had a public vote too, so it was public and staff votes. So, I think we always made an effort to include staff in the processes that we undertook to make the websites, to make improvements to our websites." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What aspects of your work have you enjoyed most?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Well, I like working with people. I like solving problems. I was talking with someone yesterday, and I think when I first came here, it seemed like we had a crisis every Friday, at 3:00, there would be a crisis! We would wait because some announcement was coming, we would have to post it, and this was just how it was. There was always something crazy going on that we would have to stay late and try to, you know, address. But it also was exciting to be involved in that and to know you have that kind of impact, you know, to be able to spread the word like that very quickly. Now there is social media, so the web does not have to be up to date as much, although we can do that remotely now. Before, we used to have to physically be here. Now we can do that remotely, so someone doesn’t have to come into the building." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What’s an example of a particularly memorable Friday crisis?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Let’s see, usually it would be some press release that had to go out, about some issue. I guess, and it wouldn’t necessarily be a Friday crisis, would be when we were releasing Presidential records. So, whenever the was a Supreme Court nominee, I’ve done Alito, Sotomayor, John Roberts, there might be one more—when they got nominated, the agency looked in all of our records to find out if they had ever worked for the government, they had records here. So, they would get digitized, and then we would end up publishing on the website. And sometimes, you know, we would have rollouts of one big launch, or sometimes we would be launching them. So, all the Supreme Court nominees—I learned about what they had done in their past, and it was just, again you’re having impact, and all of them obviously got confirmed. One that was particularly—it wasn’t something that I like to be really proud of, in terms of what our country did, but the CDC [Center for Disease Control] had these files—America had done some experiments with prisoners and prostitutes and things like that, and had injected these folks. They had syphilis, and even though we could treat it, we did not treat it. We wanted to see how the disease progressed. This was a very shameful thing that the agency did, but anyway, we ended up publishing those records: graphic pictures of the results of these experiments. So, we had to work with General Counsel; we had to work with all these different people to make sure—because it was something that could cause, well, had already caused an uproar when people found out that we had done these things. But when you put them on a website, and they are very graphic, people will be like: “you’re publishing porn,” you know, things like that, so we had to figure out a way we would put up—this is the first time that we had done that, we had put up this alarm when you click on a page, an interim page would come up and say: “these pictures are very graphic.” If you want to continue, click here. If not, go back. You know, because, it was very, very sensitive." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "When was this? And what were the legal implications?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "I’m going to have to look up when that was. I am not really sure of the timeline for that." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Just approximately, early 2000’s?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "It was late 2000’s." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "It was, I want to say, ’09, or 2010 possibly. But we can look online to see those exact dates. But mainly it was that people would file complaints against us for posting stuff like that. And then, of course it hit the news. Even though it had sort of been there before, now, you know, the Guatemalan government would get upset. You know, different, it could have had, I guess, a lot of political ramifications. Apparently, it was agreed upon by the countries that allowed this to occur, but the families of these people were very upset, and I don’t know if they received reparations, but they may have. That was the most—it was a very difficult project that I was involved in." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Would you say that NARA was serving as sort of a watchdog in that scenario, or just had access to the records?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "No, we weren’t a watchdog because mainly we can’t publish things if they are records from another agency; we have to have their permission to publish them. So, all this was being worked out, with our General Counsel, their General Counsel—I guess it’s possible that they were FOIA-ed—we would not have released them without coordinating with CDC. So, you know, all this back and forth was going on about when we could release them, how we were supposed to release them, so there was a lot going on across these agencies to publish. But we were not really a watchdog. We just can’t publish some of the stuff until, you know, the agency agrees to release them." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Moving to a more specific question, can you describe a typical day in your unit?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Well, we do have staff now who telework. We used to not be able to do that. Staff had to be here. But mostly work comes in from all over the country that we review, check for, you know, spelling, formatting, and things like that, and then they get published. A lot of stuff now can be, like on NARA@work, we have a content management system, so we do not have to touch that stuff as much. They self-publish—we don’t have to monitor that. Right now, I’m actually not on the web team anymore, I’m doing other work, but right now they are implementing a content management system for the public website, so that eventually staff will also be able to self-publish. They won’t have to rely on us to be here to physically touch a file and push it up, like we used to have to do. That’s the manual process. There, let me see what else is going on—well of course, we have the catalog. In my division, we are responsible for the online catalog. In my role now, what I’m doing is I’m looking at how our unit supports the strategic goals. So, I look at the data from the different groups, like the catalog, how much stuff we are publishing, the digitization lab, how much stuff we’re digitizing, how much of that ends up in the catalog on the web and social media side, looking at: is our traffic increasing, what are people looking at, what are they searching for, are we getting traffic from social media to the website, are we getting traffic from the catalog there, and then we have these digitization partners. I’m looking at how much they’re digitizing and how much traffic they’re getting on their site. So right now my role is more about how we are helping support and reach a goal that will give access to the records and all the different units in my Office of Innovation and how they contribute to that." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "You mentioned the strategic plan. Is that what it is called? What is that?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Every agency has a strategic plan. And you have a certain number of goals, and one of our goals is providing access to the records, and I think the fourth one is developing staff. So, there are four elements, and when I do my performance standards, for example, there might be five or six, and I just have to say how I would be performing them and they have to align with the strategic goal that is listed on our plan. So, it’s published, I think it’s updated; I want to say, every five years. But it changes over time because things can change from year to year in terms of what you are—we are trying to, in terms of access, we might have a goal to describe 95% of our holdings. I think it is 90% for this year. So, I track: are we doing that, are we keeping up with that, and then that gets reported, that is reported then into our plan to show if we are meeting our goals." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "How has web traffic changed over time?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Actually our traffic has gone a little slower. I would like to say 5%, or between 3% and 5% per year. And one of the things is that I think that we are putting, and this was always a challenging idea for people, we are putting our content in more than one location. Instead of just publishing things on the web, or publishing in the catalog, they get published on Wikipedia, they are published on Facebook, you might see things on Twitter, we have a YouTube channel. We have Flickr. We are publishing photographs. And then we have these partners who are digitizing stuff, and they are putting the stuff on their website. So, while we might get eighteen million visitors on a year of traffic to the website, Ancestry gets that in a month. So, they have many more images of documents on their site, but so we are seeing billions over last year. We saw over a billion on Wikipedia alone." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What is the relationship between the National Archives and Wikipedia?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Well, we have a Wikipedian in Residence. And we work with them. And they are going to have a little space down in the Innovation Hub downtown, where we collaborate with them to get materials up into Wikipedia, and then we also track how often our material is used in articles and Wikipedia. We are actually in Wikipedia Commons. So, we have one person who is just devoted to cultivating that relationship with them—Dominic Byrd-McDevitis—our Wikipedian in Residence. And then with our partners, they have usually an agreement that for five years they can digitize certain records, and they get to use them, obviously they get to charge for those uses for however long we have the agreement. And then, once the agreement is done, we get the records, and we can publish them in our catalog. So, that is what we are in the process of doing now. I think we have twelve million things that we need to put up in the catalog right now." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "You have mentioned a few, but can you speak to changes over time that you have experienced at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Changes over time, I guess, well obviously technology. We used to have, the web team used to purchase our own PC’s because the ones that they gave to staff were not as powerful, so we often were ahead in technology. NARA itself, I think things have changed outside of NARA that have made us have to change, for example, social media. There was a lot of staff who did not want us to participate in social media. They felt like it was not really supporting the mission. There was a lot of resistance to it because they did not feel like we should be publishing our materials on other sites. So, I think people have gotten used to that, and even having staff speak on social media, like someone tweeting, and writing on Facebook, there are people who are very resistant to that. And so, there were some comments that we had 200 people working in my office just to do social media, and the reality was we only had two people working in the office on social media, but we might have had a hundred and something other people across the agency who were publishing on social media. They might be putting on Flickr photos; they might be putting on videos on YouTube. So, they did not actually work for our office. And actually, this was “other duties as assigned.” They all had other jobs. They probably were archivists, or they were doing other work. Here they were also participating on social media. So, the other thing I think, that has changed in the agency is that we have the ICN, the Internal Collaboration Network. That really changed the communication process in the agency, where a lot of people are able to share ideas and get information very quickly, like today everyone’s blasting about Facebook being down because people actually use Facebook. They publish Facebook materials or things like that. So, Facebook has been down again. We cannot get to Facebook from here. It is not that Facebook is down; it is that we cannot get to it. So, people who actually do work on Facebook and look for information to publish on Facebook cannot do their work today for whatever reason. So, I think, something that was interesting was the ICN—people share things like pet photos and what I did on my summer vacation. But they also share information on where they can find certain things, like records, or how to address a researcher’s problem. We have a virtual scream where you can scream, and they don’t really write swear words, but you can tell that that’s what they want to do. So, the ICN, I think, has had a big impact on communication, and again, people can talk to each other from all over the country. I don’t think that would have happened before if you had to call somebody and look them up. So it’s good for immediate communication, and you can put something up there and say: “does anybody know where this is,” and next thing you know, you have five responses. I think that has had a really big impact. Again, people were resistant to it and did not want it. But some people still complain that a lot of non-work stuff happens on there. But we describe it as sort of being the water cooler talk. So, you might be walking down the hall or standing by the water cooler, and you guys have these conversations, now these conversations happen on the ICN. That’s how we view it." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "How was the decision made to start social media sites, or being involved with Facebook and Flickr and YouTube and all those?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "So, in 2009, the administration, President Obama, they decided that we should be using social media. The government issued a lot of guidance. There were two memorandums issued by the Office of Management and Budget that allowed us to do two things. One was to use cookies, which meant that you could get some information about people and their behavior on your website, and also that you could use social media. So, OMB, gave us a list of all social media platforms, and GSA, General Services Administration, started working with these different groups, these different platforms, to negotiate terms of service agreements that would allow us to participate. So, it started in 2009, and the first agreements that we signed, and this is what we had to do. We had to get the agreement, we had to take it to our General Counsel, we had to run it by IT security, and then the CIO had to sign the agreement. And once the agreement was signed, we had to set up policies and procedures to use it. So, we had internal training, and first we did a Twitter account, we did one Facebook page, we did a YouTube channel, we had Flickr. I think those were the first four or five that we first did. Now we have over a hundred and sixty different places on the network, which means there is twenty-five Facebook pages, or forty Facebook pages. So, each region has one, each library has one, but there are 160 locations where we are participating on social media. It started in 2009, with the administration encouraging us to do it. And then what we would do was we would start some of them internally, and some things got shut down because they were not successful. One thing people did not realize is that if you have a Twitter account, you have to tweet regularly. You cannot just put it out there and just leave it. So, that happened a few times before, so we set up a process where people would send us proposals for what they wanted to set up, and they would be reviewed, and then we would meet with them to discuss it, and then they would decide whether or not they wanted to continue or not. They realized that we were not going to be doing the work for them, other than setting them up, establishing them. They were going to have to do it themselves after we got things set up. So, it just blossomed, and I’d say every couple of months a new service would get released, and sometimes they would change their terms of service agreement and we cannot use them anymore. Or, they could charge us for it. Or, they decided to charge us for the services, so we just decided that we were not going to continue with it." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "How would you evaluate the transition overall to the ICN, and NARA using social media— how would you evaluate that transition overall?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Well, I’ve been in the government, like I said, since 1983. I have never seen anything move as quickly as I have since 2009. I would say that it just, in many ways, how it moves on the outside of the government agency, and we have made such progress in terms of moving much more quickly to get things set up and get things approved, and things like that. I have never seen anything like it. It is really just how social media is. It has just been fortunate that we had an administration and an agency that decided to participate." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Along the lines of things being online, another change I was wondering about is the digitization of records, including both digitization of paper records that are already here, and then what happens when the records at NARA that are received are already digital?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Well, those go into the ERA, the Electronic Records Archive, and then we ended up pushing them up into the catalog. The partners—they deliver hard drives with the images on them, and then we move them up into the catalog. So, again, there was a lot of resistance with the partners that were not very much appreciated, back when it started. And we often still get complaints from members of the public. We have a customer satisfaction survey on our website. We have had it in place since 2003, and we ask questions about the website, what they were looking for, or what the best thing was. If they could change something, what would they change on the website? So, we frequently see complaints about they do not want to have to pay to use Ancestry to get access to the records, and the only other option is for them to come to a NARA facility. And so, you know, there are complaints about that. The 1940 census was another one that there were complaints. We did not have the capacity to host that here, so we had to host that externally. So, you know, the customer does not like to pay. First they think everything should be online, and second they think it should be free. That’s the bottom line. It’s their taxpayers paying for this stuff, and they think it should be free. It will be eventually, but we just do not have the capacity to digitize everything." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "I am not sure if this question is under your line of discretion, but what gets digitized? What are the priorities within the strategic plan?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "I am not able to address that, other than to say there is a digitization strategy group, and they are within the Office of Innovation, and right now they are doing a digitization prioritization strategy. So, that is again on the ICN. The Digitization Government Board is asking for agency input on what should be digitized. I don’t know how each unit decides what to digitize, but we share information on our survey. If the public says we’d like to see more of this, we share that information with the different offices that have those records. I think we have a bunch of State Department records that are ready to be published soon that are going to be of high interest." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What are those, just out of curiosity?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "I’m not 100% sure. I just heard about that yesterday, of what the content is of those records. I’m not sure what they are, but I just know that for right now, they are not uploading stuff right to the catalog. But as soon as that is functioning again, it’s 1.2 million records from the State Department. It would be uploaded, but high-interest records tend to be Nixon tapes, for example. That would be, that was one that was something we did, you know, transcriptions from Nixon. We posted those online, so whenever that happens, we have to be prepared because the website will get a lot of high traffic. But high interest records require coordination, and like the 1940 census, the site crashed, the day that it launched, and it wasn’t here. It wasn’t us. It was externally, but it crashed. And there were so many people that were interested in it, you know, that they just could not support the traffic." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Any other changes over time?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Well, obviously things like tele-work—when I first came into the government that was not very common. I didn’t know anybody who worked at home back then, and I would say that this agency, like the one I worked at before, supported work-life balance, so teleworking is one of the things. One of the things I liked at Labor was that, less so here, was that the Department of Labor had a day care center that my son went to, is that they were visible in the building quite often. They had events. Whenever we had, let’s say, Black History Month, they would be part of the program. So, you got to see them more. Here, they cannot go into certain areas of the building. So, it is nice to hear them when they are downstairs, or outside of our offices. I think it is helpful for parents, and I was a single mom too, to be able to have your kid right there nearby, that you could see them during the day. So, those kinds of things in government in general just have made life for working parents a lot better. This agency supports the work-life balance." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "You said NARA has a daycare, or have we heard them?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "NARA has a daycare. It is actually when you first come in the building—no, you actually have to access it from the outside. So, when you first come in the driveway, if you look to your left, there is this little short area. That is the daycare, and that is where the playground is. The other time we see them is when there is a fire alarm, and parents rush down to get them, and then they, I mean, it’s kind of fun to see, but they put seven of them in a crib and roll them out—it’s kind of cool." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Does Archives I have its own daycare? Do they send the kids on a shuttle here?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "I don’t know. It’s open to other people; it does not just have to be NARA employees. But there’s more facilities available downtown. The Department of Labor had their daycare center since 1963. But you have more opportunities to use other daycare centers nearby. You don’t have to rely on your own agency. So, my son went to Labor from three years to five years old. I think here they take them as infants, six weeks to eight weeks." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "He can put that on his resume: Department of Labor, age 2 to age 5." }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Yes, you know, that was the fun thing. And so, I’d see a school bus come up here sometimes, so I’m not sure if there is school age, but an elementary school bus comes in the parking lot sometimes. So, there might be a kid down there who is already going to kindergarten." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "How do you view your time at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Well, it’s interesting, because at first, one of the things I liked about working at Labor is I felt that the Department had a lot of impact on Americans, and I did not see that so much when I first came here. But over time I see that we’ve got so much history here. We are providing access to those records. Again, I’ve learned a lot. I do feel that this agency has a huge impact on all Americans, not just working Americans because that’s what Labor was: working Americans. Everybody who worked, but so, I definitely feel proud and honored to have worked for the agency. And it also, again, I think, I don’t know if you’re aware, we have low scores in terms of employee satisfaction." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "I didn’t know that, but that’s interesting. Can you tell me more about that?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Well, they do a survey every year. And this is all online; you could look it up if you wanted. We are like second from the bottom, which is very sad. I think pockets vary; I have been very satisfied with my work, and a lot of people who work in my office are too. I think most dissatisfaction is the lack of advancement opportunities. Like any agency there is sort of this jealousy over headquarters versus the field offices. That’s one thing; they feel like they’re step children. But that’s the same way it was in the Department of Labor. Every regional facility felt like they did not get everything like the Headquarters did. You know, so, in general though, I think most people I’ve worked with seem very happy with their work. They think there were opportunities to work on special projects and do different things. The only thing I could say might be lacking was promotional opportunities to be able to move up, because people don’t leave. I have not had one person leave the web team, for probably seven or eight years. And most of the people who are there came in 2001. Most of them have come in and have not left. But I think the work has changed, so they are interested and developing skills, and also I think the culture in terms of work-life balance because a lot of people have children and families. I think it just fits everybody well, and so they don’t leave. The employee satisfaction in general is pretty poor. There are a lot of activities that the agency has been doing to try to bring morale up. But a lot of it is external stuff. We had a sequestration with these big budget cuts. We have no control over that. We have no control over whether Congress gives us raises or not. So, when people want more money, Congress did not give us any more money. There are no wage increases, so some of that we cannot control, but I think there is a big effort, and I think, a sincere effort, to try to improve employee satisfaction. I’ve been very satisfied with my work." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "That was 2013, right? How did the government sequester affect NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Well, again I cannot speak for everyone, but for example, a lot of contracts were cut or reduced, like we used to have a contract in the fitness center. We had staff that did classes. They updated equipment, and their contract was cut. So, I think our security contract had to be cut, so I think we used to come in by the entrance down there, so there was fewer security staff. We had a hiring freeze. People were leaving, and we could not replace them. That was bad everywhere. It wasn’t just here. Some of my friends were furloughed. They were off from eight to ten days with no pay. We didn’t do that. NARA did a lot to prevent that from happening, so we didn’t have furloughs. But there were a lot of cuts. Like I said, the gym was one of them. We have no more contracts for that. I think that’s the main thing. Some things like you put off upgrades, or updates and things like that on technology. But they kept us from being furloughed and laid off, so I think that was another thing that the agency should be proud of." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What contribution are you most proud of at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "I would say, just in general, the quality of the websites. We have always tried to do a really good job of portraying the agency in an accurate light, not necessarily always positive, but an accurate light. I am also proud of the social media effort in 2009. I was the first one to get these set up for us when it became feasible for us to do that. I would also say that the satisfaction survey—we were one of the first agencies to get that on our website. We have been doing that since 2003. We have won a couple of awards on the websites. We won a Webby. We received an award of recognition from the Federal Web Managers Council, you know, for the content and plain language. As the manager of that group, I think we always worked really hard to produce a really good product on the web representing the agency." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Are you affiliated with any other professional organizations, such as SAA or OAH?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "No. On the web team, we were not archivists. The only thing that I do right now is the Federal Web Managers Council. And then there is a social media group, but they are not recognized like SAA." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "That’s okay; tell me about them." }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "Well, the Federal Web Managers Council is, again, sponsored by GSA. They’ve been around for quite a while, but we used to have an annual training where we would share best practices and things like that, and so, there is a website, digitalgov.gov, where there is all the information. So, we would review new policies and new guidance. We would share all of that information and that kind of stuff. So, they used to have monthly meetings that I would attend and then when social media kicked off, that Social Media Council did that same sort of thing where, you know, you can go online. That’s the other things that changed so much: webinars and things, where you don’t have to leave your building and travel too far just to learn about the latest, you know, software that people are using and things like that. But no, I’m not affiliated with any formal things like SAA." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Okay, and is there anything you would like to add to the interview, such as anecdotes or words of wisdom?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "That’s a hard one: anecdotes. I guess one thing is not to judge a book by its cover, probably because like I said, when I first came here I was thinking I had made a mistake because I felt like people were very unfriendly. It didn’t seem like people were very happy here, but over time, as I got to know everyone, there was this serious demeanor all the time, so it did not seem like people were having fun in their work, but that would be one. I guess the one thing that people don’t know about how I ended up in this is that I have a degree in hospitality." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "I know that program at UMass." }, { "speaker": "MS. DOZIER", "text": "I came in as a clerk typist GS-3. I took the test. Back then you had to take a typing test. And I took the test, and I came in, and six months later I had gotten a position in another office doing training. So, I started training, and I was very shy. I ended up as a training assistant and then actually a trainer where I was teaching classes on the consumer price index and the housing index, which produces the CPI, right. So, there you go, I was having this big impact. They ended up just setting up a server email, their own email servers, so I ended up getting training for that. I managed the server, so here I am moving into technology. I’ve gone from training into technology. In the main Labor building I ended up getting a job where they were setting up a computer lab. You probably don’t even understand computer based training, where you would have ten PC’s, and you would have computer training loaded onto them. People would sign in and come and take training. That’s what we used to do; we had a lab. So, one day, I was walking through the suite, through the Secretary’s suite, and he was having a problem with his PC, and he calls me and I go in and everything had frozen. So, I don’t know, I hit a bunch of keys and unfroze his document. And so he was able to continue, blah, blah… And the next thing I know, I am now setting up the Intranet because I solved a Word problem, a Word Perfect is what we had. I solved this problem, and next thing I know, I’m being asked to set up the Intranet. No training, no skills, terrified. Somebody had started the project, but they were six months behind, so I took it over and figured everything out. And I guess the thing is just to be open to new challenges, however they present themselves. If I had not done that, I never would have created the first Intranet at the Labor Department, moved onto Web over here at Archives.gov. These things happened, and I just sort of ended up—no one would have told me with a Hospitality degree that I would end up managing a website and web team of eleven people. I guess just be open to new opportunities when they appear, even if you really don’t believe you have the skills. Things were much simpler back then on the Web, you know, with the coding and stuff. But I can’t even believe how that happened to me because I unfroze someone’s PC, and ended up becoming the Web Program Manager and actually the Web and Social Media Branch Chief up until the end of 2013. Just be open to trying new things, and don’t be afraid." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Well, thank you so much for your time, on behalf of the History Office, we really appreciate it. # \\ ####### Na tional Archives History Office ####### 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW ####### Washington DC 20408" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. BRIAN KNOWLES", "text": "I am Brian Knowles. I am acting as an oral historian for the National Archives and Records Administration. Today’s date is 25 April 2014. I am conducting an Oral History Interview with Mrs. Nancy Fortna, recently retired. She is formerly of the Customer Services Unit at Archives I, Washington, D.C. All right. Nancy—" }, { "speaker": "MRS. NANCY FORTNA", "text": "[Interposing] Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "May I call you Nancy?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Yes, please." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Please provide a brief overview of your career with NARA, from when to when." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Okay. I started on December 7, 1987, so a day that would live in infamy. Yes. And I started… and I just ended, I just retired on the 10th of January, 2014." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Nice." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Am I speaking loud enough?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "No, perfect." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Okay. All right. So, my voice tends to drop. I started out with what, I’ll say, we called it NC, which was the National Archives. And it was Records Centers Office. It has changed to other acronyms, NR, etc. I don’t even know what it is now. But it was the head, the headquarter office for Records Centers. And we worked for David Peterson at the time. We were on K Street. We were in, I think, 11 different places all over town because we had no room. You know, all the offices, this was before we built Archives II out at College Park." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Oh, yeah." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "So we were down on K Street. And, of course, when we moved to College Park we were in the boondocks. And we were like, “We miss K Street. We miss our vendors.” It was a great place down there. And we had a great bunch of people. But it was basically an office building. And we had most of the third floor for that. Do you want me just to go through quickly, and then come back to what I did? Or just tell you a little bit—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Let’s, let me ask you, for your background. Did your education influence your decision to come to NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Okay. Right. I have a degree in history and I also have a Master’s of Arts and History. When I was working, actually I had just gotten my undergrad degree. And then I went to work for the state of Pennsylvania because I figured if you were in government work, you could have a nine-to-five job. And you don’t have to work weekends. That was my theory. So I went to work for them. But until I figured out what I wanted to do, I worked as a clerk typist at the Department of Environmental Resources. And then while I was there I went for my master’s." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "You could do a couple of things. You could write a dissertation or you could do an internship. So I did an internship at the Pennsylvania State Archives. And that’s what got me into the archival field." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Nice." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "After I got my degree, then I applied for a position there. And they didn’t have any way to get us into an archivist position, so they got us into a microfilm operator position. So three of us with Master’s degrees in History, who wanted to get into this field, did some microfilming of borough and city council minutes. It was a project that actually the National Archives, you know, the NHPRC was handling. We had money from them. That’s how I got into the field. And then got to be an archivist. And one of the people that had worked for me in that project was Becky Collier. And she called me from the National Archives one day and said, there’s this perfect job for you. You need to apply. You’ve got a week. I would not have applied if I had worked here for a while. Because I figured if you had a week to get it in that means it’s pegged for somebody, you know. So, but I went ahead and applied. And I got the job." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "That’s nice." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "So, came down…we moved down here." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Great. Great. What year was this, or time frame?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "1987." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "1987. All right. Let’s see. So what were your impressions of the agency when you first got here, when you first came on board?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Well, when I was in Pennsylvania I came down here for the Modern Archives Institute. This was when I was still in Pennsylvania and I had an idea, and it was the same when I got here, that this was such a big place, compared to Pennsylvania. We went out and did a tour at the Records Center in Suitland. And we looked at one bay. And that was like bigger than the archives in Pennsylvania. And I just couldn’t believe. It was a football field, basically, size. And so it was just that it was so big. I had had a lot of experience in a lot of different things in Pennsylvania. So I was impressed by the fact that everything was so specialized here. You know, I wasn’t going to work with photographs one day, and then work with the county government and bring their records in the next day, or work with state government, transfer records to the archives the next day. You had to be more of a specialist here. And that was kind of hard for me because I really liked to see the whole picture. And it was difficult, even though we had some training and people came in and talked to us and told us a little bit about the agency. But it was just that it was so big and, I know that sounds funny now. But it was so big and it was national, of course. So, you know, in Pennsylvania, it was just Harrisburg. Here, it was not just D.C., it was all these places, Presidential Libraries, and Federal Record Centers and Regional Archives, all over the United States. So the size of it and the specialization was one thing that really was my first impression." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. So you worked at the Office of Federal Records Centers from 1987 to 1995." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "What were your duties and responsibilities, generally?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Okay. They switched. They progressed. I started out looking at—I can’t think of the name of it—when people are sending in requests—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "[Interposing] Correspondence?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "—215, no, 115s. People were sending in requests to transfer records to the Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Oh." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Okay. No, to get them approved. Record Schedules, that’s what it is. Okay. So I was working with records, see, I’m retired, it doesn’t matter anymore! I was working with Record Schedules. And there were certain things that our office had to look at on each Record Schedule. So I was assigned certain agencies. And I had to look at these and approve them in certain ways. And then we sent them on to other offices in the National Archives. Because a lot of offices had to sign off on them. So that was what I started with. During that time, I had my son and I came back. And we had some new people on staff. And I had a new boss, Alan Kramer. And he said, I’d like to see whether you would like to do some administrative things, which I ate up. I just loved it. I worked with, in EEO complaints. I worked with the new offices that Trudy Peterson, as Deputy, as Archivist of the United States, Temporary Archivist, had asked us to look into certain things, do some projects. And so I was on one of the committees to develop an EEO office, Equal Employment Opportunity Office, EEO. And that was really interesting because we started from the ground up. We looked at the legislation. And we prepared documents that would say, okay, this is the way the office ought to be run. Here are the positions you ought to have. And so that was more of an administrative thing that I was doing. And I loved that—administrative, personnel type work. I also was in charge of the training program that Office of Federal Records Centers, NC at the time, had developed for its archive specialists and archivists. Mary Rephlo had developed one for archivists. And so I talked to her and developed one for the archive specialists. And this was an internship where people who would come in, they would actually work for us. They were actually employees, full-time employees, permanent employees. And they would work in different areas of the Office of Federal Records Centers. And have different task and different duties. So that they could learn all about Federal Records Centers. Because they could be sent to any Records Center or to Central Office. So we needed to give them some hands-on experience. So I developed that training program. And I think I had maybe 15, 20 of them in, people in that time frame, that short time frame to get through that program. There was something else I was thinking of. I might think of it later. But also, at that time, the Vice President, who was Al Gore at the time, had spearheaded a project called the Government Performance and Results Act, GPRA, G-P-R-A. And so we had volunteered, the National Archives, to be a pilot for that project. This was happening all over the United States in government and industry and all over the place. So we had to do the pilot and I had to really spearhead that, actually run that project. And that involved people from all of the field offices, all of the Records Centers, being able to work with us. And develop different guidelines and things that they could do to streamline what we do, to make it more efficient which was kind of the reason to have this project. So I worked on that and that was basically a full-time job in addition to these other things that I was doing. I just remembered what the other thing was. We would go out on inspections of the Federal Records Centers. And we would check all of the areas that they have, whether it was the accessioning area, whether it was being able to make sure that we described these records correctly, whether it was getting them shelved correctly, whatever it was, quality assurance, they had a quality assurance staff, we checked all of those. So I went out on a few of these inspections. But Alan asked me to write up the final reports. So I went on some inspections. Other ones I didn’t. But the people who did go would come back, four or five of them, and hand me their reports and I would have to put them all into a certain report, a report so that it sounded like one report, not five different people speaking. That I loved to do. I loved that writing." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "What are some of the Centers that you’ve been to?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "That I’ve been to?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Where you did these inventories?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Okay. They did them all over. But I’ve been to Boston, St. Louis, the Military Records Center there, not the civilian. San Bruno in California. Fort Worth, the Fort Worth one. Let’s see if there was anything else. I can’t think of any others right now. But I did at least those four. But I wrote reports for all of them." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "During those trips, did anything stand out to you as surprising or interesting?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "What was interesting was that I found out how they felt about central office. And it’s like central office was needed. But, don’t get too close, “because we have our own way of doing things.” And that was fine within guidelines, which is what we did the inspections for. But I found that they had their own way of doing things and it was efficient. And it was well done. And it was…well sometimes it’s better to have a more hands-off approach. Just give them general guidelines. They’re intelligent people, they knew the area and knew the records, knew their customers, and they were able to do the job much better than anybody from D.C. handing down an edict for them to do. So that’s basically, you know, the way that the office was run. I also then was surprised because I had been here for a few years at how small those areas were. Because coming from Pennsylvania, I was surprised how huge this area was. But then going out to the Records Centers, you know, Fort Worth Records Center is big, but it’s not like Suitland. You know, so they had certain records for only certain states. And so that was kind of a shock going back the other way. I found that the personnel was absolutely wonderful and that they really catered to us when we came. I know we were inspecting them, but they were so gracious and so kind, and would have us into their homes for meals. One assistant director’s wife made a beautiful meal and invited us over. And it was just really a nice time to really get to know people, because I’d only dealt with them on the phone or through email. So it was really nice to get to know lots of great people in the Record Centers." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Did you ever come across any issues or any errors during these trips?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Very minor errors." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Very minor." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Very minor. These people knew their stuff." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Do you have an example of like one of the minor ones?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Oh, let’s see. Maybe, I think like when we were looking at the time and attendance, there might have been an error, keeping time and attendance. But usually not, you know. But, okay, so instead of 22 hours of annual leave, the person may have had 22.3 hours of annual leave—something very, very minor like that. And we just didn’t find that many mistakes, at least the parts that I inspected. We just didn’t find very many mistakes at all." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "So when you first came to NARA, what was the situation as far as a mentor showing you around or instructing you how to train or conduct, do your job?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Okay. I think that’s something that actually the National Archives needs to further develop. Because I think that a mentoring program…I know we try it. But we don’t have it really, it’s hit or miss. It’s whatever office in which you are located. I had several people who were there in that particular office, down on K Street, who were to show me how to do the Records Schedules. And they did, to a limited degree. But they sent me out to Suitland to learn a little bit more. So I’d go out there, like once a week or, I think, I went out there one time for a week at a time to learn exactly how they handle requests out there for records from the agencies. Exactly what they do. And that would help me a little bit to understand that end of it. And I had really good supervisors who would spend whatever time they needed to help me do that. When I did the administrative things that was basically learn by experience. Because they hadn’t had anybody that I know of that had done a lot of that stuff. So I just kind of learned by experience. I would look in the regulations, talk to people in the different offices that we were dealing with, consult with other people in other offices, other staff members, and go to my supervisors, and say, “this is what I found. What do you think? Here are three ways that I think we could do this. I’m suggesting this because of these reasons. What do you think?” And I was given really a go ahead. I was really able to develop that part of the program. But it was the Records Schedules that I had like, specific instruction. When I went to other offices, I would have varying degrees of mentoring, some good, some bad, some non-existent, some, you know, extremely well done. It just varied on the job. But you have to realize that I was promoted throughout this. And it was to the point where, as a GS-13, I should be able to figure something out like that, you know, just general guidelines. This is what we want, do it. And that’s basically what I did." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well when you first started here in ‘87, the agency hadn’t been separated from GSA for that long." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Was there still independence growing pains at that point?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Yeah. Oh, absolutely. They were so ecstatic about becoming independent. When I was in Pennsylvania we wrote letters to our Congressmen to say, “Please let them become independent.” There was a big campaign going on. But, yeah. They were still getting used to certain things that, we now did, that GSA had done before. And in Records Centers, the big thing, I think, was that GSA still owns the buildings. They still owned the buildings that our records were in. But we now owned the records. We had intellectual and physical control of the records. But they still had to do the upkeep for the buildings. So it was a slow process in some regards, becoming independent. I don’t know now if the office, if the Records Centers are still owned by GSA or not. I don’t know." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "That’s interesting." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "We’ll have to find out." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Yeah. I don’t know. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. Okay, a question dealing with the same time frame, ‘87 to ‘95, the development of technology, especially on the administrative side. How did that influence your job, how you conducted just day-to-day business? What was the influence?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Well usually, it was find somebody. Because we were so isolated. Very seldom did we come down to the main building. We were down on K Street. So we’d have to call people and talk to them on the phone. Or get on the Metro and come down and visit different offices. When I went in I had an officemate and we shared a computer, which was interesting. And I didn’t really think of it as a computer, because we weren’t connected to the Internet, really. It was a way to get some things done, but we weren’t emailing. There was no email that we did. There was nothing electronically being sent to anybody." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Like, word processing?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "That’s about it, word processing, yeah. That was about it. Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "So when did email, the Internet, really have an effect on your career?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Well when we moved to Archives II, which was November of 1993, all the sudden we had our own computers. And we were hooked up. We were, you know, hooked up to the world, you know. So that made a difference. So now we could email people." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. Your next position, was with the Professional Development and Training Office. How did that transfer take place? Or why?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Okay. After I was in Federal Records Centers for a year, I went from GS-11 to a GS-12. And then I was looking into getting a promotion at that office. And the paperwork was with my boss. And he was looking it over, getting ready to do that for a GS-13. And this GS-13 came open. And it would be in the Training Office, which would be common needs training. Training that everybody would need. I mean, if you worked in photographs, you would need certain types of training. If I worked, you know, with Records Centers, I would need something else. But there would be things that would be common that we could all, like writing skills or public speaking skills or conflict management. Things like that that were common to everybody. And when I was doing a little bit of training with the interns at Federal Records Centers, I talked to Trudy Peterson. And I suggested to her that I’m trying to get like computer classes for some of our people, writing skills classes, and they’re very expensive to go to. But I found out that if you have someone come in and present to 10, 15, 20 people, it is so much cheaper per person. So that’s what this office was going to be doing. They were going to bring people, bring vendors in, people who would teach. And it would make it just so much cheaper for us and more efficient again, for the National Archives to train its people in those common needs trainings. We call those universal competencies now. I think it’s still on the website. We had universal competencies and supplemental competencies. But the universal competencies are the things that everybody needs for their job. So I had been interested in that. So when this opened up, I thought I would apply. The person that I had been involved with the internships, Mary Rephlo, had been moved to that office. And she said, “Nance, look.” So I applied for that and interviewed. And I got the position. And then transferred over. We were in Archives II at College Park by then. And so I just moved down the hall and went to work for Donn Neal. And Mary Rephlo was there and Regina Campbell. So it was the four of us in this brand new office." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "How’d you like it out at AII?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "I didn’t. And I’m thinking of a commute, like the commute there. And the isolation out there. When we went out there in November of ‘93, of course, I couldn’t Metro. And I had Metro. We bought a house two miles from the Metro so that I could Metro to K Street. This was a problem for me. But it was really a problem for people from Virginia who now had to get in their cars and commute a long distance every day. We had no Metro. And the building is like rather sterile compared to things here, downtown, that were all built in the 30s. And it all kind of looks alike, what we think of as Federal buildings, the government’s buildings. This looked like, I don’t know, some kind of a monstrosity, you know. But it was all steel and white, you know, everywhere. And it was so big. And when we were moving out there, office by office, it was like you were in a mausoleum. It was like, I don’t know, is there anybody here…am I the only person left here? You know, because there was nobody in the halls. And you would try to go to the fitness center and you’d get lost coming back. You know, that kind of stuff. But when we went out there, there was no cafeteria, which came later. There was no vending…I mean, there were vending machines, but there was no change machine. So you had to bring everything you wanted to eat for the day. And if you needed something from the vending machine, you could put your money in, but if the vending machine had run out of change and you had a buck, you were out of luck, you know. No little convenience store, nothing. Plus it was the worst winter. We had sleet storms maybe two times a week. And here I was driving now, instead of Metro-ing. So we didn’t like it. And I remember one of my colleagues saying, “I really miss my popcorn vendor.” Because we had been on K Street. And we were used to just taking two minutes and go get food wherever we wanted to, any type of restaurant. He had gone down every morning to get his popcorn. So we were all in some kind of a shock going out there. And we never really fully recovered." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "And you were out there, well, for this position you were there ‘95 to 2000?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "And you were out at AII the whole time." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Mm-hmm." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "And did you travel at all or like you said go out to the centers or anywhere for training or teaching?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "I did teach some. I took some training. Actually that was when I was in Records Centers. I went and did some microfilm training on how to microfilm records, went to Denver. But in this office I didn’t really do a whole lot of traveling. I can’t think of when I travelled for that, for the particular position there. We brought vendors in. I spoke to them, emailed them, had them come in and meet with me, and then we hired them to come in and do the training there." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Mm. Okay. Your next position was over with Life Cycle Management from 2000 to 2004." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Mm-hmm." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Again, why this transfer?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Because it was quite obvious that our main boss for this area, Donn Neal’s boss, Ren Cahoon, wanted to change the climate of this office and the duties of this office. So Mary and I switched to different places. Donn retired. Regina got another job. And he was able to hire people to come in and do the training the way, actually not really do much training, but to do more facilitation work with meetings that they were having. So we just saw that we were being phased out. So I talked to my Michael Kurtz, who was the head of the Washington office, that would be NW. N for National Archives, W for Washington office. And he talked to some people and said, “You know, Marie Allen has some positions open. And this would be in Life Cycle Management. And you would probably be teaching classes.” Well, I’m in training. I have seen how people have come in and taught classes. So I thought, well I’d like to take a stab at that. I’ve done teaching outside of NARA. And I thought that would be great. It’s a completely different office. I mean, a completely different audience, excuse me. These were records officers from different Federal agencies that we were teaching. So we were teaching them on how to set up their programs. How to go through their records. How to come up and write the schedules that we had improved a few years ago. And make their departments, their agencies, their units more efficient in their paperwork control." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "How important is that?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Well it’s extremely important. Because if you just have a mess you can’t find out what you really need to keep permanently. And, as you know, the National Archives keeps 3 to 5% of what the government manufactures, creates. So you have what we used to call paperwork tiger, you know, jungle, whatever it was. We just needed to say, “Look, you can save space, you can save money, you can save time finding things, if you do it at the front of the life cycle, at the creation stage and the maintenance and use stage.” If you take care of your records then when you try to schedule it you’ll know what to schedule. And when you try to transfer it, you won’t have to worry about all the stuff, you don’t have to sift through anything then. We know that from personal experience at home. You open a drawer and there’s 50 years’ worth of photographs in there. Oh, great. Now what? You know, I can’t find the one photograph I wanted because nothing’s organized. So it was, I think, it was really, really important. It still is, to be able to help them. And now, you know, with so many electronic records, it’s the same, but it’s a little different." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "So, what were your duties and responsibilities in that department?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Okay. Joe Byrnes and I were both training officers and we really had the same job. We were making sure that those classes that we offered had the proper materials in the, in there, and that the teachers, the instructors, our fellow colleagues had what they needed to teach the classes and that they were scheduled and that they were publicized. In addition to that, we taught some of the classes. So we had to prepare our scripts, our hand-outs, our examples that we used, and made it something that would mean something to Federal officers. That was basically it. There were a few schedules. There were a few things that we had to look at too, Records Schedules, but not much. It was mainly in the area of training." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "None of that, death by PowerPoint, at this stage?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Oh, yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Yeah?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Oh, yeah. Everybody was learning PowerPoint, you know. Let’s have an all-day class and have 3,000 PowerPoint slides, you know. So we know to try to help other instructors who would need some help with, “How do I organize this? Is this too much? Is this…” okay. And so we would say, you know, that, and we would sit in on some of the classes, if they asked us to. And we’d give them our feedback. Since we were trainers we would give them our feedback on how they presented the material, if they wanted it. But people were really learning the PowerPoint, thinking that was going to save, be the end all for training, was give them a PowerPoint." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "So you, well, up to this point, did you become a subject area expert in anything? Or would you consider yourself an expert in any particular subject of NARA’s collections or part of the agency?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "No. Never really worked with the records here. I worked with them in Pennsylvania. But when I came here, things are so specialized here. I never accessioned anything. I never looked at the records, organized them, did a scope and content note. I never did anything like that. Now we were there to inspect what other people had done. But I basically worked in records scheduling and training." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "I just thought that was interesting. Because I worked a lot with the records in Pennsylvania, you know. There’s old legal size yellow tablets where you did your box listings and all of that. That’s what we did in Pennsylvania, by hand, no computers." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. Well from there, from 2004 to 2014, you worked with Customer Services. Again, why this transfer?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "This transfer? Because I had had a wonderful two years of the four years in Life Cycle Management. And then we had a change in personnel. And I decided that I needed to move on. And still, again, I would love to do something in the training area. But those jobs are really hard to find in the National Archives. So I was looking outside of the National Archives, saying I would still like to do something in training, and talked to a couple of people about that. Deputy Archivist for the Washington, D.C. area, Sharon Thibodeau, talked to me a little bit. I gave her a rundown of the experience that I had had in Pennsylvania and here. And she said, oh, well, I had no idea. Let me think about this. The next thing I knew I was talking to Diane Dimkoff who later became my supervisor. And Sharon had said that Diane was looking for a training officer. They had redone the Archives I area, the research area. And Diane was in charge of both Research Rooms at Archives I, downtown in D.C., and then Archives II, the facility in College Park. And she wanted somebody who would develop some programs that would help researchers, as well as staff. So I talked to Diane for a few minutes and she said, wow, let’s have you come for 120-day detail. Because I have some ideas. We’re talking the same thing here. Come over. We’ll work together to see what we can come up with. After a few weeks Diane said, I want you permanently. And she got the FTE, the position itself moved over. And so I was able just to move over. It was a lateral. But I didn’t have to, you know, apply for the job and get selected as being qualified and then interview because I’d been doing the job. So I came over. And we worked on a program which really kind of exploded. And it was not only, like I said, training the public on what records we have here, but it was also training our staff on what records we have here which would help them in their research or in their jobs. It would also help if they were handling the public. And could say, “Wait a minute, you want something like this? Hey, why don’t you check this Record Group?” Because they had learned about the records. So that was it, the detail turned into a full-time position. And I was there for ten years. Loving every minute of it. Loved it. Not that I didn’t love what I had done before, but I really, really enjoyed my time at Customer Service." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Now was it, was your time mainly with the staff or was it with the public?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "It was both. In fact, some things that we started for the public, ended up being for the staff too, so both things. And I can go into detail on those, whenever you want me to." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "That’s where we’re at in this stage. Go—" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Okay. All right. So, they had redone the research area here. It was beautiful. It was green. It was carpeted. It was lovely. But Diane said, oh, you know, “let’s get reacquainted.” So she had started a little, I think it was a weekly, I think it was weekly, program, called, “Let’s Get Reacquainted,” where researchers, the public, would come in and learn a little bit more about the records that we had here. Because some of the records stayed here, some when to archives, you know, around different area. And these records down here were mainly genealogical in nature. But, there are things that are out at Archives II, photographs, motion pictures, all types of different records that might help researchers down here, particularly genealogical researchers. So she had these programs and had staff come in and talk about different types of records that they worked with. Well that was really popular and staff said, “Can we come too? We want to know about these records. You know, Joe’s working on military records, you know, from the 18th Century. I don’t know anything about that. But I have people coming into the Research Room, and I could use that information too.” So, she had done that a short time before I got there. So when I got there she said we’re going to continue that program, but we’re going to give it a different look. Let’s see, how do I want to say this? She said, let’s come up with a title. And I said, well, you want them to get acquainted with the records. Yeah. So we talked and talked and talked. And we came up with \"Know Your Records.\" K-N-O-W. Know Your Records. This is called the Know Your Records Program. So the first thing we did was have these weekly sessions where we would invite people and we publicized it. So people from all walks of life would come in. All types of researchers or just people who were, wonder what the Archives is about? You know, or ah, gee, “I’d like to look into my grandfather’s pension record. I think I’ll come here to this session on pensions.” So we had all types of people, and again, staff, also came to that. That was the first thing we did, this lecture series. And we thought, gee, there are lots of people that can’t come on Tuesdays at 11 o’clock, downtown D.C. So we said, let’s ask the people, the staff people who teach that, to teach again on Thursday at Archives II, and have a different audience out there. And then we thought, well, that’s fine. But there’s still people that won’t be able to see that. So we had it filmed. They filmed it at Archives II, every week. And now we have some of those online, so that people can just sit at home in their bunny slippers and tune in and get the lecture, you know, from Denver, or London, or wherever. They can just tune in and get that lecture. So that’s a big thing now, is getting things digitized and getting things up online so that people can attend, \"attend\" in that way. So I thought, well, that’s great. This is what we’re doing. But Diane is a very innovative person and she said, let’s do some other things. I said, okay. So she said, I think it would be great if we would have a newsletter. I went, okay. All right. So we’ll have a newsletter. And this will be a newsletter for customers. We’re going to call these researchers customers now. This is the Customer Services Division. And we would tell them what’s happening here in the D.C. area. If something’s going on with the building that they need to be careful of when they’re coming in, physically with the building. If we have new types of records, which are going online. If we have someone who has written an article in _Prologue,_ you know. So we put all that type of stuff into these newsletters. And so we started doing those quarterly. And then she said, well, you know, “the lectures are going great. Why don’t we have some big one or two-day symposium?” All right. So we did one on Hispanic Records. And we did one on African American Records. The Hispanic one was a one-day session down here, in downtown D.C. And the African American was a two-day symposium. And it happened to be out at College Park. Not because that’s where we wanted it to be but because we had a hurricane and we flooded out the theatre here. So it was under water and was going to take a while to get rebuilt. So we booked it out there at Archives II. And we had several hundred people attend that. All right. So we have these little lectures every week. We have these yearly or bi-yearly symposia. How about a big genealogy fair? Let’s have everybody come in. Let’s get all different types of people to come in and speak about different records. We could get people from the Library of Congress to come in. We could get people from wherever, to come in and talk about their records, INS, could come in and talk about their records. We did that. We started that in ‘05, I think. I think it was ‘05. Yeah. And that was our first genealogy fair. We had it inside in this building. There was little space to have people come in. But we packed in 300 people. And we had sessions and it was a huge success. People were really excited about this. The next year we had it. We had about the same amount of people. I think because we made it just D.C. records. We just narrowed the focus. Then the next year we expanded the focus. We had 500 people, then a 1,000, then 1,500. It just kept going up and up. And then in 2013, with the cut of all kinds of money in the Federal government, having tents out in front of our building, because we eventually were so big we had to go outside under tents for these sessions. That “optics,” I think, is what they called it. So that wouldn’t look good to be spending money, even though it wasn’t our money, it was raised by the Foundation for the National Archives. So we decided, hey, let’s go digital. Let’s have a digital genealogy fair. And we did. And that way, we think, that there were maybe, I think the numbers are around 10,000. We had that many people that came in and out in that two-day session to see that, to see the sessions that were online. And these were people, okay, what do we call it when we Tweet? We had Tweets coming in during the sessions. And these Tweets were not only from the United States, they were from all over the world. The people…so this was really a big thing, a huge thing. I think they’re going to continue to do that. I think they have one scheduled or they’re thinking about October of this year. So people were really, really excited about that. Our speakers weren’t real thrilled about being on camera, but, oh, well. It really, really reached a lot of people. So there were lots of things that we’re doing, that were going on here. Now this ended up being a really full-time job for me. We brought on Andrea Matney. And she took over the whole Know Your Records Program. So that I was able to work on the other part of my job which was staff training. I had been so busy with Know Your Records and that was expanding and expanding and expanding. But we saw that there was a need for training, back to that common needs training, that I had worked on with Donn Neal. There were things that were common to the people in Customer Service. And there were several hundred people in Customer Service between the two buildings. Common things that are common to everybody; that they needed to be able to do their job correctly. The first think I did was, was to come up with a curriculum, a one-day class on presentation skills, oral presentation skills. And that I really got into. I just loved doing that. That was my favorite class. But doing all of the research and preparing the curriculum and then running a pilot with a couple of our people to see if we were covering everything, to see how it ran, to see how it worked, to get it to be timed within six hours. So we trained over 100 people in public speaking skills. After that I worked on customer service skills. And so I developed a class for customer service training. And last year, 2013, we trained about 400 people in the two buildings on customer service. I had—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "[Interposing] I was one of those." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Yes, you were. Yes, you were. So what’d you think? Was it okay?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "It was good." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Okay. I had really good responses from that. I had like one or two people that say, “Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you do this?” That’s good. I want feedback. I always want feedback. Just like with the public speaking, I had a couple of people say, we need an intermediate. You know, after we have learned how to speak in public and gotten over our fright, and now we’re progressed, you know. Now we’re doing 20-minute speeches, or let’s have another intermediate class. I wasn’t able to do that, because I had to stop, do the customer service training and then I retired. So, but that would have been a lot of fun too, to take people who had worked on their presentation skills and were able to get them challenged in a different way in an intermediate type class. But the customer service, I had pretty good response from that. People came in with their lower lips dragging on the floor. You know, like, oh, man, because it was mandatory. And I would just look at them and say, “We’re going to have fun.” And they go, “really?” And I said, “Yeah. Because I’m spending three hours here with you. And if I’m not having fun, why am I here? So, you know, let’s have fun and learn at the same time.” And some of them were really hesitant to participate. But when we start out with, give me some horror stories of when you were a customer. All the sudden, they were sharing. And that would help us learn that if we don’t like being treated a certain way, then maybe we need to treat the customer with dignity and respect and be helpful to them. So that’s where I was when I retired." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Nice. Let’s see. What were some of the challenges you faced while in your career with the agency, just things in general?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Well, I think, computers, the technology was a challenge. Every time we all learned this new computer thing, then it changed, you know. Every we time we got, like, learned the email, the way to do the email, then it changed. So I think that was something that was challenging to everybody, particularly those of us who were older and had not grown up with computers. We were pushed into the digital age, you know, in our 20s and 30s. And it was fine. It was great. But everything changes so quickly, you know. Was that, was that Alice in Wonderland, people come and go so quickly here? Or was that who, I don’t know, anyway. Things change so quickly here, whatever it was. I should, I know what I’m talking about before I say it, but so that was one of the challenges. Another challenge, frankly, were the people that were in supervisory or maybe, let’s say, managerial positions. Trying to get them to understand what we needed and what we did. And how it could be more efficient. I was pretty lucky most of the time to have supervisors, not so much their managers, but supervisors who would understand what we needed. In fact, every couple of weeks Diane would say to me, “is there anything that I can do for you to make your job easier?” Because she knew that her position as a supervisor was to be able to help her people be able to do their jobs and to do them well." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "What is the most enjoyable aspect of working for the agency, the National Archive?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Teaching. I loved to teach. I liked to develop curriculum. Curriculum for our class, and then teach it. So the last few years have been just a dream come true, basically. I get to do what I want to do and I get paid for it. So what’d I do? I retired. But, whatever. Anyway. Now I get to do nothing and I get paid for it. Not really. But, yeah. I loved doing that. Because I’ve had some really great teachers in my life. And I’ve really been able to learn a lot. And I just want to be able to help people. And particularly, I mean, I liked, I liked it when I was teaching federal records officers. I liked it when we were bringing in other people to train. And I like it when we were training, helping public and researchers, but I really liked training staff. I really enjoy that. I get to know people and some really fantastic people here, really fantastic people. We’re really dedicated people. And I’m just, I mean, I was having a great time getting to know them and being able to teach and having them say, this helps. This doesn’t help. What can we do? And when they’re my customers. I want to be able to give them what they need." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Okay. Let’s see. What was your… or did you have an involvement with the National Archives Assembly?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Not really. I think I joined one year and just I really didn’t have much of an involvement." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "I was involved with other agencies, I mean, like, NAGARA, things like that, so, I don’t know if that’s—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Sure. Sure." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "The National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators, that’s kind of the SAA, Society of American Archivists equivalent, but it’s just government records, just for government records. And people who handle government records. We call it NAGARA. It used to be NASARA, National Association of State Archives and Records Administrators. And then they made it nation-wide. So that people can come to these conferences from federal, state, and local governments. And, you know, we have a lot of records that are very similar. Sometimes we have copies of ones that another Federal agency or whatever would have. State would have a copy. Local would have a copy. We have a lot of things in common. And I belonged to that. I was on the Board for about ten years. I was Treasurer for around four or five years, I guess. But that was really interesting because we got to know and network with people that had the same types of challenges, the same types of problems, with the same types of records." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Any other associations, such as Society of American Archivists or with MARAC?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "I was involved with MARAC, Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. And that’s Mid- Atlantic. And it’s all types of archives, whether it is church archives, you know, historical societies, all different types of agencies, institutions. And I really was a part of MARAC more when I was in Pennsylvania, at the state archives. I spoke at a couple of the sessions, conferences. And was involved with planning of the program. More so with NAGARA, because I was a Program Chair and Local Arrangements Chair, when it was in D.C. SAA, Society of American Archivists, I have gone to a couple of the conferences. The only real work that I’ve done, I did speak a couple of times. But the very real intricate work that I did, was I was on a, I was NAGARA’s, one of two of NAGARA’s representatives on the committee when we did a joint meeting of the three, SAA, NAGARA and COSA, which is, it’s State again, Council of State Archives, I think, or Archivists. They’ll shoot me if they hear that I can’t remember that right now. But those three institutions had a joint meeting. In fact, they’re having another one this year in D.C. But, to be able to say, okay, what sessions are we going to offer? You know, lots of people apply. And I was on that one Board that decided which sessions we would accept for that particular conference. That’s my extent of working with SAA." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Mm. All right. Getting back to the Archives, was there any other sections that you would have wanted to work in?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Mm. Wow. Well there was one area that, in Pennsylvania, that I didn’t get to work with, and that was with photographs. So that might have been kind of fun to be able to work in still pics, in Still Pictures. Well, that and Conservation. Those were the areas that I got a smattering in Pennsylvania of everything else. But conservationists dealt mainly with still pictures there. I just find it fascinating what photographs we have. And I find it fascinating how our conservationists deal with reconstructing basically records that are falling apart. It just amazes me. And so that would have been something that I would have been interested in learning a little bit about." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Were there any records collections you wish you had the opportunity to work with?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Kennedy Assassination, I think. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Do you have any opinions about the reorganizations that NARA’s gone through?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Yeah. Did you really want me to say it here?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "As much or as little as you’d like." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "The longer I was here, the more all the changes were the same, you know, basically. I mean, okay, here we go again. Okay. We’re going to change this. Okay. Fine. I’m trying to be flexible and I change. And we go through a reiteration of everything that we just did before. And it’s just the same thing. I’m sorry. That’s what I feel. But this last time, when they started to change the acronyms again, I went, “it’s time to retire. I’m not learning these again. I’m just not learning these again.” I’ll adjust any other way, but I’m not learning acronyms again. And we really have our alphabet soup here, don’t we? But I think that we’ve had archivists, we’ve had governors, and now we have a librarian, who’s in charge of the National Archives. And I see that there have been good points and shortcomings in all respects. Maybe being an archivist makes you too insular, I don’t know. A governor, really good at being able to talk to people on the Hill. And get us the funding that we needed for stuff. I may not have agreed with everything that that Archivist did, or how he may have reconstructed things. I agreed with some of it. Some of it, I didn’t. But he got us the funding that we needed. I don’t know this Archivist as well as I knew some of the other ones. But, there’s always been this chasm between librarians and archivists. And so it was a little strange to have a librarian become Archivist of the United States. So it makes me wonder if he understands the Archives. I know he understands libraries. But does he understand the Archives? So, some of the decisions that have been made, I don’t understand why they’ve been made. There may be excellent reasons for that. But I don’t understand why they’ve been made. And different Archivists have communicated in different ways and to different extents. This Archivist is able to communicate more effectively. Because he streams this to everybody all at once. And talks to everybody. And you can see him on the screen, if you’re not here. And so there’s a better opportunity to be able to let us know what is going on and what direction we’re headed in. I do think that the many changes that we’ve gone through has had its toll. I’m not saying so much in changes from the top administration. But just a lot of the things that we’ve gone through, growing pains or whatever you want to call it. But you can see that the surveys for customers or for staff satisfaction were really low, government-wide." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Yeah" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "I don’t know why. I don’t know why we, such a little agency and we’re so low. You would think that, you know, like Defense would be, you know, really low. Or another big agency. But this one, I haven’t really be able to keep a pulse on exactly where this present Archivist is going. So I can’t really say how that’s working out. And I’ve left in the middle of his tenure. So I don’t know where this is going to end up because we’re still in the midst of it. So, that was a long answer to something that could have been short like, agreed with some of them, some of them I didn’t agree with." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well, looking into the future, what do you think is the Archives’ greatest challenge—" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "[Interposing] Electronic—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "—you think we’ll face?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Electronic records. We’ve been struggling with that forever. We tend to get records 30 years, a lot of them, 30 years after they’ve been created. And so we’re a museum of hardware. So that we can actually read or view whatever records we get. But now, they’re transferring electronic records. Because we’ve had electronic records now for like 30 years. And coming up with standards for that. I mean, ERA Project was a tough project for staff to work on and work with. And I don’t think that it’s going to get any easier just because things are electronic. It may be harder. It’s the same principles for records management, it’s just that it’s electronic. So, that can be easier or harder, I don’t know." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "What strikes you most about how the agency has changed since you first started?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "When I first started, I may be wrong, but I got the impression that there were so many subject matter experts. Someone was the expert on a certain record series, certain types of records, certain time frames, certain war, whatever. And people were hesitant to talk to each other, have exchanges of ideas. We are an agency of introverts. I’m being one of them. But what I’ve seen change, has been the fact that we have gotten together and exchanged ideas. Different offices have gotten together and actually worked together on certain projects. And I just thought that was, not miraculous, but it was new for the Archives to do this. And I think that’s something that has been for the better." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Good answer. What advice would you have offered yourself back when you first started in 1987?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Mm. Well, if it was career advice. I guess I might have advised myself to not be quite so happy where I am and keep looking to be able to expand where I wanted to go. I’m the type of person that I’ll stay somewhere if I’m happy, you know. I had an opportunity to move again, to another facility in the National Archives. And I didn’t take it because I didn’t want to move and I was happy where I was. And that would have ended up with a GS-14 or probably a GS-15 by now. But that’s okay, because I’m happy. I was happy where I was. I’m happy where I am here. And I didn’t want to move my family again. So I might have said, if maybe, that if I was younger, try some new things. Experiment. Move. Go somewhere else. Apply for other positions. And it’s just hard for me. I see that a lot of young people doing that. They’re there two years, later they’re gone. They’re somewhere else, you know. And I’m just from the old school that you, you know, you got into a career, \"career\" and you stayed there. And you were loyal. And we have a lot of loyal people to this agency. And by loyal, I mean, we make a career of it. You stay there for 40 years or whatever. So, I might have taken more of a chance, or advised myself to do that. I tried to be flexible and with the changes that were coming about. And I did end up in different areas of the Archives. And loved doing those changes. And trying to do that, what I could, learn what I could and experience that to the fullest. But I think that would be about the main thing. I’m trying to think of other things." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. What are your plans for retirement?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Everybody asks me that. What are you going to do with all your free time? And it’s like, I don’t have free time. I just say I’m trying to do everything that I did when I was working. But I was so tightly scheduled and so stressed, particularly with the commute, to get where I needed to go in the evenings. So I’m doing all of those things that I was doing before, plus I’m going to be taking some training on teaching English as a second language. And be involved with that program in Montgomery County. I might, I don’t want to do it now, because I don’t want a full-time job right now. But I might want to look into teaching public speaking somewhere. Could be, you know, a Community College in Montgomery County. I hear Frederick County has some areas, some colleges, that, that, you know, there’s a possibility I could maybe apply there. But I would like to continue to teach and I do that in my church. But I would like to continue to teach the public speaking. Because I’ve been there, scared to death to get up in front of anybody and speak at all. And so for me to be able to do that and be able to help somebody else who is walking in scared to death, not knowing how to keep their hands from shaking, not, how to keep their voice from shaking, you know, not knowing how to organize what they want to say. That is something that I’ve been through, worked through, struggled with, and I loved helping people to be able to do that. So that’s something that I would like to do." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Okay. We’ll be calling you professor." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "I’m not going for a doctorate. That’s one thing I will not do." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. That was my last question for you other than if there is anything else you wanted to add, or is there any name dropping you want to say? Anybody who’s really supported you, helped you out in your career?" }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Oh, wow. Here at NARA? Alan Kramer and Debbie Leahy and Greg Pomicter right away. The first day. Well, Alan came a little bit later, but the first position I had, they were fantastic. And very supportive and have become very good friends, actually. Donn Neal was my second supervisor. And I’ll always be very grateful for him for saying, “Here’s what we want to do; here’s the program, Nancy. Let’s talk about what you want to do. Okay. Go forth and do it. Just check in with me to make sure that we can afford it or whatever, you know. Check in with me, make sure I know what you’re doing, you know.” And Alan was like that too. “Here’s what we want you to do. What are your ideas?” I loved that. “What are your ideas?” And then say, “Go forth and do it.” I loved that. Sharon Thibodeau, for giving me a chance. And Lee Ann Potter and Paula Poulos for getting me into talk to Sharon or listening to me. Mike Hamilton, also lent an ear when I needed to work through some things. Marie Allen, who I worked for. And then, Diane Dimkoff. I mean she is just something else. She is something else. I loved working with Diane Dimkoff and Jessie White and Andrea Matney. And Jessie White is someone who knows everybody and knows how to get things done. And I have watched her work through insurmountable, or what I thought were insurmountable challenges, and get the job done. And she’s just been a delight to work with too. But all of my supervisors, but Diane, just has made the last ten years very enjoyable. She and Jessie and Andrea." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. Well thank you very much for your time." }, { "speaker": "MRS. FORTNA", "text": "Well, thank you for the opportunity. # National Archives History Office # 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW # Washing ton DC 20408" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. BENJAMIN GUTERMAN", "text": "I sent you some material that was helpful to me to remember some of the things that we were working on." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "I appreciated that. So this is December 11, 2015, around 12:00pm noon and I’m here in Olney, Maryland, with Ben. Ben, could you state your full name and spell it out for posterity?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Okay. Formally, Benjamin Guterman. Last name G-U-T-E-R-M-A-N." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Great. I’m Eric Rhodes, E-R-I-C R-H-O-D-E-S. I’m an intern at the History Office with Jessie Kratz, and we’re here to do an oral history of Benjamin’s time at the National Archives. So usually what we’ll do is kind of stick to a bit of a chronology. So if you wouldn’t mind telling us a bit about where you were born, and what that was like—your childhood." }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I was actually born in Italy, and my parents were refugees after World War II. I came here with them when I was the age of about three. They were assigned to live in San Francisco, so I grew up there, pretty much, until 1987. I had graduated from San Francisco State, with an M.A., and applied to the University of Maryland at College Park, Maryland. That was my reason for coming out here to a doctoral program, in 1987. So I skipped over quite a bit there. But San Francisco was very formative for me culturally, politically, and educationally. So, I came here to Maryland, and during the grad program in history, was able to get an internship, kind of, at the Archives. They called it an intermittent program at the time, where you would work part time. Quite a few students from the University of Maryland did that at the time, so that was good. Over the course of three or four years, I was able to move into a permanent position part-time, and eventually full-time, so I appreciate that. It was a way to do grad studies, and learn about the Archives, and work at the Archives at the same time, and to emerge into a career, because it was hard to employ one’s history background at that time, and I think it still is, so I’m very grateful for the opportunity." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Going back to, you’re three years old and in San Francisco, what are your memories of San Francisco at that time, and when was this?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "This would be as a child from the mid…as far as my memories go, from my earliest memories would be the late ‘50s, when I was around ten years old, and some of the neighborhoods there were very colorful because there was a Jewish neighborhood, really European immigrants, and it’s very colorful. A lot of stores that would cater to that clientele, or that ethnic group. So I have some memories of the kind of unique butcher shops, bakeries, things like that. Those neighborhoods changed over the years, and we moved to different parts of the city. It’s quite a dynamic city, as different races and ethnicities came in, and it became a heavily Chinese and Japanese city as well. Economically, it changed quite a bit with the high tech boom. I’m racing through quite a few things, but it’s a very dynamic place. And very exciting and innovative in many ways." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "What was your schooling like? When you were in, you know, say middle school, was there, did you, did you have a penchant for history?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I recall that I, I had an interest in reading, in books quite a bit. As a kid I think I had wide ranging interests. I liked, I liked science fiction. I liked history. That was not the major thing at that point, but I liked stories about people. I remember reading about sort of fictional stories about children in China Town at that point, and that, that kind of was fascinating to me how people who grew up in a different culture. Different traditions, creating different mindsets, and how they thought differently, and so I was intrigued by that. But I was also, I also grew up, I think, through high school thinking that I was going to go into science. I was very interested in biology and zoology, and maybe underwater sea, oceanography, things like that." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "What informed that, would you say?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Science was intriguing, and it was kind of dynamic. Maybe I had some really good science teachers in junior high and high school that I recall who inspired us. I think biology, going through junior college, is where I thought I was going to go, to study biology. But I think I didn’t do that well in some of the practical exams, where they stick pins in creatures all around the room, and you have to identify the organs. I don’t think I did too well in that, so I kind of fell back to history. That was good." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Yeah. But those Cousteau films are fantastic, aren’t they?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Oh, yeah, yeah. I’m fascinated." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Of course, one can approach them historically. That’s the beauty of history, I think." }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Yeah, it touches everything." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "I guess you went to high school in San Francisco?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Which high school?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Lowell High School. I was fortunate to get into that school because it was a college prep school. You had to have a pretty good GPA to get in. I guess it was not highly selective, but it was a notch above the other high schools, in that the teachers had a better class of students to work with, better prepared, and they could teach to them, and give them more challenging stuff, and more activities. I think that school is still in existence, and has been around since the 1890s or early 1900s." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Wow. So you made the decision then to attend San Francisco State, and this must have been in the 1970s?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Around ‘68. I actually went to City College of San Francisco, which is a two year school, and then transferred to San Francisco State." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Could you talk about a little bit about the milieu, and your involvement with it in San Francisco in 1968?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "[Laughter]." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "I mean, how can we not talk a little bit about that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Yeah, I think about that sometimes. I was pretty young, and the whole counterculture movement was coming along, and overwhelming everybody. I remember visiting the Haight-Ashbury, and just a lot of colorful people in costumes, and it was a real cultural revolution, and just the excitement and music and ideas. You couldn’t really go down the Haight very easily. There were thousands of tourists, and they had to reroute the bus lines along that street because the buses couldn’t navigate. There were just a lot of people gawking. So it was an exciting time. I didn’t get involved that heavily in the counterculture. I was surely influenced by it, in terms of thinking, and ideas, and the anti- war movement eventually, and the literature. I had friends whose parents were distraught because a couple of those friends sort of disappeared into that culture, and who knows what happened to them. But it was fascinating. But also the city, of course, has a real innovative and liberal spirit about it. People are very open and creative in every way, and I think I was always attracted to that. In San Francisco State, we had classes that were devoted to the literature of the counterculture movement. The new poetry, the new novels. So they tried to adapt to that, and dig into it." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Did you enter Junior College or San Francisco State knowing that you were going to do history specifically, or you talk about literature a lot, so did you have a wider focus in the humanities? What were your intellectual kind of attractions?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "When I started junior college, at City College of San Francisco, I was most attracted to biology. But I did really enjoy my literature classes. I had several interests. I can recall we had some good instructors at that junior college, who really excited us about literature, and about science. But also I can recall anthropology. That was a real eye-opener for me because the premise of anthropology is that you become immersed in another culture. We had a teacher named Mr. Manlove, of all things, Manlove symbolizing loving mankind. Anyway, he did his research in the Philippines with a primitive tribe. That was very fascinating to me. So, while I was loving science and such things as organic chemistry and biology, and advanced calculus—I mean that was fascinating to me—I wasn’t the best, but it fascinated me. I was also fascinated by the softer sciences, I guess you could say, like anthropology. And literature, just studying, we read case studies, studies of the Cheyenne Indians, who were people who went and lived with tribes and studied their culture, their language, their traditions. So, I think I was a real student in that I was fascinated by it all. That’s what college is about." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "You transferred to San Francisco State, and what was your degree?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Eventually at San Francisco State I had a B.A. in History." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Did you have a specific topic for your thesis?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "No, there was no thesis at the B.A. level, but it was American History pretty much." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Alright, so you land at…early 1970s, you graduated from college. What did you do after that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Well, I actually stayed at San Francisco State and got a teaching credential. I wanted to teach." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "This is a common thread throughout many of the people I’ve spoken to." }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "[Laughter]. Yeah. Well, that’s what I thought I wanted to do, teach high school or junior high, something like that, so I got a California teaching credential. Didn’t have any luck at that point. I did land a job at a boys’ home about 60 miles north of San Francisco, and I actually lived in the home. I was the teacher. These kids were wards of the court and they lived there. We had about six counselors who helped with all the other duties. I had a little schoolhouse on the premises, which was pretty rough because some of these kids were emotionally disturbed, and they were all ages from 10 through 18, all in the same room. I had to devise all kinds of lesson plans for them. It was quite a scene, but you do the best you can. Some of these kids were eventually farmed out, or placed in Special Ed courses in public schools. But it was good experience. I did that for about two to three years. And then I worked in the private sector, in miscellaneous jobs. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. Sales jobs, things like that. Then, I decided I had to really follow what I wanted to do and I reapplied to the M.A. program at State in History." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "OK, so that would have been the mid-‘70s by then?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "There was a gap in time where I was working at private businesses at that point, about 1984 or so when I applied for the M.A." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "And what was different at that point, going back to the Master’s degree at State?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Some of the same professors were still there, so it was really nice to see them again. But I think, like anybody else, I was more mature, so I got more out of the courses. I was able to participate more effectively in discussions, and get more from the readings, and took it more seriously. It was more rewarding." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "I had a point in my education as a history student in which I had that leap from realizing that history isn’t just reading narratives about the past. It’s constructing narratives from sometimes seemingly disparate artifacts, and things like this, which is where my appreciation for archives has come in. Did you start to understand history in any different type of way, when you went back for your Master’s?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Well, I think my interests at that point, I think I knew very little about the Archives. I think I approached history in a traditional sense, looking at documents, newspapers, photos, things like that. So, for me, it was trying to learn the traditional skills of research and writing. But I did notice that I was more drawn toward cultural history and social history, and that was the big thing at that point, social history. It was transforming the profession, like statistical history, you’re learning about groups, and interaction with groups, and political history was suffering—people associated with the Vietnam War, repression, and things like that, so political history was on the decline. I think that carried over from my earliest college days, I just loved studying about people and social problems and issues. I recall a class on Venice, and we had to write a paper, I think I wrote on the racial makeup of Venice in the 1500s to 1600s, as best I could from documents. We had a rare collection at San Francisco State on European prints and documents, so I was able to do a little bit there. But that’s where I tended, more on social history, like a lot of people." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Were you inspired by Shakespeare, for example, to undertake that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I always liked Shakespeare. I never delved into him too deeply. But I’ve since been doing a lot of Shakespeare. Sure, I did enjoy all eras of history, especially the Renaissance, and I’m reading Greek philosophy. That was always pretty incredible, too. So I was a master of none and a student of all." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "I think I strive to be a generalist as well. It’s a great way to be, especially in the Archives. I realize we skipped over something that you had mentioned, the anti-war movement. Is that something you want to speak a little bit about?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Yeah, I was never too heavily involved, but to a degree. I remember participating in a march. There must’ve been 150,000 people marching from downtown out to an area that I lived. It was called the Polo Grounds, a big open field, and so I was a part of that march in something like early 1970s. When you come over the hill and you see this massive crowd, there’s nothing like it. It’s one of those great experiences that stick with you. And of course, there was music in Golden Gate Park, which is a mecca. There were free concerts by the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and all these people that I could go to. There was the hippie movement. I happened to be there sometimes when there was a confrontation with the police, and saw a little bit of police brutality against people who were stoned, or not behaving well, maybe taking off their clothes, things like that. There were a lot of things. I remember the Cambodian invasion took place during the Nixon Administration, while I was at San Francisco State, and there were demonstrations on campus, thousands of students. They had to close school for a day or two, and I remember the hundreds of police were there around the Commons. They just circled a big area, so it was very intimidating, and that was about the time of maybe Kent State, where fellow students were killed on those campuses, and Jackson State. So it was a revolutionary time, and it inspired a lot of students, and was very disruptive. But those were the kinds of things that stay with you, and they teach you a lot about government, about politics, and make you kind of pessimistic. That’s how it was for me, and there were probably other cases, other instances I can’t recall right now. There were some instructors who sympathized, others who did not. I came right after President Hayakawa as the President of San Francisco State, and he I think came down pretty hard on students. That was just before I transferred to State, about ’68. So I remember him. That’s about all I remember on that at the moment." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Did you have a sense, do you remember, just that you’re in sort of, that this would be, like for, in that march for example, did you have a sense that this might be in an archive, that this might be part of history in the future, or as someone who’s an historian, or a hopeful one?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I didn’t think about that." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I didn’t think about that. I just thought this was a very tumultuous time, and I was, I was very sympathetic but a little bit on the hesitant side, like, like some people, I guess, I was concerned about the, to what degree I would get involved. I was concerned about my safety. I didn’t want to get hurt. So I was involved but not in an extreme way. I remember, of course at that point, just before that it was People’s Park Movement thing at Berkley just across the Bay and Mario Savio was the leader of that and I remember reading a lot about him, and he, he in the subsequent years came to San Francisco State and as a student in science, I believe. So we were, we were reading about these things, we were following it, and we were, it was very divisive. But I think we were living in the present pretty much." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Okay, so, so, sorry, you’re back. It’s 1984 or so and you’re in the Master’s program. You wrote a, did you write a thesis for your Master’s?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Uh, no [phonetic]." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Or, or do you have a particular, again, sorry, you said it was social, cultural history." }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "How did you decide you wanted to go to Maryland, and specifically to study what?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I got the M.A. at State, and at that point, I think I decided that I wanted to teach college, and to have a better rate of success, you need to get a doctorate. So, it was a question at that point, my fellow students at the M.A. program said, “No, this is it, I can’t undertake the doctoral program because you’re going to face about seven years of study and probably poverty as well. I had a family, I already had my oldest son at that point, a wife and son, when I graduated with my M.A. in 1987. When talking with fellow grad students, I was one of the few, I think, who wanted to go on. I applied to UCLA and to Maryland. We came to Maryland for a couple reasons. My wife’s parents were here, and that could be some support. Also, Maryland had a very strong Colonial America, American, Early American program, and that was my major interest at that point. It was very good, very strong, with some good people, and that’s why we came here—" }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "You said that there was an intermittent program where you’d work. Where did you work? This would’ve been around the time of the building of Archives II?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Earlier. Earlier. I don’t have the exact year in my mind, at the beginning. I think it was probably in the late 90s, mid-90s. I started at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. about 1991, as an intermittent, maybe my third or fourth year at Maryland." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "What did you undertake as an intermittent?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I worked in the research rooms, in Room 203, which is the primary Textual Research Room where documents were brought in. A lot of people would research all sorts of documents, including military records and pension records at that point. They alternated us to work upstairs in Room 400, which is where my last office was, that was the Microfilm Reading Room. That room, where I worked for my last ten or 15 years, was actually where I had started at the Archives. It was a huge room, with very high ceilings and thousands and thousands of microfilm rolls. All the microfilms were there, even the ones that are now in College Park. Everything was at Archives I. I would help people find the right microfilm, whether it be census, immigration, military records, or Indian records. It was a great education into the microfilm holdings of the Archives. For many researchers, microfilm was essential because a lot of records had been filmed, and they wouldn’t give you the original documents. You had to read it on microfilm. It really got busy around the time of the release of the census. I can remember the 1920 Census, there were lines out the door and you had to take a number or get your name on a list, and they would allow you an hour or two inside, and then they would have to get somebody else in there. So it was extremely busy. This was all before ancestry.com, and before you could do online research." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Can you talk about how that works before ancestry.com? How did you index things? Somebody comes in and says they want this census, what do you have to go through to help them?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I should talk about microfilm because I was heavily involved with microfilm after I left that unit. While I was in that unit in the early 1990s, and microfilm had been undertaken by the Archives since the 1940s. It was a way to preserve records, preserve facsimiles of them in perfect series order. They would film it as the records were organized, an entire series or a group of series, and you would have a microfilm publication. A publication might be the 1920 Census for the State of New York, so that would be one number, like M100. It was assigned a number. Then, M101 would be the State of Pennsylvania, so it was very organized by numbers and titles. But also, the microfilm program was designed to provide access so they wouldn’t have to pull the records. That preservation and access technology went from the 1940s up to the late 1990s, when digitization took its place. Anyway, it was a great education in the Microfilm Research Room because we had to learn how these films were organized, where they were, and how people could get access to them. We had a pretty good-sized desk, where four or five interns sat, and people would come up and say “I’ve got this problem, I’m trying to locate an ancestor in the 1920 Census, who lived in Pennsylvania, and I don’t know the county.” Of course, the census is critical because it lists your entire family and their ages and where they came from, and in some cases, their assets or their work title. It’s incredible. So we learned how to help them find the right roll, and there were indexes as well, and most of them were on film. First, you’d go to a film index and take down certain numbers. Then, you’d go to the actual film of the census. So that was census. Then, of course there were Indian records, which are very complicated. There are State Department records, Treasury, Legislative records, you name it. Again, it was a great education over the course of four or five years, to learn what we had, what it contained, and how to access them, and that helped me quite a bit." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "At what point in the 1990s did you start to use, firstly, computers in the aid of doing this kind of work, and secondly when did the Internet come to Room 400?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I think it came later. I can’t give you an exact date. I would say it was probably in the early 2000s. It started with only a few computers, and they might have the information on a CD, so you would check out that CD, go over to a computer and put it in. They didn’t have the information programmed in the computer or hardwired to an outside mainframe or something, that way at the beginning. You would have to check out the CD. But I think it gradually built up, and even today it’s not entirely computerized. The Microfilm Research Room has shrunken quite a bit. It’s in a different location, but they still have the films, and some of the things you’d do, you would use ancestry.com and fold3.com. Those were the two private firms that have digitized, scanned a lot of microfilm. You can use those resources free at the Archives if you come in. I think that’s true of any Archives or regional facility, whereas if you’re at home, you have to subscribe. It’s a great resource. I think computerization took a little longer to hit the Research Room. I should say another thing that really revolutionized genealogy, and a lot of people have talked about this, is the phenomena of the TV program Roots. Before that, not as many people were doing genealogy. Roots was such a big thing, especially for African-American genealogy, that we had thousands and thousands more people coming to the Archives nationwide to do their family research. It was a big turning point." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "And this was when?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I think it must have been in the late ‘70s. I can’t give you the exact date." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "So throughout the 1990s, you were in the Microfilm Room?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Until about 1995. Then, I applied for a permanent job with the General Unit, where I stayed from about 1995 to 2015." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "You got your dissertation in 1995, is that right?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "No, end of 1994." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "So you must’ve made the decision that you were not going to teach, you wanted to stay at the Archives, is that right?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Well, I never told anybody at the Archives, but I guess I can go on record now—I still had the hope that I would teach college through the 1990s, and I was applying, but I didn’t have any luck. I was an adjunct, I did teach a summer course at the University of Maryland, and also three or four classes at George Mason University. That was phenomenal because they were grad courses. Only one was an undergrad course, so for me as a non-positioned professor, instructor, to be able to move in and teach a grad course was great because I could speak to students who were more motivated, and I could deal with more penetrating and interesting material. So that was great. I still hoped to teach college throughout maybe the late 1990s, but I gradually kind of gave up on that. Also, I didn’t want to relocate. Who knows where you’re going to go if you land a teaching position. And, to be honest, I think the Archives pays more. It’s not an easy life as a college instructor. Good and bad points. And I was enjoying my work at the Archives. I felt I was doing some interesting things, and making a contribution. I think it was 1996 when I moved into the position that I was to hold for the rest of my time at NARA, which was as a writer-editor. The unit was probably reorganized. The Archives went through about two or three reorganizations during my time there, so the office title and acronym changed." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "From?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I’m trying to remember. An earlier one was NWCD. NW was Records Management, so we were, in a sense, part of the whole Records, Holding and Records Branch, which was an odd fit for an editorial and publishing unit. But we published a lot of their books and things. So it was NWCD, and I’ve forgotten some of the other ones, but the last was SCP, part of Communications, which was probably a better fit in some ways." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Did Communications exist before, for public outreach and to promote the Archives and its mission?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Right. I think in the late 1990s, early 2000s, there was a unit called NPOL, N Policy, under the Archivist. They did things like the all-out Archives communication, they formulated the Archives Strategic Plan, things like that. So, in a reorganization, the administrators move the units around to however they feel the units can best serve their respective purpose, or their mission has changed, their concept of what the Archives should be doing, I assume." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Were you involved with…I guess you’d been working with Jim [Worsham] for a while. Was there anybody else that you worked with?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Well Jim, I don’t know the exact year, I think he came along in 2004, something like that. Before that, Mary Ryan was the Managing Editor. It was Mary, myself, and another writer-editor named Maureen MacDonald, and a previous woman who had resigned, or she’d left about 1996, 1997. So it was Mary and a couple of us producing _Prologue_ until about 2004. Then, the administration decided they wanted to upgrade _Prologue_ , and they brought in Jim as the overall editor. Then, the magazine was redesigned somewhat, and the content was changed. I remember originally, before the change, it was a documented journal, heavily footnoted. They did away with that, so at the end of the articles you would have a note that in a very general sense talked about the sources that were used. A more popular format." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "So it may have been a shift in targeted audience, from generally historians to the wider public?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "That’s part of it, but I think they felt the articles were more readable and less distracting. They wanted to appeal to a wider audience, but they wanted to make it more readable, maybe shorten the articles a little bit. We still kept a lot of images, that’s always been part of it. But I think that’s part of a wider trend in government agencies. With the Internet, history became more available to a wider audience. That just really changed everything, so the change in _Prologue_ is part of that larger trend toward making publications and historical facts and knowledge more accessible." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Can you talk about how the Internet changed things here, because you would’ve seen that. It would have been in transition when you entered, or no?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Yeah. When I first started at my writer-editor position, I think that we had computers. This was 1996, definitely. We were editing things online, of course. We could do that, and were using word processing program. We used WordPerfect rather than Word. But where I noticed major changes in _Prologue_ work, when we tried to get images, it was all done mostly through physical research, going to the Library of Congress, going to the Still Pictures Branch at College Park, and we still do that. If we had to find a really rare photo, we had reference books that listed historical societies or museums across the country. And if we suspected that they might have a picture of some civil rights topic, or a certain politician, we would call them or write them and do a search the old-fashioned way via fax or e-mail. But gradually, as more and more stuff was put online, that really changed the way I did photo research. I could find images instantaneously on the Library of Congress website, which had a really good photo resource, better than the Archives. Also, historical societies started to scan their photos, so it really sped things up. It made more available, and we had better luck in finding things, we found a wider variety of things. That’s speaking of images and documents. It just made for even richer depictions in the articles. It made the work easier in many ways, but also gave us more choices, too. It was a really rich supply of materials, and we could be a lot more efficient. It was great. And that’s accelerating all the time because just in my last few weeks, I noticed the Naval Historical Society, when you want images of ships or sailors throughout American history, they always had thumbnails online, but just in the last two or three months, the Naval Historical Society had gotten funding and upgraded their system and they’re making available high-resolution images. So you don’t have to tell them what you want and wait for them to send you a scan. It’s downloadable. They’re behind the curve but they’ve come around. So that’s the kind of thing that’s happening. It makes it very quick." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "The Archives, along with, I believe it was the University of Maryland sort of defined the modern iteration of the profession of archivism, like to be an archivist, right? They helped to create that. And so how do you think that the Internet is affecting the profession of archivists?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I can speak only from my work with archivists because I was not one. But certainly, they would find their finding aids, their guides to records are online. And these are not the same guides as before. Previously, you’d go to a book, and it was organized by topic and subtopic. But now, you go to the online catalogue, OPA [Online Public Access] as it’s called now, and you put in keywords, and it brings up everything. So the results that you work with are different, and you have to change your mind set about how you use those results, and before that, how you access the records. So I think that’s changed archival reference work. I’ll just say that this is on a different track, the budgetary problems in not having as much as many archivists means that in the last few years archivists have not been able to write as much or produce guides to records. They’ve pretty much been designated as reference people. They would serve the researchers. Whereas, previously they used to have some time to put together guides, let’s say such as the Vietnam War records, the records of the Civil War Treasury, for example, they can’t really do that anymore. That’s a budgetary problem. But it’s also something that affected me as an editor. The Archives Institute of Policy really went away from printed guides, in favor of this database Guide to Records. So we weren’t producing printed finding aids anymore. I don’t know if that answers your question. There’s probably more to it, how it changed archivists. Yes, I think it probably sped up a lot of the communications they had with people, in terms of email and sending them scans of documents, things like that. It’s just revolutionized communications." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Well, you started off in your post-baccalaureate education thinking about teaching. At what point did you become aware of this field of federal history you’ve been very involved with." }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I try not to mix that too much with my archives work." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "But maybe you can speak about the importance of federal history?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Yes. There are two aspects to the term “federal history,” the history of the federal government, of course, and also the work being done in federal agencies on history. See what I mean? It’s a vague term. But at some point, I just wanted to join an organization, and there is one in DC called the Society for History in a Federal Government. It was a way to meet people doing similar work and related work in other agencies. I’ve been involved with them, and it’s a very good thing because you meet archivists, let’s say, at the Library of Congress. You meet editors at the State Department. You meet historians at the Army Center of Military History. And all these people who are fascinating to meet. They do their work differently, just by virtue of their different missions, the different records that they have there, the different goals of their leaders. So isn’t that incredible, it enriches you because you see different possibilities for doing your job. You learn from them, and it teaches you a lot about other agencies, what they do and how they do their history. And it’s not always good. Some of them are not doing great history, but it’s interesting. It’s a wider world, essentially. I guess, not to go into it too deeply, I felt that the inner world at the Archives was not enough for me. It’s kind of limiting. But that’s not to say I didn’t do a great job at the Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Not by any means." }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "But whatever. I felt I had to be part of a larger group. And there are a fair number of people at the Archives who are part of this organization as well, and some of them have been presidents of the organization. The Archives was a partner with them for many years, allowing the society to hold conferences and other events at the Archives. The connection is that all these agencies, of course, have to retire their records to the Archives. That’s what makes the Archives unique. It is the center of the universe in a way. So you learn by studying these other agencies. You learn about what records they have, how they’re organized, what format they’re in, when they turn them over, when some delinquent agencies turn their records over late or not at all. It’s a very interesting picture, and it’s all tied together. It enriched my work as an editor. But I just want to say it because when I edit books by other units, or guides to records from other units at the Archives, my having a larger view of the way these records originate, what they contain, and where they ended up, that informs my editing. It can’t help but inform my editing. I’m not just doing grammatical work. I may, at times, point out to somebody, “Well, you could phrase this differently, with regard to the origin of the records to make it more accurate.” So, inevitably, a wider view, more experience informs your reading of something." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Did you have particular accomplishments at the National Archives that you’re exceedingly proud of?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I think about that sometimes, and I’m just going to go off the top of my head, it’s like anything else, you have to maybe pick out something that comes first to your mind, but of course, _Prologue_ . I worked on that for almost 20 years as a photo editor, and then tried to really enrich the text visually. It’s a package that I put together and got some good feedback along the way. I really was very conscientious about it, and dug very deeply into a lot of sources. It was not just the pictures, it was also the captions. I think a lot of people don’t read the article, they just look at the pictures and the captions, so it’s important. And the covers, I was very involved in selecting and suggesting covers. It was a very exciting experience because it allowed me to dig into a lot of different sources, not just the Archives. Primarily, first you go to the Archives, and then you go elsewhere. So I can just say I had the opportunity sometimes to visit with archivists at College Park or elsewhere, and go in the stacks with them, and look at specific documents, or look at images. Sometimes, there are photos in the textural records, not just still pictures, but there are photos, and maps, and things like that. I get my hands on some of these things, and make it a greater, richer selection of the images, and then find some rare images outside the Archives. Sometimes, even small historical societies, or even families who had pictures of their Confederate relatives—these things are not public, and publishing them for the first time, getting permission, it’s amazing. There are so many stories. Each article has its own story and its own fascination, so I can’t go into all of that right now, but it was an adventure, amazing." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "I would like if you could talk about the creative process. How does the finished product come out of that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I think everybody has their own approach, like Maureen, my co-worker for many years before she left _Prologue_ four or five years ago. But my approach was to read the article, jot down important people, places, and events, and then I had to think about telling that story, what would be important to picture. And we knew that we could fit in only maybe anywhere from six to ten illustrations. So you try to get a balance between the photos and documents because we want to promote documents. The whole point of _Prologue_ is to promote what resources we have, and what they can yield, and documents were a major part of that. So you brainstorm a list, and then you go after that. Then, I always tried to involve the author because, let’s say I got it wrong, and that author’s priorities were different. So, once I developed the list, I would run it by the author, and he or she might make some changes, and once we had our list, we went after those photos, wherever they might be. But the Archive’s resources were first, and then if they didn’t hold them, we went elsewhere. Every story is unique, every story has unique demands and problems of access, information, and costs, and you have to watch your costs. So there are pressures. There are deadlines, and nobody wants to hear any apologies, so you get it done somehow. You develop a system, you become efficient, and we did have a little help. Sometimes, authors would actually have done the research already, and had some citations of images at College Park. They already had good scans, maybe, or good photocopies of some of these documents in the early days. They had citations to the documents, folders, and box numbers. That helped a lot, and I would lean on archivists to help me find some of this stuff, and gave them credit and a free issue, and it usually worked out." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "That’s great." }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I’m very thankful that I got to learn about so many different kinds of records from military, Native American, immigration, Supreme Court, you name it. It was all over the place, yes. Also, it’s astounding the range of stories that the records can tell from the very personal stories that the people submitted, strictly about their family, that’s all. No further. To stories about the highest levels of the international diplomacy, the range of stories that are contained in the records is amazing. And that’s what _Prologue_ was about, revealing the possibilities, you know, and showing what could be done. And I hope that that continues because to me it’s a very important product, and it has changed. In the early years, when _Prologue_ was founded, I’ll just say this, it was conceived of by the early archivists as a scholarly publication. It would promote knowledge and research. But of course, over time it continued to promote research, but also dissemination of stories and history to a more popular audience as well." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Were there any sort of controversies during your time at NARA? And how did you contribute to resolving, or weren’t able to resolve those controversies? Or were things insurmountable?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "I really don’t think I was involved in too many controversies. I think other people were. I don’t think I was. I was too low on the pole, I just did my job. I was involved maybe in editing certain reports that were sensitive, just to that extent. I don’t think I can help you too much. The controversies were usually handled by the Communications Office. We didn’t really see much. In other words, where you have something like the Clinton emails, and the handling of emails, and the State Department was supposed to turn things over, or you’re supposed to preserve them in certain ways, certain procedures laid out by NARA, the State Department maybe didn’t follow those procedures. Those kinds of things are handled by Communications. Our unit maybe edited a memo or a bulletin relating to that. That’s about it." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Anything else that you’d like to add? Anecdotes? Really, the time is yours." }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "Well, I just want to on the record to say that _Prologue_ was just one part of the products that I worked with. Actually, the original name of our unit was the Product Developments Staff. We produced books, guides that were written by other people in other parts of the agency. We produced guides, museum catalogues. They were produced by the Exhibit Branch, and we edited those. So we were involved in products, and so I just wanted to say for the record that I worked on a lot of different products. One important category was finding aids, information leaflets that went out to the public, brochures, flyers, posters, slides in the more recent years. I’m trying to think of what else. Oh, this is very important, it took a lot of my time, microfilm publications. About in 1998, I became the chief editor of Microfilm Publications for the agency. I’d already become an editor, and the woman who was doing that was retiring, so we produced a few dozen microfilm publications a year at the height of the program, and I would be the editor of the historical introductions that somebody else would write, giving the background of the records and how to use them. So if you go through some of these microfilm publications, the introductions are in a booklet that accompanies each one, and also on the first roll of the file. Actually, it should be on every roll of the film. So I got involved in a lot of history, and weighed in on the accuracy and the readability of those introductions. So that was a heavy part of my workload, working with microfilm publications until they were sort of phased out around 2010, 2012, in that area. Another enjoyable area for me was finding aids, and things like that. These were printed guides to records, while they were still doing it that way. An important one was a Guide to the Records of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp Complex. In other words, this was a death camp. The archivist I worked with at College Park and another grad student to produce the guide. They went through all the records in the Archives that had information relating to this concentration camp, because the U.S. Army liberated that camp in May 1945. So records were generated by the Army, by the State Department, by Treasury, I think, but various branches of the Army, by general staff. There must’ve been about 28 different record groups. It’s astounding, and it’s a lot of work, and they went through and collated this. So this is a fascinating, highly focused finding aid, and really something should be done like that for every camp or every topic. There’s not enough time, but to me it was fascinating, and so I was the editor on that. The great thing is that I got to pick the illustrations. I don’t know if they intended to put them in, but I suggested it and I took the lead in that. We had images that we could find of the Commandants. A lot of stuff was captured, like the death books that were left behind that the Americans appropriated. Letters, images of the American troops coming in, probably like ten, or 14 images I think, made it into the book. So for me, that was a creative effort, something that I could use my judgment and my opinions as to what was important in producing some of the captions. It’s an awful story, but you try to make it more important. You try to impress people with the importance. You just don’t want it to be dry. I mean, history can’t be neutral, in a sense. There’s a moral imperative there. You try to show people how awful it was as well, and our records were very revealing there. Another case was I was revising a Guide to POW Records held at the Presidential Libraries. People don’t know that a lot of POW records, like a lot of POW negotiations and documentation, were generated by [Presidential] administrations. I’m sure there are other military records as well, but a lot of the POW records are in the Presidential Libraries. This was a guide of what’s out there. So I was involved in surveying or communicating with Presidential Libraries, and getting the latest updated information on what they had. We revised that guide, and that was very revealing. Another guide was on railroad records, you see, it’s all over the place. What kind of railroad records do we have? I don’t know; this wasn’t just railroads. This was specifically cartographic railroad records, so maps and drawings specifically relating to railroads from the 1830s on. An archivist in Cartographic wrote it, and I was able to work with him on the photo selection. We put the images in the center of the spread so it would be more effective, not just a dedicated photo spread. We included an early drawing of one of the first railroads, just a sketch of the route between two cities. That kind of stuff just opens your mind to what the Archives has. Also, it’s the art of illustration, the art of composing a book. That’s the whole other aspect that excited me in this job, how to create a product. See, it’s not just editing, so those are some of the major products. Others were more mundane, such as editing a notice or something like that, or a minor report or something that’s very cut and dry. But I worked on some things that were very difficult to understand, a lot of legalese, such as Records Management brochures, booklets, and reports, and I tried to introduce some plain language in there. That’s a whole different line of work. I just want to say that the work covered a wide spectrum...exhibit catalogues, working with the curators who wrote them and trying to help them improve their writing. They did the major part of the work, but I contributed to that, and to the signs and the captions that are in the Exhibit Hall. I could go on and on, but I have to look at my list." }, { "speaker": "MR. RHODES", "text": "Thank you very much, Ben." }, { "speaker": "MR. GUTERMAN", "text": "You’re welcome. It’s amazing. Great. I appreciate the opportunity. ## NATIONAL # ARCHIVES #### National Archives History Office #### 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW #### Washington DC 20408" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MS. REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "This is Rebecca Brenner and I am interviewing Doris Hamburg at Archives II, in Room 2803 on July 10, 2015. So, Ms. Hamburg, will you please provide a brief overview of your career timeframe at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "I came to the National Archives officially April 1, 2001, to take the position of Director of Preservation Programs. And I've held that position since that time." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Could you provide a brief background of your education or previous positions that led you to NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Before I came to the National Archives, I was at the Library of Congress. I held a number of positions there. I was the Head of Preventive Conservation. I was the Acting Chief of Conservation over a long time. Previous to that, I had been the Head of Paper Conservation. And I began at the Library of Congress in 1980 as an intern, as part of my graduate program, and finishing my graduate degree. From an intern, I was hired to be a paper conservator, which is what I was for my first few years at the Library." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "How did your education influence your decision to start at the Library of Congress and NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "When I was in college at Mount Holyoke, I was a medieval studies major. And as I was figuring out what I would do when I finished my undergraduate studies. I was very interested in going into museum work. And I was trying to figure out what aspect I would be interested in. That had been something I'd learned about earlier and was very fascinated by, and the objects that museums bring to life. I was looking at museum programs, and I actually learned as a senior about the field of conservation of art and historic artifacts. So, I began to explore that, and there are not many programs in the country that teach conservation. I decided to take some time off before going directly to graduate school, and I worked at the Morgan Library in New York City for several years. And at that point, I was also taking more courses because to go into conservation, you need to have a strong background in chemistry, you need a strong background in art, history, and art history, so I was supplementing my undergraduate work in those areas. And then I decided to get a Masters in Art History, which I did at Columbia University. And after I completed that, I went to work for a year as an apprentice in conservation to a paper conservator in Philadelphia. The following year, I went to graduate school in conservation at the Ruth Kemp Weidner Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, which is associated with the University of Delaware. And that brought me to the Library." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Just a comment, these are almost the same schools as Francis Perkins, who was an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke and earned a masters at Columbia." }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Oh, okay. I didn't realize that she had gone to Columbia as well." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "When you got to NARA, what were your original impressions of the agency?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Well, I learned a great deal about archives, that I did not fully know all the aspects. And I was fascinated by the mission and by the importance of the mission that we have as an agency. The contributions that we make for the present and for the future, I think are invaluable. And certainly, from a professional standpoint of preservation, the challenges are also amazingly interesting, especially when one thinks about the quantities that we're working with in terms of the amount of records that NARA has, and the range of problems and needs that we have for ensuring the preservation in the future." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Did you receive any training when you first came here?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "The very first day I came, actually when I signed in, I learned how to work the mobile shelving in the stacks. That I remember very well. But over a little time, there may have been some supervisory manager’s training. I am a little fuzzy on that at this point." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What about mentors, did you have any mentors early on?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "I reported at the time to Michael Kurtz, who was the head of Records Services in Washington, DC. He was my manager, and he was mentoring me when I came to NARA." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What aspects of your work do you enjoy most?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "I like very much working with people, and I think that as a manager, it's very satisfying to see staff grow and develop their skills and interests. I find the goals from what we're trying to accomplish from a preservation standpoint extremely fascinating and rewarding as well. We make progress on behalf of NARA's needs. That’s also extremely rewarding." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Can you describe a typical day in your unit?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Well, our unit involves includes a number of different departments. So, I would say that if we talk about the unit as a whole, that involves a range. We have the Preservation Program at St. Louis, which is focused on preserving and making available the records of the National Personnel Records Center, the archive side as well as the records center side. So, that's one component of our program. We also have the Conservation Department, which is addressing the needs of the records, whether we're talking about paper, photographs, cartographic materials, a full range of original materials. So, the conservators and the conservation technicians are working to make records accessible. In terms of my daily life here in Preservation Programs, the central office for preservation, I'm involved in meetings, I'm involved in discussions with other people about planning and how we want to go forward, addressing needs, and of course there's always email to do. I do some traveling to other facilities. Our Preservation Programs is a nationwide program, so we are addressing preservation needs across the whole agency. It includes Presidential Libraries, as well as Archives in Washington, DC, and around the country, and we are also working actively with the records center program to ensure that the records are available for as long as they're needed." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "When you think of your career so far, what successes first come to mind?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "I've been involved in a lot of interesting projects over time. One, we've been very pleased to see NARA have standards or directive policy for how we develop archival storage to try to bring consistency across NARA, and help integrate modern current research into what it is that we as an agency are doing. So, we have developed policies along the way, and that helps to bring consistency and bring NARA forward. So, that's one thing, we've really developed our program working with the libraries. One of the things that I was asked to do when I came to NARA was to make Preservation Programs a nationwide program. I think we have accomplished that, and are continuing to accomplish that, and that's a big goal and I think benefit for the agency. On some more specific project-based elements, we had a big project that involves working with records that were found in a basement in Iraq during the war there in 2003. My colleague, Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler, and I went to Iraq in 2003 to assess those records. We got a call from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad at the time, and they asked that we come and assess those records." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What exactly were these records?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "They were books and documents from the Iraqi Jewish community in Baghdad, primarily Baghdad. And basically, they had been taken by Saddam Hussein's government, and put into the basement of his intelligence headquarters. And then with the war, there was a lot of water, and the items were in that water. They got very wet and then got very moldy. And the National Archives made the decision that it would provide assistance for this." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "So where are they now?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "They're here at the National Archives. The project to preserve and make them available has essentially been completed. We've done all the work to stabilize the records and box them, and a website has been developed which provides worldwide access to these books and documents. And we've had feedback from people all over the world. The Iraqi Jewish community had been in Iraq for more than 2,500 years, and in the 1950 to 1970s, basically the community completely left because they were forced to leave from Iraq. And most of them left in 1950 and 1951, but there were some who continued to live there. And now, there may be less than a handful of Iraqi Jews there. So, the people who pulled this out of the water, understood or recognized that this was a tangible link to the Jewish community that is no longer there. It had been so active, but is no longer there. It's an unusual project for NARA because these are not Federal records, but we have been working very actively with the State Department, and the work that we've done has furthered ties with Iraq, and helped in the U.S. Government relationships, as well as made all this information available." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "That's fascinating, it sounds almost like a humanitarian service." }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "On the cultural side." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Would you say that fits in the mission?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Well, it's certainly providing service to beyond NARA significantly. So yes." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Wow. A few minutes ago, you mentioned the Presidential Libraries and to step back to that, can you speak to your involvement with them? Any specific anecdotes of conservation?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Well, we're very involved with the libraries. A member of our staff is the Preservation Program Officer for the Presidential Libraries. And her fulltime job is working with the libraries. We also do conservation work, treatment for the libraries and we do reformatting, and so on. We're involved with helping to plan each new Presidential Library. And also, we help the libraries regarding possible emergencies, by helping develop preservation planning for them, and providing services. Each library is a place unto itself, and they are fascinating to go to and see and learn about the respective President. And the artifacts and the records help bring all that alive." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Does conservation play a role in which documents and which material culture items go to the libraries? Or is that something else?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "No, as a President is in office, that person is receiving gifts, for one thing, and records are being created in the course of his—in this case so far—his role as President. All those materials end up coming to the National Archives. They are being deposited here, they are in physical custody of the Archives during the course of the Presidency. There's also a records office at the White House. And as the Presidency ends, those materials, the records, and the artifacts are transferred to NARA. And NARA takes both physical and legal custody. That's how we end up with them. And the President forms a foundation before he leaves office, and that foundation raises funds to build a Presidential Library. There are certain requirements for building a Presidential Library. We have a role in developing those requirements from a preservation standpoint, and others contribute from a security standpoint, and other aspects. And there are laws involved with determining the size of the library, and what's involved. Once the library is built, it is transferred to the National Archives. So, it's really the administration that is involved in developing or putting together everything that is part of that administration. We are involved with helping to determine what's involved to preserve those materials." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Speaking of Presidential administrations, have changes in Presidential administrations or in the Archivist of the United States administrations changed the nature of your work?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "The mandate to preserve has been with the Archives from the very beginning. That's written into law, and that's a responsibility of the Archivist of the United States, and the Archivist has many responsibilities that are then delegated. So, that's one aspect. That doesn't really change over time." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Do you interact a lot with the Archivist?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Not so often. Occasionally, periodically, I do." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "I guess I picture that like a cabinet meeting." }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "The head of each office meeting with the Archivist." }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Right. Right." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What challenges have you experienced in your work?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Challenges. Funding is always a challenge. There's lots to do and funding has gotten less in the government as a whole, so that continues as a consideration. It's not unique in that regard to preservation. And one of the things that we're always working on is developing, and looking at priorities because we don't expect that every single item is going to be completely perfect, that is not the goal. The goal is to stabilize the condition, to minimize further damage, and to address preservation so that materials can be used and made accessible. A lot of work and a lot of effort are going into digitization across NARA, so that as many people as possible can see the records, which is fabulous." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What changes over time have you experienced here? I'm sure digitization could be an example." }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Well, digitization has certainly grown significantly in its importance. That's a significant change, which is excellent for moving forward. It has a dividend also in that the more that people are able to look at records online, the less they need to handle the originals, so there's a preservation dividend to that. There are aspects to that that may or may not prove themselves out." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Can you speak to those aspects, I haven't heard this before." }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "So, it has always been thought that when you digitize something and put it online, that original materials will be no longer accessed. It has been seen in institutions around the country or the world that sometimes in making certain things available online, actually raises questions on the part of the people who are looking at them, and they become interested and want to see the originals, and start to also ask about other things. So, we have, as an agency, sought as much as possible to do a thorough job of digitizing, let's say a whole series of records, and then we can put those records aside. If someone needs to see the originals, and there's a particular reason that the originals provide them with a lot more information, or there's a need to see the originals, we make those available, definitely. But time will tell as to how that impacts NARA and making the records available online, and how use changes. I think our overall expectation is that use of the originals will go down. But there may be some groups of records that may go up. The other thing about digitization is that it makes people aware of things they didn't know about before. That is very exciting, and everybody wants to see as much as they can online. Everybody wants that." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "How is it decided which documents are online?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "The National Archives has a group at the present time called Digitization Governance Board, and they're involved with looking at the wide range of materials we have, and making decisions about our priorities and what we will do first." }, { "speaker": "Ms. BRENNER", "text": "When did that board come into existence?" }, { "speaker": "Ms. HAMBURG", "text": "The Digitization Governance Board came into play about a year ago. There had been other groups before that." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "So how did that work before then?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Within Records Services, Washington DC, we had the Digitization Management Board, which I headed. And we also had a process for making priorities as to what would be digitized. There are different drivers for digitization. One example is making decisions, okay, what would be the most popular to put online, so that as many people who might be interested can see. There may be a topical reason for putting something online. As an agency, we put online certain records related to a topic that might come up and be of interest. For example, elections or an anniversary of a particular event, when people would be interested in seeing the records associated with that. We also do digitization, and have for some time, related to preservation goals. If something is in poor condition or is not accessible, we will decide to reformat it, in many cases that's through digitization. And by doing a copy of it, we're able to make a new copy that can be made accessible through current technology. This comes up particularly in audio and video, where equipment is no longer being made to play such things. Like, how many people have 8-track tape recorders, you know? That's just not used anymore. NARA needs to be able to provide access to that information that was used, or created in the course of doing government business. We actually have a “museum” here at NARA, so to speak, I put it in quotes, that has all this old equipment because the equipment has become obsolete. And we need to be able to have access to equipment like that. And then we'll play it on that equipment, and make a new copy so that people can then get to the information. Sometimes, some of those records have only one play left in them, and we need to make sure we capture that information." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "To what extent are you involved in the Electronic Records Archive?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "At this point, NARA has created a department that focuses on digital preservation. It’s the primary department, and moves around a little bit for a while. At some point, it was part of Preservation Programs, but it's now its own department within Information Services. We work hand-in-hand with them, and digital preservation is part of NARA's preservation strategy, which is another great accomplishment within the last year or so. We have a preservation strategy that's taking us from 2015 through 2018. And certainly, the challenges of preserving digital are very prominent in that strategy." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What other technological or other changes have you experienced?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Well, over the last decades, people were doing microfilming to make copies of things. Now, much of that has transferred to digitization. People are still doing microfilming in a variety of contexts. You may be interested to know that banks, for example, digitize our checks, but then they'll make microfilms out of that because it's cheaper to keep the microfilms. Cost plays a role in all this. And certainly, the evolution of digital, and our use of digital systems is huge, and completely changes preservation needs, as we think about going forward. It doesn't change our needs for what we have retrospectively. We still want to take care of all those things that we've seen changes in. Science keeps evolving, and so does the field of research, and the field of preservation, so we continue to get more information, and it's like medicine in that regard. You want to stay up with the changes in technology, and want to keep being able to apply it and put the best information out there so we can achieve our goals of preserving. We're focused, and have been focused over time, on preventive measures, making sure we have the best environment we can so that we can accomplish the most with environment. It's like, with the environment, we can slow deterioration and we can take care of huge stacks that way. We know we can't get to every single item and take care of it, or do hands-on work, so we're always looking for broad measures to accomplish the most we can." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What are some specific challenges in conservation that digitization has solved or improved?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "In digitizing, we don't necessarily handle everything. We're putting it out there, and people can look at the information. From a handling standpoint, it means that records may be handled less. Time will tell and we'll see, we just talked about that. We also want to make sure that in digitizing we're not doing more damage. In some ways, we have changed, or we're also focusing resources to ensure that the records can be handled in a way that they can be digitized. That's another aspect. I want to point out that sometimes we use the terms conservation and preservation interchangeably. But we think of preservation as the umbrella term, and that includes conservation, which is stabilizing and taking care of the physical items themselves. So, conservation is a component of preservation. Reformatting and changing from one format to another is another component of preservation. We also include in preservation, storage and environment and stabilizing and preventing damage. And, so those are components to preservation, conservation being one of them that focuses directly on the items and treatment of them and stabilizing them." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Moving to a different topic, what has been your relationship with other Federal agencies, if any?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Oh, definitely, we're involved with working with other Federal agencies. We work with colleagues around the whole government. Sometimes, we've been involved, let's say with emergency response activities with other agencies. We are involved with comparing notes and research and working collaboratively on research with other agencies. So, we have joint projects with the Library of Congress, for example. And we have conferences. We have held, over the course of 25 years, conferences to talk about preservation and related topics, and they've been attended by colleagues all over the government and all around the world. We’re on committees together, professionally, and also government-wide there are some committees that have been working on standards, and so on." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What specifically has NARA collaborated with the Library of Congress on?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "One example is standards. With an agency like NARA, we are ordering, for example, boxes to put the records in, whenever we're reboxing things. And the standards for those boxes, NARA and the Library of Congress have the same need. We've had discussions over time, and collaborating to bring together our standards so that they mesh. We do joint testing on certain materials. We discuss treatment a lot together. Many staff members have gone from one institution to another one." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[interjecting] Oh, interesting." }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "I mentioned earlier, that prior to coming to NARA, I had been at the Library of Congress. There are actually many people who have been at both institutions. Some started at the National Archives and have gone to the Library, and there are even one or two people who've gone from NARA to the Library and back again to NARA." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[interjecting] The language of the National Archives vis-à-vis Library of Congress really reminds me of Mount Holyoke and Smith. It's like they're sisters." }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Yes, there are some similarities. The Archives’ mission, though, is different from the Library's mission. And I don't think that's always fully understood. In that regard, we are two separate institutions. The other thing that is a pretty significant difference is that the Library is part of the legislative branch, and the National Archives is part of the executive branch. And when it comes to funding, that actually does play an important role, because the Library of Congress goes directly to Congress. Whereas, the National Archives goes to OMB, and then it becomes part of the President's budget, and that's how our funding requests are put forward, and that's significant." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "You mentioned earlier that funding is a challenge. How does that relate to the executive branch? Does the legislative branch fund better? That might be a silly question." }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "It's not a silly question at all. The legislature has its priorities as well, and I think in general money is tight. So, it's not about more, but it is different. There are more layers in the executive branch than there are, maybe, for the legislative branch and budget. But the legislature is very conscious about how much it funds itself also." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Overall, how do you view your time at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "It's an exciting place, as I say, I'm really very supportive and excited by the mission of the Archives. The staff is really fabulous, and we're very lucky with the resources we do have. We have a research and testing office, for example, which has been very active in making contributions to the field as well as to NARA. And, for example, over the last couple years, through the work that we've done in Preservation Programs, we've been able to save the agency hundreds of thousands of dollars. That connects to research that has helped to identify options for going forward, and it’s also involved with collaborating with other departments. Energy savings is one example. So, we're always trying to look at, okay, how can we do things better, and how can we prioritize, and make things go ahead in a good way." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What would you say is your historic contribution to the preservation field?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "[Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "I slightly reworded the question." }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "[Laughter] Okay." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Originally it said, do you feel that you made a significant contribution to the National Archives or the historic preservation field? If so, what is it? So, that works, too." }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "I think that I have been a very strong advocate for preventive conservation, and have contributed a lot to furthering that aspect, which I think in the end is probably the way we are going to be most successful in ensuring preserving NARA's holdings and in general the collections that we have. Because the numbers are so significant, we have to keep making choices, and the more we can do in a broad way. It's an interesting question. There are a number of independent projects that have been very satisfying. The Iraqi project has contributed to people around the world, and made a big contribution to a community that is in—" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[interjecting] Have there been any NARA publications on that, or other publications?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "There are some things in _Prologue,_ and there's a website, www.ija.archives.gov, where all the materials are shown online. And we have the information about the project and the program set- up being developed, and the whole exhibit is online. Also, we have made available for the field information about how we've gone about doing the project. So not just the materials and the books and the documents are accessible, but also, we've made completely available how we did what we did, so that can be useful to other groups that might be digitizing, preserving and so on. We tried to make it as transparent as possible. The funding was from the State Department. In part through my time at NARA, and starting before, actually, I have worked also with the Dead Sea Scrolls. That also has been a major project. And there have been a number of major projects that I've had the good fortune to work on during my career." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What was the trajectory of your involvement with the Dead Sea Scrolls?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "As the Israel Antiquities Authority was putting together a lab." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What year was that again?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "That's about 1990. It started even before that because the Israel Antiquities Authority was working with the Library of Congress, and the decision was made to hold an exhibit about the Dead Sea Scrolls. I was the conservator in charge of this plan to have the Dead Sea Scrolls and artifacts come from Israel to be exhibited at the Library of Congress. And around the same time, the Israel Antiquities Authority was setting up a lab, and I was involved with a committee from the Getty Conservation Institute to provide guidance to the Israel Antiquities Authority. And then over time, that was done. Since then, I've also been assisting the Antiquities Authority as they developed requirements for their new building, and I recently led a committee to review their preservation practices for the Dead Sea Scrolls." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Wow, so you personally participated in preserving the Dead Sea Scrolls." }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "That just gives me chills." }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "It is very exciting, and pretty amazing to think how old they are." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Along those lines, I'm going to add a question." }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "To what extent have you worked with the documents in the Rotunda?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "So, I have been part of the team that has been involved in addressing the Charters of Freedom, as we call them. That work began before I came, and our team in conservation were the conservators who did the treatment, and then we all worked together in developing the planning for how they would be displayed and preserved. I would say, I'm certainly part of that effort, and have responsibility for that effort as the Director of Preservation Programs, but the work on a day-to-day basis is done by the staff in conservation." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Okay, well thank you so much for your time." }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "You're welcome." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "And is there anything you'd like to add to the interview, such as anecdotes or words of wisdom?" }, { "speaker": "MS. HAMBURG", "text": "I think that, words of wisdom, this is a key aspect of NARA, and we are well positioned to be able to accomplish a lot. And I hope that that will go forward for the future. So, at the moment I can't think of an anecdote." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Thank you. ###### NATIONAL ##### ARCHIVES ######### National Archives History Office ######### 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW ######### Washington DC 20408" } ]

[ { "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", "text": "Okay, so I've got the recording started. And first, I just want to start out by saying thank you for participating in the National Archives Oral History Project. We're documenting the history of the agency by preserving firsthand accounts of the people that have actually worked here. My name is Stephanie Reynolds, and I'm based out of our National Archives facility in Broomfield, Colorado. And I'm assisting the Historian, Jessie Kratz. Today is Wednesday, July 19th, 2023. And I'm speaking with James Hemphill, whose NARA [National Archives and Records Administration] career has spanned multiple different offices: the Office of the Archivist of the United States, Presidential Libraries, and the Federal Register. So you've got a lot of perspective here. So, first, Jim, would you just go ahead and get us started maybe by telling us a little bit about your background, where you're from, your educational background, that sort of thing?" }, { "speaker": "Jim Hemphill", "text": "Nice to be here. Thank you for your interest in my story. I grew up in Pennsylvania, western Pennsylvania. I transferred from the college I was going to, to Georgetown in 1973, graduated in 1975 with a bachelor's degree in government. In my senior year, I had started interning in the office of Senator Mark Hatfield, a senator from Oregon. So upon graduation, I was hired on as a mail clerk and then had progressive promotions in that office, ultimately serving as his executive assistant for 12 of the 17 years that I worked for him. I've actually done a previous oral history with NARA about my experience serving on his staff during the time that NARA got its independent agency status, because Senator Hatfield was a great promoter of the National Archives and supported independence. I was the staff person who worked closely with Dr. Warner, the Archivist [of the United States] at the time, and others on the Hill on the congressional side in their efforts to bring that to pass. And just one interesting connection between that and my later career at NARA is, at almost literally the very last minute in the debate of that legislation, the remaining question was: Should the Office of the Federal Register be retained by the GSA [General Services Administration]? GSA wanted to keep it, and so we were pretty involved in negotiating that the Office come with the Archives in independence. And little did I know at that time—1985—that I would spend 25 years serving in the Office of the Federal Register! I ended my career in Senator Hatfield's office in December 1991, when I came over to the National Archives as the Executive Assistant to the Archivist Don Wilson, serving in that role until October 1993. That's when I was detailed first to the Office of Public Affairs, and then to the Office of the Federal Register for about six months in July 1994. And then I competed for and was appointed to the position of Deputy Assistant Archivist for the Office of Presidential Libraries, in January 1995. And I served there until July 1995, when I was moved back to the Office of the Federal Register with the title Special Assistant to the Director and remained there for the rest of my career. I retired from the Office of the Federal Register about a year into the COVID epidemic, in January 2021. So the last nine months of my career were spent teleworking, along with the rest of the federal government and citizens of the United States." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. So you've got a lot going on there from when you started out as the executive assistant then to Senator Mark Hatfield, is that correct?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I got that right. Okay. And so I know this is your pre-NARA time, you know, but you've talked about how you were—this is when NARA was becoming independent of GSA. Can you talk a little bit about what your involvement in that was, any contributions and any discussions that were surrounding that whole time period of, okay, we're going to have NARA become a separate independent agency?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "So I shared my memories about that in an oral history that NARA already has. So, just to summarize, I was a staff person there in Senator Hatfield's office supporting the independence efforts, and I don't want to overstate my role. It was driven, of course, by Bob Warner and people in the Archives who wanted the agency to become independent, and they were looking for congressional support. And Senator Hatfield was one of the people from whom they sought help. The Senator was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, so he had a very powerful position from which to be helpful. This was in the middle of the [President] Reagan administration. And while Senator Hatfield held a much more moderate, liberal position in the Republican Party than the Reagan administration, he had some close ties in the administration and was able to run interference and help it in the process. That was very important because whenever you're separating an agency from another agency, the bureaucratic turf wars are going to be pretty significant, and you never know where your battles are going to come from, you know, because personal relationships and networks in Washington, DC, and in the government are a significant factor in policy-making. It is often very interesting—things will come out of left field. And we experienced that in the independence process. So I worked at the staff level on this process. I don't want to diminish my role, but I also don't want to overstate it. [I was] monitoring pretty carefully what was going on. Any legislation has to go through both houses of Congress. So primarily, we were involved when it was on the Senate side, with our eye on what the administration’s position was—the President could veto anything like this. And so we wanted to be sure that we're getting the administration's approval. And my recollection is that some folks who were pretty well-connected to the President through GSA were making the effort to at least hold on to the Office of the Federal Register, because it has an administrative role in government that NARA doesn't. NARA is a cultural agency NARA employees like to say, but they _keep_ records, whereas the Federal Register is part of the administrative process in which records are _created_ . And so an argument could be made for GSA’s point of view. But the Office of the Federal Register did not want to stay with GSA, and we felt their arguments were strong ones. So, I actually can't pull out of my memory right this moment exactly some of the dynamics that went on. But I have a funny, maybe embarrassing, but kind of interesting story from the night that Congress was going to pass the legislation on the Senate floor. That same evening there was a reception at the National Archives Rotunda for—I forget the exact group, but it was a pretty significant group, maybe the members of the private foundation that supports the National Archives. I was working pretty late trying to find out whether or not the Senate had passed it because it was caught up with some other legislation ahead of it on the calendar. And just before I left to go to the NARA reception, I called the cloakroom in the Senate, and was told, \"Yes, it's happening momentarily.\" So I went down to the Archives, went in, walked up to Don Wilson, the Archivist, gave him the thumbs up and said, \"It's passed.\" And so he stopped the conversations, called everybody's attention in the Rotunda of the Archives and announced that the Senate had passed the bill, and everybody cheered. And it was just a great moment. Except, Senator Dole [Senate Majority Leader] closed the Senate before the legislation passed that night because of the length of time to debate the other things going on. So I had given Dr. Wilson bad information. The Senate passed it the next day or the next legislative day. So, in effect, it was a wonderful opportunity to have provided bad information, because everybody who would have wanted to be in a room to celebrate together was there when they got the word. But it was bad intel. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "It was just a little early." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "So that was also a lesson to me to not pass on news that I didn't know 100 percent sure was true." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. That's a great story. [LAUGHS] So yeah, you do have that unique perspective then of the before and after of NARA's independence from GSA. As part of maybe learning about NARA's role and their mission, did that have any impact on you wanting to then come to the National Archives, or how did that come about?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "I always, even when I was a young kid, loved Presidential history. When I made the decision to leave the Senator's office, I was looking for a job situation that would be more amenable to my marriage and family life, and also, I was hoping to move into the upper echelons of the bureaucracy. And so I went through a very structured exercise, actually, about who I was, what my gifts were, what my interests were. And I remember landing on my ideal job being the Director of the Nixon Library, not because I was necessarily a huge fan of Nixon, but because I'd been very aware of his administration in my college years and his papers were held by the Office of Presidential Libraries within the National Archives in Washington, DC. And it's just interesting that I came up with that as my ideal job and, although that position wasn't open at the time, I ended up at the National Archives, and for a period of time at the Office of Presidential Libraries. So NARA was always a place that had some interest for me." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. And then do you think having worked on the other side, you know, helping the Senator and being a part of that process there when they became independent, do you think that helped you when you did start with the National Archives, that you had a little bit of background on them?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "At the time of independence in 1985, I had no thought of going to NARA. But, yes, absolutely. I would encourage most staffers on the [Capitol] Hill who are going to have a tenure as long as mine to take a stint in the bureaucracy and then go back to the Hill. The Hill is populated by very young people, very smart people, very ambitious people, and very gifted. But they're young, and they lack a lot of experience. Now, some of them are naturally intuitive about a lot of things related to governing, but I really did not have a good understanding of the inner workings of the bureaucracy, particularly how hierarchical it is, and how you had to respect that kind of hierarchy or learn how to work within it, because the Hill, in contrast, is a very flat organization, at least inside Member’s offices. In a Senator’s office, we were working for a single person. We had a mission. Like I said, people were young. You didn't have to have been there a long time really to be rubbing shoulders with very senior and seasoned people, including senior federal bureaucrats. One thing that I think I personally didn't appreciate is the immensity of the power I was wielding when I was a Senate staffer. I had no understanding of—I did at one level, but at another level I didn’t understand the waves that are created within the bureaucracy when a member of Congress or somebody from their staff calls an agency. And, you know, that's like stepping into a China shop in a very literal sense. And you can break China very easily. I had no sense of that. On the other hand, I don't think I had adequate respect for how nimble and powerful and skilled many senior executives are. Most of them have had to claw their way to the top. You know, the federal bureaucracy is very big. The organizations are very big, and people don't reach the top without working pretty hard at it. I had come to my position pretty easily. I'd gone from a college student into this role and, well, I think my work justified my existence there. I did a good job. But I didn't have to go through that kind of battle to get my position. So you have to respect that, and it's easy not to rise to the top in the Executive branch. It was easy for me, I think, to mistakenly apply what was true on the Hill to the bureaucracy at the National Archives where it's not. Another thing about the National Archives, in specific, is that it's a very small organization by federal government standards, but it's the top of the food chain for the archival profession. Whereas engineers can get jobs in lots of other places, archivists can't. And so if you're at the top rung of the National Archives, you're at the top of your profession. And there is—again, that needs to be respected—but there's also the potential for an arrogant attitude among leaders, and a \"We are the chief priests, and no one understands what we understand\" attitude that, I think, hindered, at least when I was there, a lot of growth and opportunities that the Archives could have had. So when I came into the Archives, what I didn't realize is how suspicious people were of me—a political person coming in at the very top of the agency, you know, having my office on \"mahogany row.\" And while I knew I would have to prove myself, I didn't appreciate how negatively I was probably perceived from the get-go. And so that influenced my experience. Also at the time, the Deputy Archivist was Claudine Weir, a very, very competent person, but a very powerful person to whom the Archivist, at the time, Don Wilson, really had handed over most of the day-to-day internal agency operations, while he was trying to build outside support for the agency. He was creating a foundation for the National Archives. He was working the Hill. But he kind of let Claudine do what she needed to do. And she was a creature of this process of moving up the chain. And she was a pretty tough administrator. So here I was working out of Dr. Wilson's office, and I just assumed that there would be a greater respect for him and his office than there was, because people were loyal to Claudine. They were not necessarily loyal to the Archivist. And if he had forced his authority more significantly, that would have been different. But since they realized he had allowed her to, you know, pretty much run the internal organization, they weren't going to be damaged by—that she was the one from whom they needed support. So all those dynamics I learned, after the fact, and probably learned too late to be as effective as I might have been. The resource, I think, that the Archives really failed to utilize of mine was the extent of my knowledge of Congress. And they could have put that to use, but I understand they could be suspicious of me. What was I going to do with that? You know, was I going to manipulate my way into something threatening to others? But honestly, personally, I was motivated to get to know the organization really well. So what I did was start traveling through every office in the National Archives in the Washington, DC, area, just going downstairs and upstairs, inside and outside the main Archives building, meeting secretaries, meeting people, you know. People would say, \"I've never seen anybody from 'mahogany row' out here.” And they, too, I think, were pretty suspicious initially. But over time, I think, I built a lot of good feelings for myself at the working level. Ironically, that only increased the suspicion of me at the managerial level, because you know, what was I up to?—and I get it now. At the time, I thought, what could be bad about a senior manager walking through an office? But if the executive assistant to the Archivist walks into your office unannounced and is walking around talking to your people, that's incredibly disruptive. They would have to 100 percent trust me for that to be useful. And, I think, they could have trusted me, but they didn't know that. And then" }, { "speaker": "Dr. Wilson did not support the effort", "text": "He got some flak for letting me do that. So he pulled me back from doing that kind of thing. And, I think, he lost a lot of the benefit of the eyes and ears that could have been put to good use." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. Yeah. With you going around meeting everyone and then, like you said, just your knowledge of Congress and how things work over there, that could have been put to better use, it sounds like. [It’s] unfortunate. So when you came to the National Archives, it sounds like this is still very much a transition period for the Archives being an independent agency. Is that pretty accurate?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "I would say that transition was pretty much completed. What I lived through was the transition from—I don't know quite how to say it. You might call it analog to digital, but it's bigger than that. It's from a more hierarchical, bureaucratic operation to one where, at least on paper, there's a greater attention to the workforce. And they have a greater voice in operations, but not as efficient, in some ways. So the processes are not as professional. That's what I would like to say. They're not as professionally performed, but they are far more efficient because of the digital and technology applications that we have access to. So, we no longer have secretaries, you know, but we don't have very well-written memos either lots of times [LAUGHS], and recordkeeping is problematic and not necessarily because people are worse at it, but just because we were in this transition of where work is done and who does it. So I would say _that_ was the bigger transition that I observed. It was not being part of the independence, but more of this change that was the change of the century, between the 20th and 21st century." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So when you came to the National Archives, what was your first position?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "I was Executive Assistant to the Archivist, which is a staff role. And all my career—this is pretty important, because I think I have a good fix on it and maybe other people who are in staff roles don't. And this comes out of my growing up in the [Senator] Hatfield office. I always understood that I did not have power in and of my own, or authority in and of my own position. I was always using borrowed authority. So I would pick up the phone and say, \"This is Jim from the Archivist’s office.\" \"This is Jim calling on behalf of the Director of the Federal Register.\" \"This is Jim from Senator Hatfield's office.\" And so staff extends their principal's ability to hear, to see, to speak, to touch, to walk, to talk. But it's always the principal for whom you're working and whose authority you’re using. That applies not only for a staff person, but for a staff office. And I think we should always bear that in mind how it is different from the operating offices where, even in the Office of the Federal Register, the Director of Publications has authority in the position to do certain things. Any position can have a staff clustered around the person holding the position. But that staff needs to always remember that they are using borrowed power, not their own. But because staff are so closely, intimately sometimes, in daily contact with the person holding the position of power, and sort of gets to know instinctively that person's personality and their likes and dislikes, they can speak without, maybe, being specifically authorized, but nevertheless doing things that the principal would agree to. But then you can sort of step over into misbehaving by feeling like you have the authority to tell people what to do. And I see that has happened very much in NARA. I'm sure it's in every organization—but in NARA, there’s been the tendency of some of the staff offices to take control over the operational units in a way that they don't support the offices. They put onus and burdens on them—even though they are providing some support, they're more frequently demanding things from the operations offices. So I think any healthy organization needs to get that right. And I think that's been a consistent problem at NARA." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So when you were the executive assistant, what were your responsibilities? What did your day to day look like?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "So, we're still talking about the Archivist, or at the Office of the Federal Register?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "For the Archivist. Yeah. For the Archivist." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "I wrote things for him. I reviewed things for him. I wrote speeches. He gave me a couple of special assignments: one was to study the National Historical Publications and Records Commission [NHPRC] to do an efficiency study on its operations, and to produce a report that he used to make some changes in the NHPRC. He also assigned me the project of exploring and implementing TQM, Total Quality Management, principles in NARA. TQM is sometimes called the ‘Japanese Way’ or the ‘Deming Way.’ It was how the Japanese auto industry grew up out of the ashes of World War II. And it's a very well-respected methodology and way of thinking about management. Japanese cars were selling well, and GM [General Motors] was losing" }, { "speaker": "market share. So people were asking", "text": "\"What is their secret?\" And they'd hear the word TQM. So it was becoming a buzzword that was beginning to filter into the government, as many trends do in the government. My work on TQM was a casualty of the Archivist/Deputy Archivist relationship dynamic. Because it was an internal NARA initiative but initiated without the buy-in of the Deputy Archivist, it had no support or future. But also, what was developing at the very same time—and it's a little related, but not entirely— was strategic planning in the federal government. So it may be hard to believe, but that was a novel concept in the early '90s. And, as it often is in administrative and management things, the Defense Department had really been one of the innovators of this. So I remember that a retired admiral came and gave a presentation that really knocked the socks off a bunch of NARA leaders. And so NARA then, you know, was going to do strategic planning. And then during the Clinton administration and under Al Gore's \"Reinventing Government\" initiative that became a mandate—strategic planning. And Congress eventually passed legislation that required it. But the strategic planning sort of washed over TQM, and that assignment, like a number of assignments I was given, sort of dwindled away. And I think it was Dr. Wilson's honest effort to make good change, but those internal changes needed to be managed by his deputy archivist, because that's the person to whom he had given the authority. And I was not in a line position, so I was just this outlier. And I'm not saying it was malicious. I'm just saying it was, I think, that they didn't really know how to utilize me. And also, NARA was a very closed organization. I mean, the leaders had grown up with each other. Outsiders often would say, \"It took me 20 years to feel accepted ... I'm still a new person, new to the Archives or an outsider.\" And I don't—it's probably much less than it was back then. But I experienced a number of those kinds of things. Another responsibility I had was to write a “Managers Monthly” newsletter. So I would collect information from all the managers and then produce a monthly newsletter, which was, I think, pretty valuable, and especially out in the field where there was a sense of disconnect. So those are the kinds of things I did for him." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you know if they still create that Managers Monthly?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "No. No." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "They don't?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Huh. I wonder why. That would just keep them abreast of things that are going on or share best practices or stories or ..." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Well, I think today, I don't—so I'm two years away from NARA. I don't know whether the ICN [Internal Communications Network] is still there, but there are so many new social media- based or computer-based ways to communicate. Back in the day, I mean, just think about it. There was no email. I mean, there was _no_ email. So the only communication was to pick up the phone, which you're not going to do lightly with senior leaders—you know, a Director might talk to the Archivist, but the Archivist is not going to talk to lots of those reporting to him frequently—I mean, he just doesn't have the bandwidth to do that—or send out memos, you know, paper communications and all the limitations of that. So the Manager’s Monthly was useful in its day. And, I think, newsletters are still valuable, but it would be a different form today." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. Yeah, we do have a lot of different newsletter-type communications that go out. You're right. But yeah, just that format has changed over time." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "And maybe it's a point to say this—and here I might be showing my generational, whatever, stuck-in-the-mud-ness—but to me, the plethora of those communications diminishes the force of them. There's so much information in so many formats. And it seems to me, it would be smart to somehow minimize those or give authority to some and not to other areas. But my experience, too, is that younger people are used to that kind of plethora of inputs and can handle it maybe better and understand how to sift through it. But maybe it's a negative. I don't know." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, I can definitely see, like, you're just inundated with information nowadays, right? So it's either you shut down and you just don't read it anymore or, I guess, maybe you learn to be more selective in where you spend your time, right? Yeah. Okay. So in your position as executive assistant to the Archivist, you were there from when? 1991 to about October of '94? Is that what you said?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yes, I held that title officially until October 1993. Well, actually I was detailed to the Office of Public Affairs in October 1993, and so I effectively no longer served as Executive Assistant to the Boss, even though my title remained that for two years, I guess." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So I believe that the Archives II facility in College Park opened in 1994. Do you recall any of the planning and decisions and things surrounding the opening of that facility?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yes. So, the election of Bill Clinton was an earthquake event in the Archives. I don't know whether it was his election that kind of created an opening for—there was some dissatisfaction with Don Wilson as Archivist. I honestly don't know all the details. I don't know if it was purely partisan, or if it had to do with other things. And there were some problems going on, internally, with the Archives that I don't think were his fault. There were some people that were misbehaving. Anyways, in that mix of soup that was happening, some folks on the Hill, I would say, took advantage of the opportunity to make changes they wanted to make. One of which was, I think, to kind of behead the leadership of the Archives. And I don't know who all the targets were—it was Don Wilson, but it may have been Claudine and some others that were there. I don't either remember, or I may not be privy to all of that. But clearly, there was stuff going on. When President Clinton was elected, meaning the transition from Republican administration to Democrat administration, and, I think, also a new majority on the Hill, then this was an opportunity for big change. And so, interestingly, the Deputy Archivist at the time was Ray Mosley, who was ultimately my boss at the Office of the Federal Register for about 15 years. But when Don Wilson left, instead of Ray being named Acting Archivist, Trudy Peterson, who was the Assistant Archivist for the National Archives—the archivist who was over the main body of historical records—was named Deputy Archivist and, therefore, Acting Archivist. And it's my understanding or belief, she was closely connected with certain parts of the Clinton administration. And that's not a negative thing. That's just, you know, any good bureaucrat would develop their political ties. That's necessary to operate well. But I think also, Trudy was very ambitious, hopeful of being named the Archivist of the United States. She would have been the first woman to that position. She was a strong leader and gifted. But ultimately— Trudy kind of opened the door, I would say, to the Clinton administration bringing political appointees in, which was a new thing to the Archives we'd never had. For most agencies in a transition, you've got a political person coming in during transition, and then you get all your political appointees. Well, NARA doesn't have political appointees, or didn't up until that point. And we got at least four over a period of two years. And some of them had significant positions in the Clinton campaign and were very rabid Clinton supporters. And again, I'm not saying that negatively. I'm just saying, you know, they were all in on the Clinton agenda. And they were young, most of them, or not experienced in government either. So they were like me in that inexperience of the bureaucracy. But they were unlike me in that they had really strong political ties. One of them moved into my office, and the gentleman and I who had been in that office, were moved downstairs into the Public Affairs office space, which was a very symbolic and real diminishment of our stature and authority, which is okay. But without changing—you know, I still carried that title. And for a while, I thought, this was going to be good. I was ready to serve Trudy. But it became very clear that she had identified me and Don Neal, who was the Director of External Affairs, as people she didn't want assisting her. And so both of us, literally, went downstairs and, eventually, the position of head of the public affairs office was assigned to another political appointee, Shirley—I'm forgetting her last name right off hand. That office already had a press officer, Susan Cooper, who had been there a long time and knew the agency thoroughly. So Shirley was kind of layered on top. And Shirley was a force. She wasn't going to be pushed around. And yet, I don't think she ultimately was very effective. She, too, was a bit of a bull in a China shop, as it affected NARA. And I think, ultimately, there was a sense among the career staff that “this, too, will pass.” I mean, people began to realize there was a lot of noise at the front end and, you know, there had to be kowtowing to it and appreciate it. And they did some things that were valuable. But most bureaucrats know they can outlast the political appointees. And I think there was a sense of that happening. In the Public Affairs Office I had less to do, but I retained the editorship of the Manager’s Monthly. We also put out the Annual Report, which at the time was a thick booklet reporting on the activities of each subunit of the National Archives. That, like many other sacrosanct parts of the agency’s life, were dramatically transformed or eliminated as a result of the increasing availability of technology within the agency. But a highlight of my time in the Office of Public Affairs was planning the dedication of the Archives II building in College Park, Maryland. We planned, I think, a really spectacular event. That's one of the pleasures of my life. And yet, it was bittersweet, because I don't think that was appreciated. And it sort of capped for me kind of a period of disappointment, of where I was going to be at." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So that was done when you were kind of detailed to the Office of Public Affairs?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yes, and that occurred for about a year. And then I was detailed over to the Office of the Federal Register. Actually, I was detailed twice. That office had some—I forget. Someone had left and so I was sent over to help. But I think honestly, I was a big whale that they didn’t know what to do with! I mean, being a GS-15, they had to do something with me. And so this was where they found a place for me. And I went over to OFR [Office of the Federal Register] and I, literally, moved from unit to unit to learn about the entire office. There were, I think, six units at the time, and I spent about a month in each unit, and I loved the work they were doing, and I really respected it. It felt like a place where all this noise that I'd been living with and around for two or three years was just not important. And at the end of the day, every workday, the Office of the Federal Register has to produce a book called the _Federal Register_ . And it's a 150-page newspaper-style book. And having to get that done at the end of every day cuts through a lot of the nonsense because people there understand that when they're being told that someone needs something, they realize that they need it now, that's it's real. And so I have a lot of respect for those folks. They're really, really good. But they also are in an environment where they—you know, not a lot of people in the federal government see the product of their work every single day. And they produce not only the _Federal Register_ , but they produce the Code of Federal Regulations and Presidential Papers volumes. So there were really tangible things that could be done, and it was a breath of fresh air to get into an environment where we were really producing something." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And in between there, you said though, you were at the Presidential Libraries, or you were ..." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yeah. So this first time of service at the OFR was a detail, and I was still—I mean, there weren't any positions open at the Office of the Federal Register. It was a great opportunity to learn about it, and I think I helped them. But you know, what was the long-term play? And at that time, the Office of Presidential Libraries was headed by an Acting Director, Dick Jacobs, a long-time NARA employee, who had held various roles at senior levels. The Deputy Archivist for Presidential Libraries, Pat Borders, a long-time deputy, retired during that time. And I looked back to the effort I had made to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up [LAUGHS], after I left Senator Hatfield’s office, and remembered it was to head up a Presidential Library. I just thought, what a wonderful place to land, so I applied for the Deputy position. And there was, actually, some interesting background to my being selected for that post. I've learned later that—and this is how I came to understand how I had been viewed in the agency—some people involved in that selection said, \"I didn't realize how qualified you were,” that, you know, I was the best candidate for that role. I was really well-suited by my experience, for being a Deputy Archivist in the Office of Presidential Libraries. So, I landed in a job I loved. And I was there for six months. And then, on a Friday [LAUGHS], I was called to the Archivist's office and told by him: \"The Office of the Federal Register has a need for somebody to help them. And so we're going to detail you over to the Office of the Federal Register.\" And I said, \"When?\" They said, \"Well, Monday.\"" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Oh my gosh." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "So clearly, there's a backstory, right? And, clearly, this was not a benign thing. I was being moved out. Honestly, I have some understanding, but I don't fully understand what went on. I think I crossed wires, crossed swords with the Director of the George H. W. Bush Library that was being organized at the time. There was a woman in the Office of Presidential Libraries who had a very, very strong political network with all the Presidential Libraries—and realize, Presidential Libraries are a kind of 500-pound gorilla in the room that is the National Archives, because the people that support those Presidential Libraries are people who have been in the senior positions in the White House. So even though, on paper, it's a subordinate organization within NARA, it's an outsized, powerfully outsized, organization. One Director had been communicating in backchannels with the woman in the central office. And I simply, from my perspective, told him that I wanted him to communicate through me or, at least, to be sharing the information he was sharing with her. That's the only thing that I know for sure. I know that irritated him. I don't know if that led to him getting people to have me moved, but I believe it was. Of course, maybe I wasn't doing a good job. I mean, I thought I was. I think I was. I was the new kid on the block in the Office of Presidential Libraries. But that was a very sad event for me, because I really thought I had landed, finally, in a position where I was happy and where I could make a difference. But I believe in God's control over things, and that's not what it was to be, but it was a hard pill to swallow." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Yeah, especially since you mentioned at some point wanting to become a Director of the Nixon Library. And so that was kind of a gateway into being able to do that. And so, yeah, I don't know what happened there. Okay. So then you said from there, you went over to the Office of the Federal Register." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "[TAKES A PHONE CALL] Sorry." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's okay. So when you did go over to the Office of the Federal Register, what was your position there?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Well, it was a detail for two months. And then I got paperwork that created me as the Special Assistant to the Director. So, once again, I'm in that supporting role with a very poorly defined job description, and the kind of position that not everybody is sure they understand, and not one that had been there before. And this is not a history about me. It's my history at NARA. But I will say, I think one of the learnings I've had about myself is that my gift is supporting someone in a leadership position. I get how to do that well, I guess I'd say. And so that's well-suited for me, whereas being in the top job maybe is not my gift. There are a lot of special talents a person needs for that. And maybe I would have liked to have held that role but, probably, I wouldn't have been as good in it. And the fact that I was not able to hold on to the position in the Office of Presidential Libraries—you know, another person with a little more political ... little \"p\" skills [USES AIR QUOTES] maybe could have done it. So a person in my position in something like this, again, I had to—it was really important for me to prove to the office that I'm not a threat, particularly to the senior managers there. Again, it's a very small organization, so as you climb the ladder, the positions get much, much more competitive and, so again, my M.O. [modus operandi] has been to just go out and get to know the people and, you know, get to understand their jobs so that when I'm communicating with the boss, I'm sharing information they may not know, and I'm sharing accurate information. I'm not just making judgments off the top of my head. And when I'm responsible for telling people what to do, passing on directions from the leader, that I get how it impacts them and can maybe encourage us not to make policy decisions that are not smart. And you can only do that by really understanding the organization at the street level. And so that's what I did. And that's, I think, how I built cred [credibility] with the organization and with the staff. You know, not everybody likes you. And my job isn't to be liked, but it is at one level to be liked in the sense that that helps the Director. If they feel like a friend, if they feel like they can share with me, and I'm not going to immediately turn around and say word for word to the Director what I was told, but maybe say, \"Hey, there might be some problems going on in that particular office or with that manager.\" And again, I'm not trying to toot my horn. I'm just saying that the fact that I stayed in that role that long, I think, is an indication that it was a necessary role in the organization, and that I was probably well-placed to be doing it." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, it sounds like by making those connections, you were helping the Director and the program itself make better, more-informed decisions. So that would be very vital, I would think." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Hopefully." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, so then you were at the Office of the Federal Register for ... how long was it? 26 years or so?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "25 years." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "25 years. Okay. So kind of taking a step back for a minute, can you just give a very brief overview of what the Office of the Federal Register does, because I feel like it's very misunderstood sometimes. And so, maybe future people reading this transcript will get a better idea of what it is that they do." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "That's a great question. I wish the office had been called the Office of the Code of Federal Regulations. I think that would solve a lot of the mystery. So the Code of Federal Regulations contains all the regulations that federal agencies issue to implement the laws that Congress passes. So our government is founded on \"We the People,\" who agreed to a constitution, and we separated our powers. And one of the powers is to legislate. We gave that power to Congress. Congress passes laws. We gave the power to execute the laws to the executive branch. And in executing the laws, some of those agencies are given the authority to write rules, which actually have the force and effect of law. So if you don't pay your taxes under IRS [Internal Revenue Service] rules, you're going to go to jail, right? If you violate EPA's [Environmental Protection Agency] environmental regulations, you can be fined or go to jail. So rules and regulations (those words have the same meaning) have the force and effect of law, but they're written within the executive agency. And by 1935, the federal government was growing in size, and a lot of these regulatory agencies formed to combat the effects of the Depression were starting to issue regulations in areas of our economy and society in which the U.S. Government had never acted before. They had regulated railroads for a while already, and there was the Sherman Antitrust Act. But a lot of the newer New Deal agencies were doing a different kind of regulating. And there grew to be a real concern that this was extra-legal, perhaps even unconstitutional. How is it that an executive agency was writing what was, in effect, a law? And another concern was that regulation-writing was being done in the dark. Now in the legislative process we can go to the Capitol. We can watch what goes on in Congress. We can write our congressmen. But when a bureaucrat in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the AAA, was writing rules affecting farmers, who elected that person? And can I call that person on the phone? Can I write that person a letter? What obligation do they have to the citizenry? And also, some of those regulations were actually being written almost in the dark. So the regulated population didn't even know what they were, but were being called on the carpet for violations of regulations that were unknown to them. The net result of this was that Congress passed the Federal Register Act, which declared that henceforth, and first of all, we're going to collect all the regulations in one place, the Office of the Federal Register, then (as a result of an amendment to the act two years later) we’re going to codify all those regulations in a new series, the Code of Federal Regulations. That's why I think it would have been better to call the office the Code of Federal Regulations Office. Second, the act declared that from now on, before any agency issues a regulation that takes force, it must be published publicly in a new government publication, the _Federal Register_ , so that citizens can have access to it. And then in 1948, that law was further amended by the Administrative Procedure Act that said, \"Not only do you have to publicize those rules, but the process by which they're going to be created has to include notice to the public and an opportunity for the public to provide comments on proposed rules.\" So now, when the EPA issues a regulation, they have to first issue it as a proposed rule, publish it in the _Federal_ _Register_ , give a period of time for the public to comment, and then address those comments when publishing the final regulation with the date it will take effect. And when the final regulation is published, it is codified in the Code of Federal Regulations. There are so many regulations issued by agencies that the _Federal Register_ is published every single day of the week. And you can go to the _Federal Register_ and look at what regulations are being proposed and what regulations are being finalized. The Code of Federal Regulations now consists of about 280 volumes of regulations—a huge volume of regulations, and we're constantly publishing those. That's the primary duty of the [Office of the] Federal Register. We had some additional duties: publishing papers of the President and publishing the laws that Congress passed, actually binding them in the Statutes at Large, which is the compilation of all U.S. laws. But the primary duty is that related to federal regulations." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. And so then what were you doing within that office?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "So the office is headed by the Director of the Federal Register, which is a statutory position. The Office of the Federal Register's Administrative Committee—it's kind of an unusual animal—consists of the Archivist of the United States, a representative of the Department of Justice, and what used to be the Public Printer, now the Director of the Government Publishing Office. It used to be the Government Printing Office or GPO. So all through its history, the Office of the Federal Register has had this very tight partnership with the Government Printing Office, originally to print. We would gather all this information, and then every day, literally, a human being would walk this paper over to the Government Printing Office, and they would typeset it and print the _Federal Register_ . And then they also printed the Code of Federal Regulations. One of the interesting parts of the OFR is that, historically, it had a greater sense of connection to GPO than it did to NARA. NARA supplied its administrative support, handled personnel matters, was our pay master, and wrote the rules by which we would operate internally. But in terms of the policy of the Federal Register, that was not NARA's job, except for the Archivist who was one of three people who—and this continues today—to be the actual policy-making authorities. The Director has a pretty significant role, as well. He's also the Secretary of that administrative body. So the bottom line is, he is the Director of this Federal Register operation or process—system. As his Executive Assistant, I was doing all sorts of things on his behalf. I did a lot of writing. Every Director I've worked with has had a senior team, usually three or four people. And I always was a member of that team and sat in on usually weekly meetings. So we were planning. We were executing. There were a number of times when I was called on to act as one of the unit chiefs when we had a vacancy. I served as the Acting Director briefly during one absence of a Director. I also had a really interesting role, which at first seemed insignificant, but—which turned out to be very interesting—related to the OFR’s involvement in the classified activities of the government. This involvement wasn’t because we publish any classified material—we don’t—but because back in the era of the nuclear threat, Cold War, if there was going to be a disaster, then there was the need to gather federal agencies to a location where they could continue government operations. And obviously, that structure of operations was a classified activity. That took on a whole new meaning after 9/11. So, I can share a little bit of that later, perhaps." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Yeah. So was that when you were Acting Director or ...?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yes, I was the person who was designated as the “continuity of government” person from the OFR. and I had a top secret clearance and access to classified materials and spaces." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Okay. # I" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": ". Yeah. But I handled our staffing, and matters like performance planning, reporting, budget, accounting, requisitions. Another thing that I think would be significant to touch on is my role as project manager for what became eDOCS, our electronic editing and publishing system. So where I really experienced the transition of analog to digital was at the Office of the Federal Register. I lived that change and was pretty deeply involved in that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So what did that entail?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "So when I got to the Office, there was one automated process, and it was basically the equivalent of you still doing all your work on paper, but keeping track of it in a tracking system. So we had a computer that was doing tracking of the paper flow, but the paper was flowing absolutely 100 percent manually and as paper. People were using stampers to stamp documents, and different colored pens to do editing and the like. By the time I left, we were receiving documents through an online portal. We were publishing 100 percent electronically with no paper and publishing it online, although we still have to, by law, publish a paper-bound volume. But we went from 25,000 subscriptions to that book, to less than 1,500 by the time I left. And those 1,500 were only libraries. Nobody was getting the _Federal Register_ , except online. And so now, federalregister.gov is the go-to place. Also, the Code of Federal Regulations process, which literally used to be cut and paste—cut out the language from the _Federal_ _Register_ , paste it on pages, send it over to GPO, where it would be typeset to create the books—that codification and publishing process is 100 percent digital. The regulatory language out of the _Federal Register_ was physically transposed into the Code of Federal Regulations when I got to the OFR. By the time I left, the office was absolutely 100 percent doing electronic editing of those books. And all of those books are now online, those 286 books. And they're not only online as static volumes, but they are changed daily. So every change that happens in them, because rules become effective each day of the week, is available. And you can go back and see what the status of a regulation was on some date in the past. It’s truly a Herculean effort, an unsung effort, a critically important effort. It’s one that anybody who's involved in the regulatory processes of the government, and people in the legal profession, understand the significance of it." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "It just seems so much more efficient and handier to be able to go online to view all of this." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "And the staffing went from 120 people to about 50 now, and we're doing double, maybe even triple the amount of work in terms of pages published—tripled the workload and cut the staffing by more than 50 percent. It's a living example of the benefits of technology. But we fought hard for a lot of those wins, both in bureaucratic terms and in figuring out the technological solutions. In my experience, everybody outside the process underestimated how complex what we do is. I've explained it to you. Maybe you feel like you understand it. I hope you do. But the twists and turns that are involved in that are really significant. And it takes place in a highly regulated environment—think of a bank that is changing its processes or a retail business that's deciding to upgrade. You know, they do it for efficiency purposes. What if the law constrained them in many ways as to what they could do. So not only are you building a new system, but it has to also comport to a whole host of laws. And that's what we had. We had our struggles with contractors and others in that process." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That sounds like a very significant undertaking. Were there any lessons learned once you implemented this?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Oh, boy. You know, I think there's a swing from one extreme to another in all of this. Let me give you one example. Organizations can be integrated horizontally, or they can be integrated vertically. And both are good solutions, but both have their downsides. So inevitably, in a horizontally organized organization, somebody is going to come along at one point and say, \"The real problem in this organization is that we're not linked vertically.\" So they'll go through a reorganization effort, and now you've got a vertical organization. And that works well, and it fixes the problems associated with horizontal integration. But eventually, the problems with the vertical organization will be identified, because you don't have the horizontal problems anymore. And then the brilliant person will come along and say, \"What we really need is greater horizontal integration and less vertical.\" And so it'll go back. So it's not that one's wrong. It's just that both have their limitations, and the operations of it within the federal government was like that. So let’s reflect upon how technology came into our office lives. It came in with a computer on somebody's desk or a fancy electric typewriter or whatever. And who became the experts dealing with that technology? Well, the people were kind of geeky, you know, who liked that stuff. At the National Archives they were archivists who had this skill set, or in other agencies they were people who were specialists in a particular occupation, but they also had this extra interest or talent, right? So what was really good about that model is that those people understood their organizations intimately, so they would not make mistakes in designing technical solutions, because they would remember, \"Oh, on Wednesdays, we have to take a left. So I've got to build in that left turn on Wednesdays into this program.\" Whereas, the contractor knew nothing about it, and would just say, \"Oh, here's a one-solution-fits-all\" or was dependent upon subject matter experts not forgetting to include a particular need when defining requirements. But the problem with homegrown techies is they are eventually out of their depth. And as a computer science guru, you needed people who had a lot more smarts about what was available, [who] had their eyes out into the field, because the in-house techies were operating sort of on the basis of, \"Oh, hey, I read in _Time_ magazine, that there's this new computer program; I wonder if we could use it?\" Well, that's not a very good way to develop a system. So now we began to hire people who were computer specialists. But the loss there is, like I just said, they didn't have the subject matter expertise. So now you have to have someone outside the agency come into it and interview the expert in the agency about what they do. Then that person goes to the programmer and tries to repeat everything. The programmer designs something, brings it back through that person to the group, and they sit down and go, \"Well, you didn't make it go left on Wednesdays.\" And they acquire disdain for the programmers and the program being developed. The sharing-translating-implementing-reviewing process goes back and forth. And so it's just such a laborious, slow process. I often thought we should temporarily backfill some of our subject matter experts, put them full-time on the job of communicating directly with the programmers, and then they could get it right earlier. And then when they roll out the thing, the subject matter experts would resume their jobs, because it was easier to teach people the job to do for three months than it was to teach this person whose last job was designing an accounting system, and now they're at the Federal Register trying to design a publishing system. So in a perfect world, that would have been my solution. And what happened then—and I think this happened all throughout the government in different time frames—agencies began to say, \"Oh my goodness. In Office A, they've purchased IBM computers. In Office B, they've purchased Apple computers. In Office C, they've purchased Comcast computers. And these systems don’t talk to each other, and we have to support all three. It's crazy—and no way to run a railroad. So we're going to build an office on top of all this—Office of Chief Information Officers [OCIOs]—who will now manage all this. And they’ll scoop up responsibility for operating all these systems. Well, first, we're going to have a single platform. Everybody's going to use the same machines. Again, it's a necessary thing, but it's how you do it, right? Eventually, Congress mandated CIO offices, and they have become very powerful offices. But remember, they are staff offices, not operations offices, and remember when I talked earlier about staff positions that should learn to support rather than direct? CIO offices are, to me, some of the worst offenders. They are, in my experience, very cocky, and some are very poorly informed. Clearly, I’m giving you my experience at NARA. They don't have the best people, although sometimes they have very good people. And they're very \"directive-oriented\" with an attitude of, \"You're working for us. You have to do this and that.\" Admittedly, they've got some legal structures they have to abide by, reporting and similar requirements, including all the procurement rules. I get that. But that's something you have to learn how to do well. That's your occupation. That's your calling. You can't just say, \"Because it's hard, I'm just going to make you work for me.\" And I think that happened at NARA in a really bad way. The development of the Electronic Records Archive (ERA) was really a poster child example of things not being organized well. So I don't know whether I'm answering your question. But I’m laying the foundation for explaining that in some ways we, at the OFR, were fortunate in the development of our electronic systems. The OFR’s partner agency, the GPO is basically a factory, a printing factory. So any systems being developed had to work “on-the-ground” in an environment in which those processes were tested again and again, every time something was printed. When they brought technology in, at the end of the day, you look at a printed page—Does it look right or not? Is the system printing right or not? So it was very easy to, well not easy, but the process of bringing that in was validated by ground-truth on a daily basis. And they were a very big organization, with a lot of resources whose electronic material was being funded by the income from the _Federal_ _Register_ “page rate” paid by the publishing agencies. The agencies pay to publish in the _Federal_ _Register_ a page rate that goes into a pot of money, and that money then is being used to support the publication of the _Federal Register_ . We were not dependent upon appropriations or budget decisions within NARA to fund our development. We were kind of shielded from NARA's bureaucracy until, maybe, the last five years of my tenure, when NARA became much more aggressive about wanting to be in control of the eDOCS system. And that was a very dangerous thing, because eDOCS is the system that made the _Federal Register_ able to be published every day and to be put online every day. And it took some scary events, I think, for some of NARA's IT [information technology] people to appreciate that we weren't just fighting for our territory—it wasn't just a turf battle. We were fighting for good operations and the good of the people who need the _Federal Register_ and Code of Federal Regulations information." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, it sounds very complex, right? And you have to have the right people talking to the other right people, I guess." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That doesn't always happen, does it? No." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "No. I mean, that's life." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, that's true. Well, I would be remiss if I didn't bring up the year 2020 in terms of the last Presidential election that took place. We really started to see the OFR in the media more often, and I think, again, people didn't really understand what the Office did. But do you have any comments on that and the impact of what was going on at that time in terms of the certificates and things like that?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "So, obviously, I've not even touched on the fact that a very interesting responsibility the Office of the Federal Register is to be, basically, the administrative office for the Electoral College, which simply means that every four years when this Electoral College process happens, we are the office that receives the certificates and passes them on to the Congress, if Congress doesn't receive theirs directly. It's just very interesting, and we kind of look forward to it. It's a fun role. Every election, I would say, there have been some specious certificates, you know, usually just sent by some crazy person somewhere who literally has mental health issues and is sending in a certificate saying they've been elected President. We actually keep those certificates or have them vetted. But the real certificates are those that carry the seal of the appropriate official in the state, usually the secretary of state, sometimes the governor. And our legal counsel is the person who directs these operations under the director of the Federal Register. I actually was in transition during the 2020 election cycle. I left the office in January 2021, so I missed some of the action." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "I just would say, for most people, this Electoral College is an entirely new thing that they’ve never been aware of, even during election season. But for those of us involved in it, we completely understand and are familiar with this routine operation that had been going on from our office since the '50s. And before that, the State Department handled it. I mean, there's just no question in our minds about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of various certificates and how people have tried to manipulate it. And what I don't think we ever envisioned is that officials involved in the process would be perpetrators of a political attempt to do something based on partisan political reasons. So I guess I'm showing where I'm coming down on this. But I just, I don't think there's any possibility of misunderstanding the legal situation, the legitimacy of the process. And now I'm—I wasn't in the states where there were allegations of voter fraud so that, you know, I can't speak to that, but I just think the attempts to produce incorrect, false certificates is just so obvious. It's almost a no-brainer that thinking the system is broken has been able to be continued only by the repetition of lies. Just repeating something, if people are saying it so often, it's got to be true, you know? But there's no \"there\" there, from my perspective." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. So with all of this happening and swirling around the Office of the Federal Register, was there any change in maybe communicating to the public on what the role of the office actually is and that this is a routine process and, well, anything like that?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "If you go back to the Gore/Bush election in 2000, our legal counsel at the time sort of took on the title, Dean of the Electoral College. And he appeared on news broadcasts, and we were really aggressive about putting out information. We very much saw ourselves as an educational organization and, I think, wanted to be that. But the controversy was in the ballots, not in the validity of the states’ certificates of voting results. Our process was never called into question. That particular legal counsel had left the office by the next election, which was less controversial. And then our budget and staffing resources were diminished, and we just didn't have the staff to do more than just manage the paperwork. What we did do, though, prior to that election was really tighten up our internal processes and document them. And I’m thankful for that in light of what happened in 2020. We now had a very well-documented statement of what we would do and where materials would be kept and how they would be processed. So I think that was fortunate, because it could have been perceived that there was some manipulating we were doing or bias that we had, had that process not been written down beforehand. We didn't change the process, just documented it better." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "So I just don't think we had the capability within our office to do the kind of public relations/public education work on behalf of the Electoral College process—you've got to realize there are only a very few people involved in that. And it's not a heavy lift, but it's not like 400 people are available to go on _Meet the Press_ or design a media strategy. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. I was wondering if it was more about changing or better communicating what the role was and—yeah, not that it's going to change your mission or your policy per se. It's just communicating." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "And also, we can't take a position on whether the Electoral College should or [should] not exist. Right? We're agnostic. We are just saying, right now, it's a part of the Constitution. It's part of the law. And so we have to implement it. Because a lot of people were proposing to eliminate the Electoral College, we had to be careful that we didn't step into that policy debate and tried not to." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Yeah. Trying to stay nonpolitical, nonpartisan, non-everything, right?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Hey, I'm seeing I have one more minute left on the interview, but I was wondering if you would have just a quick chance to talk about ... You kind of mentioned the classified records earlier ... if you wanted to add anything about that?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "It might be useful to spend some more time later." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "And I need to really be careful how I speak about that, because it has classified aspects to it. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Sure. Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "I want to be careful." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Do you want me to set up another time for us to talk?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "That'd be fine, unless it's too much." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Unless it's too much? What do you mean?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Well, you were expecting an hour and a half, and if it turns into three hours, it may be more than you want [LAUGHS]. I'm not sure that what I have to share is all that significant, you know." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "No. [LAUGHS] It's more about trying not to take up too much of _your_ time. But if you're willing to set up another time, then I'm more than willing to do that. And so, how about I go ahead and stop the recording now, and then I can send you some possible dates and times that might work to continue the conversation?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Good. Sounds good. [END RECORDING PART ONE] [BEGIN RECORDING PART TWO - AUGUST 16, 2023]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Hi again. Thanks for participating in the oral history project. I'm here again with Jim Hemphill for part two. Today is August 16th, 2023. And I'm Stephanie Reynolds. First, I just want to recap what we covered in our last interview session, and you can correct me if I've got anything wrong, but I just wanted to do a quick recap. So last time we talked about your experiences as the executive assistant to Senator Hatfield, who was a big promoter of NARA gaining its independence. And then as you joined NARA, I believe after 17 years, then you joined NARA as the executive assistant to the Archivist of the United States Don Wilson and some acting positions as well. And then you were detailed to the Office of Public Affairs and then to the Office of Presidential Libraries, where you were the deputy archivist. And then you landed in the Office of the Federal Register, where you were for 25 years until your retirement. You were an Executive Assistant to the Director there, and you also helped with moving the _Federal Register_ online. So hopefully that was a good recap. Is there anything that you want to cycle back to or to clarify based on what I just said or anything else that you thought of, you know, in between today and your previous interview?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "No, I think that's a good summary. I'll stand by what I said." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. I want to make sure I got it right, too. Okay. Well, one of the things I wanted to ask about was the National Archives Foundation and the establishment of the Foundation ... what its purpose was, what your involvement in it was. Can you talk about that a little bit?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yes. So I would say in about the 1992 or '93 range, the Archivist Don Wilson was very interested in obtaining support for the National Archives in the private sector—the idea of public-private partnerships was growing in popularity at that time. And, of course, coming out of the Presidential Library world (Dr. Wilson had been the head of the Gerald Ford Presidential Library), he had experience and a lot of knowledge about those kinds of arrangements, because most of the libraries have a foundation that provides a lot of support, both financial but also what I call small \"P\" political support that is very useful to the libraries. Dr. Wilson felt that the National Archives itself could use that kind of supportive group. And he, of course, was well connected with some prominent people and historians and others, and with people with money. So early on in my tenure with him, this was one thing that he asked me to work on. We prepared a charter for the Foundation, and we reached out to potential charter members. There were several meetings with a variety of people early on exploring the willingness of these folks to chip in some money to go to their networks and look for additional resources which would support things like public programs, major exhibits, speakers, and to lobby on the [Capitol] Hill and explain at budget time why the Archives was a valuable investment. This Foundation continued to develop after Dr. Wilson left and was an important legacy of his tenure because the Foundation had made possible a number of exhibits and physical improvements to NARA facilities since it was established. Once John Carlin was appointed Archivist to succeed Wilson, I was no longer a part of that, but I thought it was an interesting piece to explain that really the initiative for that came from Don Wilson. And then, of course, the Foundation has been a significant part of the Archives’ public programming since then." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Interesting. So the model for the Foundation was based off of the Presidential Library Foundation?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yes. I would say that was a pretty good model. There were some differences, but it provided the understanding of what could happen and how it could be set up." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. What goes into creating a charter, the initial charter for the Foundation?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "I think I have a copy of it here. I'm not sure. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Really? [LAUGHS] Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "No, I can't put my hands on it real quickly. But it was an agreement about who would do what and the extent to which we would rely on private resources. And then, of course, any time you get into the governmental space, you're dealing with regulations governing the expenditure of funds. And one has to be very careful about giving people benefits or preferences not available generally based on their involvement. It could be as simple as bringing somebody in for a special tour. I don’t think that would cross any kinds of lines. But if you’re beginning to give significant gifts to people that use public resources, you know, you can't use appropriated funds for that. But sometimes there is a place for that kind of thing—promoting the organization or funding things—that either the Archives didn't have the money for, or would be prohibited from using appropriated funds for. So all of that needed to be laid out and clarified. And the charter laid out how often the group would meet, how it was organized, who would be in charge, you know, how they would relate to the Archivist, because it wasn't a statutory organization—an organization set up by law." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Was there a board then with it, too?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Well, initially that was the whole Foundation. But what was envisioned, and what developed was that the public was invited to become members, much like those who join “Friends of the National Zoo.”" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Interesting." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "You know, in more recent years, prominent individuals—a name I'll mention is Cokie Roberts, the journalist, was a huge supporter of the Archives, and she, behind the scenes, was on the Foundation. And there have been others on the Foundation. I think maybe the author, David McCullough was on the board. And then there have been some philanthropists on it." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Interesting. And you said that it was created around 1992 or so?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yeah, those foundational documents were in that time period." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "They're in the records of the Archives." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, I'll have to check that out. So that was mainly for, like, getting public support for exhibits and public programming, you said?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Okay, great. Another thing that I wanted to follow up on was you were providing weekly updates to some management officials, something like that? Could you go into more detail on that?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yeah. So it's kind of interesting that in all of my roles at the Archives, when I've supported the Archivist or the Director, at one point or other, they felt a need for some kind of regular communication, either within the whole organization or within the leadership sector of the organization. The first iteration of this was with Dr. Wilson, who created what was called the Managers Monthly. Remember, this was pre-email, pre-cell phones, and the way people got information within the organization was, you know, inter-office deliveries in reusable manila envelopes—we called them “holey Joes” because they had holes in them to see and not throw one away if it wasn’t empty. If you weren't on the distribution list to receive something, there could be lots of information you were missing. And if your supervisor didn't provide that information, there weren’t other means to get that easily. So communication was very different 30 years ago than, of course, it is now. And the Archivist felt that he wanted to make sure that his managers and supervisors—and that would be down to, I think, the GS-12 level—would get this newsletter weekly or monthly. Initially, it was a monthly newsletter, and it contained just brief paragraphs about important things that were going on, both up and down the organization. So the Archivist would be sharing information about what he was doing, including what he was going to be doing that month. And we would solicit information from the various units to share up the hierarchy telling what they were doing to be able to share it with the organization. And I got super great feedback on that as a really smart thing the Archivist had done, because there just was—if you ever did surveys, they would always talk about poor communication. Probably every survey in every organization, that's the number-one thing. But that was number one definitely in the expression of concerns. So this was a really useful thing that I thought was a smart, smart thing to do. It continued on through one of the Acting Archivists, and then after I left, it wasn't carried on. But when I got over to the Office of Federal Register, at some point—I believe it was when Ray Mosley became Director—he asked me to prepare a similar thing, which was called The OFR Directors Weekly, and it, again, was a gathering of information. And I guess the reason I'm—I mean, lots of organizations have newsletters, but I think my position as being at the table with the senior leadership when decisions were made and my kind of being out there on the floor with people, which happened both at the National Archives Building and at the Office of the Federal Register, gave the Weekly a little more credibility. And it was a little more substantive than many newsletters I've seen. So it wasn't just, you know “Jim had a birthday; Mary had a baby.” But it was also, primarily—I mean, we tried to cover some of those things, but it was pretty substantive. And we were really attempting to make everybody better equipped to do the things they needed to be doing. So I really enjoyed that role." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, you said that they stopped it after you left. I don't remember when they would have stopped doing that, if they would have done anything similar?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "There was an earlier version, now that you pressed me a little bit. Back, I'd say in the early '70s maybe, or sometime in that timeframe, there had been an organ like that that had gone out in the National Archives, and so that was one of the reasons people remembered that and liked that it was being renewed. I think that was part of the impetus that we—that used to be a really good means of communication that we don't have anymore. So I think it's like lots of electronic newsletters. I mean, it played its role during the time that it was in place. Whether or not it's been replaced by other useful things, I mean, certainly it has, but that was one specific kind of thing that served a good purpose. Oh, another point to make is that when staff were contributing news for the _Managers Monthly_ , it was really kind of one of the only times that the managers down to that level of supervisor, I think, were made to feel like they were part of what was going on. So much else was just top down. And this was a bit more saying, \"We want to involve you in the decision-making.\" And so we're specifically not sending it out to folks below you, not because we don't want that information spread, but we're respecting the roles you have as a supervisor, and you deserve to kind of have insight. And then, you know, they could share it with others if they wanted to." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Was this being sent to regional managers?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yes. Yes. That was the other thing. That's another reason why I think it was particularly useful, because it was a way to create the sense, you know, of \"One NARA.\" We didn't use those terms back then, but ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "... create that sense of we're one agency. And [CROSS TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you think it ... [CROSS TALKING]. Go ahead." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "No, I was just going to say, it also really illustrated to me how diverse the mission of the Archives is and how difficult, in some ways, it is to attempt to find a unified mission outside of the unity of administrative support functions that has to be there." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you think for what you were putting out, the monthly and then the weekly, do you think it took someone with your type of personality? You seem to be one that, regardless of where or what position you're in, you like to go out and meet the staff and talk to them and learn about things, whether it was always appreciated or not. But you seem like you were that type of person. Do you think that's what helped make that such a success?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, I think lots of people have those gifts. But if you're going to create something like that, you should staff it with a person that, you know, can do it in an appropriate way. Because of the fact that those types of communications that come out from the main office can be perceived as fluff sheets and nothing substantive, and so they aren't really useful means of communicating. So that's why it was important, I think, to have that. I wasn't—and the Archivist and the Director were not simply trying to propagandize, they were also trying to make this organization a more holistic, well-functioning up-and-down kind of organization." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Well, in this way, you're getting other perspectives that maybe you wouldn't have heard initially, and you’re sharing those perspectives through the newsletter-type thing. So ... yeah. Today, I'm sure that you're familiar with the ICN [Internal Collaboration Network]." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Uh huh." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And it seems like things are shared through there nowadays. I don't know if it's agency-wide, or if it was just within [the] Records Management [Division], that we have the Friday Roundup. And so there are just emails that kind of have a summary of what's going on, what staff are working on. So we do have different avenues of communication. But I don't know. What do you think of those types of communication, like the ICN or sending out mass emails?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Well, I think this is generational. So you may be getting a generational take on this. I like to know what the official organ is, and then that's the thing I can go to and count on. And as these things are multiplied, and there's a plethora of them—what I was concerned about is that people would be putting up critical information at places to which other people were not going. And unless you tell people “You must see this, you must read this thing, you must go to this site once a week,” you have no guarantee it is seen. There's a large swath of people that just, for whatever reason—they're too busy, they're not interested, they don't know about it—are not going to see things. So when you do that, you know, you have to have multiple ways of communicating. I know that I felt, towards the end of my career, that the agency was putting things up on the ICN, and then we were being told to go to the ICN to get that, where I don't think that was an effective way at the time, at least, or the best way. Some people were using it as the official place to put things, and others were not. So I think it's growing pains. You know, as we moved into this whole world we're in, we had to learn how to do it differently. But it's always dangerous once you get a cell phone, once you get something, and you start using it, to assume everybody else does it. In my personal life, you know, things that happen, I'm not on—I don't have a Facebook page. But for a lot of people, that's how they communicate news. And so they send it out on Facebook and presume that the whole world knows it. I've often found I have surprising gaps of knowledge about a good friend, maybe they got married, or something important happened in their life that I didn’t know about. And so I think it's similar to that, that if communicators aren't careful to know their whole audience, they can miss some of that audience. Those aren't very profound, but it's just ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, everyone has their preferred method for putting out information or receiving information, and so you may be having gaps in there. And who's receiving that message? I'm the same as you. I don't have Facebook either. And so, you know, I have family members that forget I'm not on Facebook. And so they share all these things, and then I'm the last one to find out. Right? So there are pros and cons to technology, social media, and all of that stuff today—methods of information." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Another thing I wanted to circle back on ... there was a study that, I believe, you conducted for the NHPRC. Could you talk about that a little bit?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "The NHPRC is the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. The Commission supports the publication of non-governmental documentary materials, and they provide grants to small groups that have editing and archival projects. It's a very small commission that has, I think, or used to have a budget of about $12 million. Its budget was always at risk. When created it was placed under the auspices of the National Archives. And so my knowledge of the NHPRC started back in my days working for Senator Hatfield. The Commission has a Senate member and a House member and a member of the Supreme Court, and some really interesting people as members of the Commission. Senator Hatfield was the Senate member, and I would go with him to meetings, or I would attend on his behalf. Those meetings, I think, were quarterly. So by the time I got to the Archives, it was a Commission that I was familiar with, kind of surprisingly. Senator Hatfield had been a very strong supporter of that Commission's budget. During the Reagan years and in subsequent administrations, it has frequently been zeroed out in the annual budget submission to Congress. And then it's somebody on the Hill that has been the savior of the Commission’s budget. And Senator Hatfield was that savior for many, many budget cycles. So it was a Commission I knew about. Shortly either before or after I arrived, the Commission got a new Executive Director, Jerry George, a real energetic Director. Incidentally, during the time I was with Senator Hatfield, the Commission’s Director was Frank Burke, who was Acting Archivist after Bob Warner, the father of NARA’s independence, retired. I had worked with Frank Burke on the Commission. Anyways, Jerry George felt that their grant processes needed attention. And so I spent about six months working, interviewing, meeting with the staff, meeting with grantees, meeting with people in the historical community about how the Commission was functioning and how it could function better. I produced a bunch of recommendations, and they were implemented, which gave me a great deal of satisfaction, not only personally, but because the Commission’s processes were improved. And Jerry was very supportive, and the Archivist was very supportive when that report came in. But one of the things I wanted to mention is, even in that world, the electronic, the digital- world era was beginning to make an impact. Documentary editing involves reviewing, annotating, and publishing material in large hardbound volumes, such as the huge number of volumes of the Papers of Woodrow Wilson, the Papers of George Washington, and the papers of other significant Founders [Founding Fathers] or important people in our history. Well, those are very labor-intensive efforts, and they involve printing, and they involve all that goes into producing books, a lot of which is not adding anything to the scholarship necessary to produce them. It's just that once the scholarship is done, there is a lot of work putting it in a format that researchers can use. Well, now we have, you know, things are moving into being created in digital mode. Computers were being brought into that process, and in two ways: one is you could digitize old stuff, but secondly, new stuff was not being created in paper. And so a lot of small archival and historical organizations out in the states were grappling with that. They might have this neat collection, some small archives or in college or universities, and think “wouldn't it be neat to digitize that and have it available for their researchers that way?” And so they would come to the NHPRC for grant money. But the time of the life cycle of the development of these new editorial ideas was like back when VCRs and Betamax were being developed for videotape. There needed to be a determination, you know, about what are going to be the standards? And so the NHPRC was pretty deeply involved in helping form what the future was going to look like in that area of documentary editing and archival work. So that was what that was all about." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. That's a lot. So, what is the intent of the Commission? Is it so that they're providing grants to enable research that people want to do that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise? This will help them get that done?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "It's to provide the documentary evidence that researchers would need. The Commission used to be called the National Historical Publications Commission, and it was really formed to gather the papers of the Founding Fathers and publish them, because that's how scholars did research, right? They needed to get the primary documents, primary evidence. And so documentary history has a long, storied history. But then, at least two things happened affecting the profession. People began to feel that these are all the books of dead white men, and maybe our history is a little more diverse. And maybe what we should also be looking at is not just the Founders—and with no disrespect to the huge work they did—but there are others who made a mark on our history—for instance, Mother Jones, the labor organizer, and Emma Goldman. Historians wanted to gather the documentary materials from some other more diverse people as well. A second thing was that people began to see the need to help small institutions preserve important and interesting records for which they didn’t have adequate resources, for example, to get a photograph collection in order. The Commission began to issue grants for this records preservation work. Each state was to create a historical records commission, and then those state commissions would examine proposals and then submit those they felt were worthy to the Commission for consideration for a grant. While I was involved in the Commission, it was beginning to shift from simply funding an important project to funding efforts that would advance the documentary editing and archival professions broadly—projects that had application in other places. So there were grant requests coming directly to the Commission, and then there were grant requests coming from the state organizations. Today, unless there have been changes, it's this organization that helps produce and make available the documentary materials of significant people in the United States’ history whose papers are not collected by the National Archives, because they weren't federal employees. Right? And secondly, to support—and these are with micro-grants, I would call them. These are not $2 million grants. These are $40,000, $50,000. So this is the kind of money that really helps an organization do some really neat things. And that was one of the criteria for examining these grants is, how can this money be leveraged in other locations? So we're going to support this group that's doing microfilming, because they're microfilming in a new way that maybe other archives can use. So it's, to me, a really good use of minuscule amounts of federal dollars that have significant impact." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. I think we have it listed under our budget every year. And so that's funding that comes from Congress, that they're allocating whatever towards this Commission. Okay. And was this started then under GSA, when we were still part of GSA?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "I forgot. I think it was in the '50s. I forgot the history. I'm sorry. But generally, after the NHPC had been created, and after it was supporting the publication of the papers of the Founders, the Commission made the recommendation that the papers of the sitting Presidents be collected in volumes, like those of the Founders. And, in another ironic connection of various parts of my career with one another, the executive order issued to commence the Public Papers of the Presidents Series placed the responsibility for publishing them with the Office of the Federal Register—where I one day would serve. I've forgotten a lot of that history. I'd have to research it. Yeah, I used to know this." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay, that's fine. [LAUGHS] I think we have Founders Online today that talks about the various Presidents and ..." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah? So maybe that was a product of that?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yep. Yep. That's right. So those books have been converted now into digital resources. So now you don't have to go to Princeton to look at the Papers of Woodrow Wilson, or even to a library. You can sit in front of your computer and pull those up." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Mhm." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "And those books are very expensive to purchase. Those are not things that you and I could afford, you know, the entire set of Woodrow Wilson Papers. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "[LAUGHS] Yeah, I'm sure. And so then a part of this study that you were working on, you're just checking to see if everything is working well and if there's anything that can be added to it or changed?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Right. Right. So the study had a lot to do with process, but there were a lot of the processes that needed attention and, particularly, needed attention given where the Commission was going to be going in terms of this whole new world. For example, once the Commission approves a grant, there is the responsibility to oversee and monitor the use of the funds to ensure they are being spent properly." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "It's worth mentioning." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, I think that's very neat. And this is yet another piece that kind of ties you to the National Archives when you were working on that also, and learning about the agency and stuff too." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Very cool. Okay. The other thing I wanted to mention, so at the end of our conversation last time, we were talking about your time at the Office of the Federal Register and how they were starting to move things online. And I know that there were several major projects that were going on around that time. Could you talk about any of those?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yes. I can't remember where we left off, so I may repeat myself a little bit. So the first thing I want to talk about is eDOCS, the electronic editing and publishing system. When I arrived at the OFR in 1995—I was detailed there first in 1994—they had already obtained a system that was used to track documents, but the documents themselves were being received, processed, edited, and published completely manually, at least on our side of the street. And when I say our side of the street, the other side of the street is the Government Printing Office, now the Government Publishing Office. So we would get all of this material ready for publication, literally walk it across the street in a black suitcase, and then the key punchers there—later computer operators—would type all this information in. Our editors would review the pages, okay them to print, and then they are run on the presses, so a very traditional paper-based process. eDOCS was intended to not simply track the documents but be an electronic means of ultimately ingesting the documents, moving them along the process, processing the documents, sending them to GPO, receiving them back from GPO, giving final review and publishing them, but still in paper format (because that is required by law). I was the project manager of the first eDOCS project. So eDOCS is an IT project. And what makes this kind of interesting also is not just what we ended up producing, the eDOCS system, but the time frame in which this project was happening, because it was happening during the time that NARA was growing up and standing up its IT operations, and IT was moving from—and I may have said this earlier—from being run by people who were archivists with kind of a geek side to them, or just liked technical things, to professionals trained in information technology. And I think this is true across the government that initially, the computers in offices were being supported by people in those offices who just kind of liked it. And then, of course, computers had many phases of coming into our lives from an unconnected desktop computer to an office system, where the drives are maintained in the office, and then back to personal computers but networked and with mainframes maintained centrally and away from the office using the computers. So it was kind of an in-and-out-growth process. One of the aspects of that is that lots of different solutions were being discovered or designed within an organization, lots of different solutions. And so at some point, that became wasteful, inefficient. We were buying lots of different kinds of computers from different kinds of people and different systems, and in some instances the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. Maybe they’re doing the exact same thing, but they weren’t. So again, this is in the broader world. Government and private sector organizations were building their capacity to run this. So, you know, no large organization would leave the accounting department to individual offices. Right? We run our budget out of a central office, and now we run our information technology out of a central office. But that was not where it started. And so, as we were building our eDOCS system—and honestly, we were doing it quite a while before NARA was doing centralized systems development, and the reason was NARA didn't have quite the need we did. NARA was receiving 25-year-old records and processing them and putting them in Hollinger boxes and putting them on bookshelves. Initially, they only needed computers to track this work, not to do it. But we were publishing a magazine every single day, a 150-page magazine, the _Federal Register_ . We were publishing more than 120,000 pages of books in more than 250 volumes—the Code of Federal Regulations—every year. So we had an on-the-ground need to make sure our processes were working well. And my point is, we got into the development of systems earlier than NARA did. So by the time NARA was beginning to feel like it had to get the profusion of computers within the agency under control, and one of those places we need to get under control is what's happening over at the Office of the Federal Register, we were pretty far down the track. And so there was a dynamic that went on for, I'd say, a decade of a fairly high degree of resentment toward Mother NARA's oversight of the project in ways that weren't helpful. There was a sense that those setting up NARA’s IT infrastructure were always trying to find out what we were doing, but not in useful ways or for useful purposes. And so we spent so much time just, you know, reporting stuff without getting the help that we needed from NARA, which was financial sometimes, and in other ways. So the reason, I think, that the eDOCS development project succeeded was that we were able to use the resources of the Government Printing Office. As I already explained, under the regulations of the Administrative Committee of the Federal Register we had access to the funds from the “page rate,” the rate agencies paid GPO to publish material in the _Federal Register_ . So we got a lot of our funding for eDOCS out of that. And so NARA really couldn't ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Can't complain. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yeah, couldn't complain and also had less control over it. I mean, really, it was nobody being bad. It was just, in the end, NARA has developed, like all organizations, a very large IT organization, and there are now laws that govern what must be reported, and there is a lot of oversight on that. And we can't be out there doing anything other than participating as we should. But because this was being developed while this historic change was occurring, it was quite a frustrating experience. And it often felt like we got it done in spite of our agency rather than because of it. But in the end, we have exactly what we envisioned: It is possible not to have a single piece of paper involved in the production of the _Federal Register_ . An agency can prepare a document, send it to us, it's ingested, and it's moved through the process, which is a very complicated process. I mean, the other point I should make is these are legal documents. These are not just Word documents." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "These are the kinds of documents that you take to the court and record. That's their nature, like laws. And also, before they're published, they are entirely confidential. So there's a lot of security involved. There's a lot of integrity that needs to be 100 percent. So on paper, the eDOCS system looks like a relatively simple off-the-shelf document management system. And that, by the way, is what I think the folks from NARA IT would often see. They’d say (we thought), \"So you're saying you're so special and so different. You know, it's just a document management system.\" Well, yes and no. So in the end then, it's the workhorse of the _Federal_ _Register_ . And also I would say we went from, I don't know, 80 employees down to 40 or 45, and we're producing double the volume of work." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "So that was the eDOCS system. I was project manager part of the time, and then we had project managers from NARA come in. But I was always deeply involved in that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. And so they still use that today ...?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "... the eDOCS system? Yeah. Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "So a second system that was developed, and it developed under the radar, and I don't think it has ever been understood for the amazing thing it is, is the electronic Code of Federal Regulations, the e-CFR. The Code of Federal Regulations is the set of regulations that govern our lives and the regulations issued by agencies such as NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], the IRS, by every agency of government. They're the documents that govern, for instance, how planes are operated in the sky, FAA directives. Critical, critical stuff to our lives. Of course, regulations have a bad reputation, but the fact of the matter is we're glad for the ones that we like, and then we hate the ones that we don't like. But they have a role. And as I said, there are now, I think, 185,000 pages in 260 volumes. So this is an enormous body of material. And each book or each title—the Code of Federal Regulations is divided into 50 titles or 50 topics—is revised and reissued every year. So if you had a collection of the CFR in your library, you would have the books from the previous year with covers of one color. And slowly during the year, they would turn to a different color as you replaced the old version with the new version." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "But there is a complication: a regulation takes effect whenever the agency determines it takes effect. So your volume of a particular set of Code of Federal Regulations may be out of date as soon as you have it on your shelf, because there may be two, three, 200 new regulations. The means to figure out what is the current status of a rule was a very complex process that people hired lawyers to do. What we did—and I was not deeply involved in this, so I don't want to take credit for it, but I want to publicize it—was to convert all of that into electronic files that were accessible online. And that was an enormous task, and then to update those on a consistent basis so they were up-to-date, and finally to create a daily point-in-time system whereby you can look at the status of the regulation at any time in the past, as well as see what is pending to be effective in the future. So it is just a phenomenal resource, and it was incredibly complex to create, and it is complex to maintain. And that was done not by contractors who came in to do it for us. This was done by government employees at the Office of the Federal Register and the Government Publishing Office, and it's up on GPO's website today. It's like having all of the laws of the United States available. Of course, they should be available. What more important material is there that we the people should have access to? And yet, until a few years ago, you could go to a library and look at it, but you also probably had to call a lawyer to figure out, you know, what's going on. So we've taken huge strides, but I'll stop there." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "We use that almost daily in our job." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Oh, okay!" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So we greatly appreciate that it's in there. We used to go through other ... I forget. There was a university, I think, that posted regulations, but you just never knew which was the most current. So it was always very confusing. And so now this is our go-to source. So it's great. Now, who maintains that then? Is it GPO?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Between GPO [CROSS TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Or between both GPO [CROSS TALKING]. Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Well, our office is responsible for the content. I mean, the content is prepared by the agencies, but once a final rule is published and given an effective date, then we maintain the Code, and we use GPO computers for the platform where the e-CFR resides." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So kind of a mix of both agencies working together on that." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Okay. That seems like it would be a big job to keep up with all of the regulations, with all the agencies, you know? Yeah. Big job." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Now, the third system is the actual _Federal Register_ itself. I think I said early on that, in some ways, I wish the office was called the Office of the Code of Federal Regulations, because ultimately that's what we're producing. The _Federal Register_ is a way station for documents on the path toward becoming a regulation. It's the place where agencies publish proposed rules and then receive comments. So every day, there's probably 150 documents being published by federal agencies in that category. We're also publishing executive orders and notices. So included are not just proto-rules but also agency notices that are important or need to be published. So, it's a very dense book. When I got to the Office of the Federal Register, there were 25,000 subscriptions. Probably 20 percent of those went to libraries or maybe more than that. Maybe another 60 percent went to law firms who were tracking that, or maybe colleges— I don't have my percentages right. And then there were a few individuals, maybe a thousand that had subscriptions to the _Federal Register_ . But it's not a book that one reads through—it looks a lot like the _Congressional Record_ , printed on newsprint-like paper. Very, very dense. Three columns and mind-boggling and sleep-inducing text [LAUGHS]. But important stuff. But it is also something that very few people are aware of, much less the regulatory process it was created to support. When I used to teach classes on the _Federal Register_ , I would use this example to explain the process: I’d say, “You know, when you drive down a street, and you see an orange sign posted on an empty plot of land with the word ‘HEARING’ printed boldly on it, you realize you’re being notified that somebody wants to do something with this land. They're trying to do something that is different from the way it's zoned. And you have an opportunity to voice an opinion about what they want to do with that land. There's going to be a hearing to listen to the public about whether this should happen or not.”" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "And if you're like me, you think, “I'm probably not going to like what they’re going to do with this land, but I don't have enough motivation to go to the hearing and find out what it is and express my opinion. Well, a _Federal Register_ document is kind of like that orange sign. It’s the notice and comment process. Agencies are issuing regulations. They are very significant. They're going to make a difference in our lives, some of them a big difference. And they're giving us notice that if you want to have a voice in the development of this regulation, now's the time, and here's who to contact, and here's the deadline. And then when all of those comments have been received, they're going to publish a document in which they're going to respond to all those comments, and they're also going to publish a final regulation. And so this is your democratic opportunity or your opportunity to be involved in the democratic process. Now, all of us in our lives have roles and groups that represent us in those roles. Like if you're a teacher, you have an organization that represents you. If you're a union member, you have unions. You know, if you're an archivist, you have archival organizations. And these associations are paying attention to these regulations for us, hopefully. So most of us trust that if there's something really, really significant, I'm going to get some kind of communication from somebody, or I'll read it in the paper that this thing that I have concerns about is pending. But, nevertheless, I would say the more Americans that are aware of the regulatory process and can participate in it, the better. It's just, the more eyes involved, the better. So making it accessible was a real challenge. And books are not the way to make it accessible. Well, the way to make it accessible is a website: federalregister.gov. And that's ultimately what we produce—a means to view online the book that we publish every day. Presently we have regulations that require that we continue to print the book in paper format, but that is becoming an anachronism that, one day, is likely to end." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Oh." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "In developing our website, we had to make sure that it maintained the legal integrity of the content—remember, these are legal documents, so we couldn’t just imagine a creative, snazzy website—and make sure that we distinguish between what was legal language and what was descriptive material about the legal content. And that descriptive content could not be commentary on the documents but simply descriptive and directional. So it was quite a process, and I give credit to our general counsel. His name was Michael White, who was in our office for many years. And he really had a vision for this and a heart for it and worked closely with a lot of people on this. There's a fun story. I've forgotten the details of it, but in general, the development of our website was done by a couple of guys in a garage in San Francisco. They were just an upstart software company looking for a way to show off their programming skills. There was a challenge with a prize for the best re-use on the web of already publicly available data and, somehow, these two guys had found the limited data we had posted and said, \"Could we see what we could do with that?\" They did it, and showed us the product, and that led to a full- blown project which grew, and it ultimately produced the online _Federal Register_ . That’s another really just unsung accomplishment. The Office of the Federal Register is an amazing place with a very small staff that's really doing incredible stuff. And I'm very proud to have been a part of it." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, like you said, it's a very fundamental, democratic process. We should all know what's going on and what rules they're proposing and that sort of thing. The public or groups, if they do want to write in or comment on anything, how is that process done? Is there a way to do that electronically? Does that go to the agency? Does that go to us? How does that work?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "So another part of the federalregister.gov project was integrating into the website the commenting process, which—remember, we're the publishers of the document, but the comments are going to the FAA or the IRS or NOAA. And so bringing the comments into our system and then sending them out to the agencies was a very complex process. But yes, now all of that can be done digitally." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow, that's great. I mean, those are some major projects that you were working with. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "And yet I'll tell you, if anybody ever asked me what I do, I always liked to laugh to see how many seconds until their eyes began to glaze over. It's hard to make the work sound real, real interesting." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I mean, how did this even come to be part of the National Archives? Because, you know, when you talk to someone they're going to be familiar with a Presidential Library maybe, or you hold the Declaration of Independence. Where does this fit in? How did this become part of the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "There's not a real good insight into that in the legislative record. I think the most we know is that both organizations were created at the same time. So the National Archives was created in 1935, and the Federal Register Act was 1935. And so they were looking for a place to put the Office. There was some discussion about putting it in the attorney general's office because it had this aspect of creating records. I think maybe somebody said, \"Well, we're creating this Archives. That's the organization that keeps the federal records.\" So it's not an entirely illogical explanation, but they are two distinct missions in some ways." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, I think just the public and probably even some of NARA's own staff aren't that familiar with the Office of the Federal Register and what it is that the Office does. And we talked a little bit last time about it being brought up in the news more with the whole Presidential ..." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Electoral College." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, that Electoral College process and all of that. And people just aren't really familiar with what it is that the Office does. And so you get asked all these questions, and they think that you probably do more than what you do. But, you know, it's ..." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "I'll give you a brief history just so ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "So, of course, the _Federal Register_ didn't exist until 1935. The U.S. Government was much smaller and was not as deeply involved in regulating our lives. Maybe railroads were regulated in the 1880s, but you know, there was the Sherman Antitrust Act. But business was kind of left alone. Then came the Depression and the New Deal and the creation of many new agencies that were regulated. But what was not created was a process across those agencies for how they were going to be issuing regulations. And it was a very catch-as-catch-can process that culminated, or that problem culminated, in a Supreme Court case in which a company was brought suit against them for violating some regulations. It went all the way up to the Supreme Court, at which time the Supreme Court asked in the discovery for the original signed document, and the Department of Justice or the agency that was to produce it didn't have the signed document. All they had was a copy. And secondly, what was discovered was the regulation that they had prosecuted the company on the basis of had not been in effect at the time of that prosecution." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Oh." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "So, these procedural problems made the whole system fall. And the court decision in issuing their opinion said, basically to the government, \"Get your act together. It is unconscionable that you can't even produce the proof that this document was ever signed, because anybody could mimeograph or Xerox a fake document.\"" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "The second thing that was happening was, as these regulations were being created, there was a lot of concern that they were being created in the dark and not in a democratic way. So these regulations had the effect of law and enforceability of law, but nobody got to vote on it. So there was a lot of this discussion going on. So to resolve that, there was a Federal Register Act where rules would be gathered, all the existing would be gathered in one place. The Code of Federal Regulations and new regulations would have to be published. Okay. So that's that history. The Department of State used to have ministerial roles. So it wasn't just for foreign relations, but they held the Declaration of Independence. They were kind of the Archives, right? They published the laws of the U.S. They published the [United States] Government Manual. So, as a result of the Hoover Commission and the Reorganization Act of 1949, one of the things that happened was the General Services Administration was created, so an organization that will provide general services to the government out of various departments like the Department of State, were removed. Publishing the laws, the Electoral College. So the Electoral College is an administrative task that the General Services Administration was given. It had been done at the Secretary of State in the Department of State. Okay. That's 1949. Remember also, that that's when the Archives was brought into GSA, because archives were viewed as a general service. Okay? So now, the Office of the Federal Register, which is within the National Archives, is now under GSA. And in that process, some by law, but some by administrative action, the Director or the Administrator of GSA assigned to either the Office of the Federal Register or the Archivist these ministerial things. So that's how the OFR has not just the Code of Federal Regulations and the _Federal Register_ , but Presidential Papers, the Statutes at Large, the Government Manual. So thank you for letting me give you that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, that's very interesting. I had no idea. Yeah, lots of moving things around and, yeah, trying to find the best place for us and for other areas, right? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Very cool. Thank you for that. Okay, so we've got a little bit of time left here. I wanted to ask you a few other questions. So, let's see here. In your last interview, you did mention that you were designated as a continuity person in charge of the continuity activities. So like if there is a disaster in the government, you know, it still needs to be able to operate. So there's certain activities that have to take place and that sort of thing. So I was wondering if you could talk about that? And I think you mentioned something with 9/11. Just kind of talk about what was going on, and yeah, whatever you can tell us." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Okay. And I'll break this into pre-9/11 and post-9/11. So during the Cold War, the federal government had lots of contingencies to deal with the effects of a nuclear bomb exploding in the Washington, DC, area, including protecting the administrative processes of government. One of those processes is the Code of Federal Regulations and this process we have in the _Federal Register_ . So I'll call it the _Federal Register_ process. It includes the Code of Federal Regulations. So, I can't speak to the specifics, because I think some of that is still classified. But there were contingencies, and our office was a part of those. And interestingly, one part of it, which is not classified, was a standby set of Code of Regulations. So if the worst happened, you know, those regulations could be brought into effect. Some of those were standby in the sense they were written down, and if needed, could be pulled out by an agency head who might say, \"Give me that standby regulation and sign it and make it effective.\" Others were standby in the sense that they were in the Code of Federal Regulations but were only activated by certain triggers, like the President would say, \"I'm activating this section of the Code.\" So anyways, there was a whole separate Code created. By the end of the Cold War, that whole system was beginning to go away. There wasn't the fear. And so by the time I got to the Office of the Register, we were still doing exercises, but it wasn’t what I would call a real rigorous process. And what we would have put in place would have looked very 1950-ish, even though we were now moving into computers and the like. So again, another place where my career really spanned this movement from analog to digital is in this area of emergency preparedness. So we would participate in these, but, you know, the idea that there was going to be the nuclear bomb, had a very big sense of unreality and a little bit of \"Why are we doing this?\" And if there were a bomb, would these plans even work (like when school kids used to practice hiding under their desks)—was that a viable option for survival? Then 9/11 happened, and that contingency planning was triggered. Not the standby regulations, but the need to do what was in the contingency plans. And so what I would say is— well, I'll tell you a little bit about my experience of 9/11. Everybody has some experience, but I was in Washington, DC. I was walking from the Metro to the Office of the Federal Register, which is a four-block walk. This was September 11th, 2001. There were cell phones in use by then, and I heard a guy walking in front of me say something on his phone about a plane hitting a building. And I thought to myself, I wonder what kind of an accident he’s discussing; maybe there will be something about it on TV when I get to the office. We had TVs in our office suite. I thought it could have been like there was an accident or something. Well, when I got to the building, I went up to our conference room and there were staff in the conference room watching the TV. The first building had been hit, and they were watching. And I joined them, and so we watched everything transpire in the conference room. Two things I remember in particular: One, of course, the Pentagon was attacked, and we looked out the window and were watching the black smoke coming off the Pentagon. We couldn't see the Pentagon, but we could see all of that. So, you know, it was a very real event. Then the second thing was, there was a lot of confusion about what was happening, playing out on the TV. There were discussions among correspondents, and reports and rumors. There was another plane, supposedly, and there was one headed to the Capitol. The windows of our conference room were parallel to 16th Street. So 16th Street is a north-south street that runs right into the White House. Our office sat on North Capitol Street, only 16 blocks west of 16th Street, and only 10 blocks north of it. We watched a jet basically come down 16th Street, and we had the sense of we're watching the plane that was going to hit the White House. Now, it turned out to be one of the military jets scrambled in defense of the city. But just such an unreal time like everybody experienced. Then I got a call telling me “to do what you're to do,” which meant leave and go somewhere. And I went there, and that was just a very surreal environment. I will say it was a place where there were no windows, and I was there for two weeks initially." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "And all that time, we were watching this devastation on the screens in New York. And we weren't doing that just as private citizens. This was the U.S. Government functioning. And [it was] just incredibly surreal, and... . But the reason I mention that also is because the first time I got to come home, there had been a tornado come through the College Park area and into the neighborhood where I live just north of College Park. So when I drove in our neighborhood, there was all this destruction. But it was—well, destruction is what I’d been watching virtually nonstop for two weeks. And coming home, I see all the destruction from the tornado around me, and you know, it was kind of difficult to differentiate between those two. So, I think what I would like to say is that what needed to be done post-9/11 was to take 1960s procedures, and—I'm talking now just about the Office of the Federal Register—and bring them into the modern times and develop processes that could work in the real environment in which we were operating. We needed to create a contingency so that if our main headquarters is not accessible, we could function. And so how is the _Federal Register_ going to function, disconnected from GPO? I mean, literally, in the 60s, the plan was that people were going to get on the radio and read the _Federal Register_ . That was [LAUGHS] how the public was going to find out things. So I really had an experience of being involved in the creation of the new processes that are now in place for that. And maybe I shouldn't say much more than that. It's ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "[CROSS TALKING]" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "All I'll say is this: Our function is not a classified function. And I should say that about the Office of the Federal Register. We do not publish classified documents. You know, there aren't any secret documents in the Code of Federal Regulations. They just don't exist. I'm not saying there aren't secret documents, but those documents govern how the government should operate. There is no secret document that can control how you are to operate as a private citizen in an emergency. Those have to be public and have to be agreed upon through the public processes. So I hope I'm making that distinction between the directives that apply to the government and directives that apply to the public. So, we were in that classified environment not because our material was classified. We were in that environment because the originators of the sources of our information, and those to which we needed to communicate, had classified operations and needed to be in a classified environment. But at the same time that they were doing classified work, they also will be producing regulations that are peacetime- related or non-emergency." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "We still needed to communicate with those agencies. So if their communications are down, if they don't have their headquarters in sight, they are somewhere else. We needed to be somewhere else with them or in contact with them. I'll just say one other thing. At one of the first meetings post-9/11 in that classified environment, where a lot of significant people were around the table representing the Cabinet agencies, we were going around, sort of giving a status of how things were in the various agencies. When it came my turn I said, \"Well, the Constitution is being protected. It is under control.\" And everybody just sort of stopped, and it was just kind of, \"Oh, yeah. Wow.\" And just, here were all these important agencies, carrying out critical functions, dealing with the military, and all that. Then at the National Archives, what do we do? We push paper. So it just made me feel a little proud, and happy that, you know, we did have a little bit of a role there, because this massive edifice that is the United States Government all rolls out from the Constitution which we preserve." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Wow. It's like the mic drop kind-of-thing. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "[LAUGHS] Wow. So it was all about maintaining continuity and figuring out how this would continue to function and working with agencies and that sort of thing, it sounds like." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "You know what? I'll tell you one take away from that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yes?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "It really showed me that in emergencies, we're relying on people. Emergency response will function as well as the people are capable of functioning—individuals. So, in those situations, the people that rise really are the people who have guts, innovation, energy, expertise, because I would say the first league wasn't out on the field, initially. And it's because this whole thing had become kind of unreal—few people thought a nuclear weapon would be exploded, so the people assigned to emergency preparedness weren’t, you know, when real-life crises occurred, those who were used to frontline action, and some were sort of saying, \"What do I do?\" And I think that's true in life. You know, a tornado comes through—you know, I have such respect for what's going on like in Maui [Hawaii] and other places where there's disasters—there are a lot of us that maybe wouldn't know what to do. We'd be sort of paralyzed by what it is. And whether it's war, whether it's disaster, whether it's some other kind of emergency, systems are not adequate. I mean, you can have all the procedures in place, and that's important, but unless you have people that use them, that have a sense of urgency—and I saw a lot of that in that process. And it was a really interesting lesson, or I don't know what to call it, but ... It gave me a lot of respect for it. We all have our roles, you know?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. And I guess some are better than others." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "[CROSS TALKING] And police, they have a unique gift. And you saw that, and you saw people that knew what to do. So rapidly, there was a response. And then there were the majority of us that just were so thankful there are people there that know what to do, because I wouldn't." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. I mean, I think there's some training involved, but I think you're right. You know, there are certain innate skills or something about what people can handle and react fast, you know, really fast to something. So, I totally agree with that. Kind of along that same line, I wanted to ask ... so I believe that you were the executive assistant to Senator Hatfield and then for the Archivist of the United States Don Wilson, and also to the Director of the Office of the Federal Register. Right?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Five were [CROSS TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "What does that say about you? Do you have some knack or skill for being able to support people in their role, of making them successful?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "I think I've concluded that the gift I have is not so much being an innovative thinker. I'm not the person that should sit at the top of an organization and think big thoughts, but I am a person who can listen and kind of capture and articulate what others are saying in a pretty simple way for others. I think I have a sense of when I hear something that's right and something that's not right. I don't mean morally. I mean, this is going to work or this—I think I'm a good analyst of things. So, I think what I could do, what I felt best with, is if I could get with a visionary who is also willing to not just think big thoughts but was willing to take action, I could help that person figure out how to take the action or how to say, \"Here's how to get from what you want to do to accomplishing it, but you've got to do this. You need to get up and make this speech, or you need to issue this memo, or you need to approach this meeting this way.\" I still think I'm pretty much a behind-the-scenes person. I can do the upfront to a certain degree, but there are a lot of people who have more skills than I do in that. But that's what I just kept finding myself falling into. So after a while, I realized that's my niche, I guess." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like the Archivist or the Senator or whoever may have this vision, and then you can help them determine how to get from Point A to Point B and to get that implemented." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yes, or maybe articulate a problem, too. So a time when I didn't think I had the opportunity to have much voice, but I think I could have, was in the development of the strategic plans of the agency. That started to be a thing during the Clinton administration. And I think a whole lot of time was spent on the process—I think those documents can be critical documents. They can be so useful in an organization if prepared correctly and then utilized. But unfortunately, most of the time, people and organizations get completely caught up in the process, and it does become pretty much a document that's put on the shelf and not used to run the organization, or the only way it's used is in kind of a reporting way, not in a visionary way. It's used just to report on measurements that end up being an end in themselves. And I've been involved in the development of some really good, simpler strategic plans that were rejected, that I think would have helped to some degree. They would have been better. I think there was one NARA strategic plan that was really good. It was John Carlin who—and a lot of people have negative memories of that process—but he put together a good plan, and he worked it. And that was good for the National Archives. And it helped get us through a bit of a transition time. He used a phrase: Ready Access to Essential Evidence. Every archivist hated that term, “essential evidence,” because the law talked about “records.” But it was the only phrase I've ever heard that really captured the work of the agency as a whole really well. But it wasn't kosher. And so it was—as soon as he left, it was ejected. [LAUGHS] And, if you think about it, the phrase captures recordkeeping, archiving, the _Federal Register_ , a whole bunch of stuff." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Yeah. And from collecting that information, preserving it, making access happen. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "And having it ready, meaning very available." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "When you need it. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "And evidence, because record evidence was kind of what the whole mass of stuff could be collected under. Anyways..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's interesting. I wanted to ask ... you've already brought this up several times, but just the kind of technological advancements and modernization that happened throughout your career. I know you've mentioned analog to digital. Can you talk about that theme a little bit, how the changes evolved, what some challenges were or some positive improvements?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Well, so positives: so much faster, so much more information, so much simpler, so much access, so much information, maybe even lifestyle, you know, can blend a little more personal and professional—maybe that's a negative as well. So all in all, absolutely, I'm glad I made it to 2023 and didn't [LAUGHS] keel over in 1990. But you can even see the transition in the records. You know, you look back at archival records up through the '60s, and they're just beautifully kept, and they're complete. And now, they're a mess. You know, people don't think about it. Part of the reason for that is that we no longer have the time to do so. Why is that? Well, for one thing, there used to be a position called a secretary. And one thing that has happened with computers, and I noticed that very much early on. When I was in Senator Hatfield's office, I had a Dictaphone, and I would dictate dozens of letters a day. Dozens. We had five people whose job was to sit with headphones and transcribe and type that all out. Okay?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "By the time I was at the Archives, I was doing all my own typing, backspacing as I misspelled things, you know. I was doing not just the thinking. I was having to do the technical work that had been done by a secretary. And so, things—the product—were much more sloppy, not as elegant, not collected as well. People weren't thinking about records, in contrast to when a secretary knew that part of the process was making three copies, and knowing where they would go and all that. So traditional recordkeeping just kind of blew up. And for a while, that was very concerning until we realized, after a while—because it didn't happen right away that this was possible—everything you've done is re-creatable. [LAUGHS] You don't really need, you know—. I can Google search someone’s name, and I get access to a letter that I wrote you or an email I wrote you ten years ago, right?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "[LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "So a lot of stuff washes over, and there are other ways to do these things. But, you know, I miss some of that, the beauty of the archival research that ... Yeah. Even at home, you know, your keepsakes might include birthday cards. Well now, maybe it's going to be an email you got from one of your kids. It's just not quite the same. I mean, it means the same, but not for the future. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "[LAUGHS] Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "I really feel that while the government and organizations were moving from no computers to these highly organized IT offices, there were a bunch of mistakes made, and it's too late now. It's maybe irrelevant, but I will say this, and I've seen this in other organizations outside of the government. It is a common practice for me, as an example, to have a process, and to be an expert in the process. We want to automate the process for efficiency reasons. So we go pay somebody who is a programmer, a very smart, smart programmer, but someone who knows nothing about my process. In between me and that person, we put a project manager. And that project manager's role is to kind of know both our needs and have both our interests at heart... . And so what happens is, I tell the project manager, or somebody comes in and interviews me about my process. I do a brain dump of everything I know about this. Somebody captures it and sends it over to the programmer, and the programmer tries to interpret whatever I've said and send something back over the transom door, through somebody else's interpreting, and it lands on my desk, and it's nothing like what I need, you know? And so we just go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And I often thought—this is what I experienced in the Federal Register. We had writer-editors who knew all the quirks of and directions that the process needed to go. And we were working through this very weird process. I often thought, \"Why don't we hire some temps to do my work, because a lot of it is not specialty work.\" There's maybe 70–80 percent that I can teach somebody to do pretty easily. Okay? I'll go off and sit with the programmer—not the project manager—the programmer. And we will work together to develop something that really suits the user's needs, unfiltered by this project manager. And then I can go back to my desk. I can tell you all sorts of things there. I can tell you not only the process, but I can say, “Don't put the button there ... put it over here,” the kind of thing you never get to till far later in the process. That’s understandable because we may only be designing the chassis of the car and we’re not ready to design the radio buttons on the dashboard. But there may be some good reasons to have the foresight to know something about the requirements of the dashboard’s radio buttons early on in the design process. Why not have access to those potential “assists” in the design process? If you put the radio in the trunk, when you show me the car and say, \"What do you think of it?\" you will destroy my trust in you and the design process." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "[LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "But I guess that's applying my analytical perspective to the extent I have any thoughts about how things played out. When I observed that process, I thought, \"Oh, this is very unfortunate.\" I wish things were done differently. And then people need to be humble— everybody. We all want to take credit for stuff. And it's hard to admit mistakes. And so a lot of times, you get somebody like that in a position, and it can really be hard. And that happened a couple times, I'd say." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Yeah. It probably changes the whole culture of the place." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Kind of around that, what do you think is your greatest accomplishment, or what are you most proud of from your time at NARA? You've done a lot of things in a lot of different offices, or a few [LAUGHS], not just one." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "I hope I made people's work happy, you know? I hope I was a person that didn't make their days worse. At least, you know, they felt like I was trying to help them. I really wanted to serve people well. I wanted to accomplish things, you know? But, yeah. And it's funny. I think I had two reputations. I think I had kind of a negative reputation. This is probably way too personal for this. I don't know. But I think there are a lot of people who really would say, \"He was a good person. He helped us, and he was for us.\" But there were people that, somehow, I just couldn't connect with. And probably behind doors, they were maybe negative about me. I never had bad motives. I didn't have enemies, you know. If I was in an argument with someone, it was just about the topic. It wasn't, \"I hate you, and I'm going to make your life miserable.\" But I think that's so common that that's what a lot of people, maybe—because, I guess I have some passion sometimes, and maybe my passion comes across a little rough, perhaps. And I don't know. I don't know. That's a part that I never think about, honestly. So ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, I think we all get along with different personalities, right? So you can't be the only one. Do you remember your last day at the agency in 2021?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "I turned off my computer in my home office, and I went downstairs and had dinner. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Oh. You were working from home." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Yeah. That was the end of my career. Yeah, it was really ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "The office did a really neat thing, though. I think two days before, they had an online “Zoom” retirement party, and so there were squares of most of the people on the staff on my computer screen. And some people said some things. I got a chance to say some things. I had watched a woman who had worked in the Federal Register for a long time and, you know, a lot of times retirement parties are kind of a laugh-and-joking kind-of-affair. But at one point, she stood up, and she just spoke to her experience and her career. And it was moving. It was just really nice. And I thought she deserved that, you know, and we deserve to hear this person who's been here a long time. Take ten minutes to let her reflect on her life. I wanted to do that, so I did that. And I have a video of the thing, so that was very sweet. Oh, and they had a cake. They had a cake delivered to my house!" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Oh my!" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "So I had that in front of me. So that was very creative. But my last day was very underwhelming. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, so this is during COVID, right? The pandemic? And so everyone was working from home at the time. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "I didn't talk about COVID, but like all the other organizations, we shut down. I mean, we shut our office, but we continued to publish the _Federal Register_ every single day. We never missed anything. We had COVID in the office. We had a security guard who was at the Government Printing Office on Wednesday and died on Saturday from COVID. He was the guard who escorted our agency liaisons up to our office. So we were in fear of what was happening. And there were some other people in the GPO building that passed away. So those were very scary times. I remember someone saying when we first were sent home, “How long do you think it'll last? Two weeks?” And I remember rolling my eyes and saying, \"Are you kidding? No way they're going to let us stay off two weeks.\"" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Two and a half years later we're still ..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Very strange, strange times." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, I think we all thought that. I went back into the office just the other day, and I saw the calendar was still open to March of 2020. So those are just reminders of, wow, everyone thought they were going to be right back. So, yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "Well, and I should say—this is not a policy statement—but it became clear that we did not need to have people in an office building. We have produced the _Federal Register_ and the Code of Federal Regulations every day without fail for two-and-a-half years. And for two of those years, there were only two people in the office every day. Otherwise, all the other staff—45— were dispersed. So there is no need for them to come back to the office. Well, except for the benefit of the fact that when you leave an office and go to your home to work, you still know what that office looked like, how it functioned as a whole. You know, for instance, that in November I have to do this, or you have overheard things others are saying or doing. But when you hire a new employee into that telework environment, they only know what you tell them. They can’t “catch” any additional information from the office environment because they aren’t in it. So it's so much more important to train people well in the online environment, because there's this big organization. There was all this stuff that was being done that was known generally by several staff members and no one had to say \"Oh yeah, in November, we're supposed to do this.\" So, it will be interesting to see, if organizations stay in a dispersed environment, how they will learn to handle that kind of ingesting of new employees." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's a very good point. Yeah, I think we were all kind of thrown into that position without knowing how this was going to work even. And so this is still kind of a new process where people are still figuring it out, right, even though we've been doing it now since 2020, I think. So, yeah. Well, hey, I kept you over our scheduled time. I hope that's not a problem. Was there anything else that you wanted to add that we haven't talked about yet?" }, { "speaker": "Jim", "text": "I can't imagine there's anything left. [LAUGHS] No, I think this has triggered memories and made me think. So thank you for your interest. And thank you for asking me to do this." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Well, thank you for agreeing to do it and to do two sessions, nonetheless! You had a lot to talk about. You've done so much. So it's extremely interesting to hear about all of this from different sides of the house, too, and your perspectives on things. So thank you so much. I'm going to go ahead and stop the recording now. Okay? Hang on just a second. [END RECORDING PART TWO]" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. BRIAN KNOWLES", "text": "Today’s date is 22 May 2014. I am Brian Knowles, acting as an oral historian for the National Archives History Office. I am conducting an oral history interview with Michael L. Jackson. He is an exhibit designer with the National Archives Museum, Archives I, Washington, DC. Morning, sir. And if you would, could you go over the dates of service that you’ve been with the National Archive?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MICHAEL L. JACKSON", "text": "I started working at the National Archives in February of 1994. And prior to that I worked for the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art for eight years. I’ve been in Washington, DC area since 1986. And my educational background, and I have some other museum background prior to coming here in ‘86. I worked several years as a preparator in the Detroit Institute of Arts. I have a fine arts educational background, with a bachelor’s degree and a Master’s of Fine Arts degree, and have done a few years of adjunct teaching of studio art, drawing, painting, design. But I’ve been here since 1994. And I was hired here as an exhibit designer. I had been an exhibit designer at the Smithsonian for a few years before coming here, Smithsonian’s Museum of African Art, that is. And I’ve been an exhibit designer here from 1994 to the present. I’ve seen the organization go through some organizational, structural changes. Have been here for at least four Presidential appointees, Archivists, and some Acting Archivists—in between the appointees. So I’ve seen a lot of change here at the Archives in 20 years. My work as an exhibit designer is a little misleading because here at the Archives there’s a couple of us in the Exhibits Office, along with the curators and researchers, a couple of exhibit designers. But, typically here exhibit designers work with the curators to research. They come up with the exhibit ideas and, of course, the exhibit idea, the theme of the exhibit, goes through a lot of approval processes up and down the chain of command here, more so recently than 20 years ago. Twenty years ago it probably really didn’t go past the Assistant Archivist’s Office for Public Programs. And, at that time that person was a woman named Linda Brown. And Linda ran the Public Programs, which consisted of the Volunteers Program, the Education Program, and the Exhibits Program. And I was hired by a woman in that office named Emily Soapes, who was in charge of just the exhibit staff, the curators and the designers. And, at that time, our office was a little more autonomous than it is now. And we didn’t have a Foundation for the National Archives that was active in raising money for exhibits and therefore more interactive in planning, in the discussions of our exhibits as we have now. Back to what an exhibit designer does here at the National Archives. Typically, the exhibit designer works with the curator, comes up with a layout plan for the exhibit, has discussions about what graphics might be in the exhibit. So the exhibit designer typically did a layout of the gallery, of exhibit cases and anything that was on the walls, all graphics. The exhibit designer creates drawings for building new exhibit cases, if that’s the case. Whatever structures need to be built and fabricated to go into the exhibits here at the Archives is all done by outside exhibit fabrication contractors. The exhibit designer also usually does the exhibit graphics. That is, all of the in-case labeling and any kind of illustrations that go on the wall, any kind of text panels that go on the wall. We design the banners that go on the front of the building. We design the titles that go on the title wall. We work with the curator to, to come up with photographic or illustrative contextual images that go with the documents in the exhibit. And then the exhibit designer is also the contract officer’s technical representative for the process of soliciting bids to build our exhibits and install our exhibits. The Archives has never had, in the 20 years I’ve been here, I’ve never had staff or facilities in-house, for building exhibits and installing exhibits. So all of that work is done by outside contractors. And in the time I’ve been here it falls on the exhibit designer to work with the contracting office, now in College Park, to come up with a statement of work, and solicit the work to be done by contractors. And then the designer and the contract officer review the proposals and make a choice. Typically, we would get three or four proposals for each exhibit project, each new exhibit. And once the contractor is chosen, the exhibit designer oversees, well, there’s a schedule of work that’s part of the statement of work, listing the schedule of when the exhibit opens, and all the steps of the work that’ll be done by dates from the time they get the contract until the time the exhibit is finally installed. And so it’s up to the exhibit designer to oversee that fabrication contractor making visits to the contractor’s fabrication facility. Then when it comes time to bring the exhibit into the space, the exhibit designer does all the preparation to get the fabricators into the building. And, that’s gotten a little more complicated in the last 12 years or 14 years, than it used to be before September of 2001. Meaning that our security here has been beefed up considerably from what it was in the 90s, prior to 2001. So just, just to review exhibit design, my title’s exhibit designer, but the exhibit designer does a lot more here because they don’t staff other kinds of people for soliciting the contractor and overseeing the contractor install the exhibits. And there’s a lot of more things that we do within our own staff and within the process of getting exhibit design built and installed. I would say the exhibit designer’s time, in my case, probably less than 20% of my time is actual design work. It’s more meetings, interacting with curators and other offices within the process of getting an exhibit approved, getting an exhibit designed, getting the exhibit built, and then installed. And that process, over the years, we’ve built a couple of permanent exhibits, including the _Public Vaults_ _Exhibit_ and the _Records of Rights Exhibit_ in the Rubenstein Gallery. Those were very big exhibit projects. Marvin Pinkert, who ran the Exhibits Program for the last ten years up until two years ago, I think Marvin came here around 2000 or 2001. And he was the one that had the vision for building the _Public_ _Vaults._ And, also, he had a pretty strong part in, in, in the vision of the _Records of Rights_ exhibit in the Rubenstein Gallery before he left here. I think Marvin left the Archives in May of 2012. And that exhibit finally got installed in December of 2013. So it went through some change after Marvin left, but not a lot. I mean the basic concept and subject of the exhibit was basically his vision in collaboration with our curators. I’m kind of wandering here, so I’m not sure—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "[Interposing] No. You’re doing great." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Where I was going, I guess, is in these two major permanent exhibits, the designers here, Ray Ruskin and myself, were more involved in a team of people working with the outside designers. You know, dozens and dozens of meetings over two and three-year periods to get these exhibits designed and installed. So we became more like in-house experts in a way, just we worked with the designers in that we knew a little bit about how our documents needed to be exhibited, and so we were part of a larger team. We were not the designers for those exhibits, we became in-house consultants working with outside designers and that was perhaps more time-consuming than if we had designed the exhibits ourselves. I mean, , these two permanent exhibits, the _Public Vaults_ exhibit and the _Records of Rights_ exhibit were a tremendous amount of hours on a lot of Archives staff, including curators, conservators, registrars, heads of exhibits, Foundation staff, and exhibit designers, and our exhibit registrars. So the work has really changed in 20 years, since I started here. And, that’s kind of where we are today. These two large exhibits were funded by people, through the Foundation, funded by corporate people or individuals. Like Mr. Rubenstein, primarily funded the _Records of Rights_ exhibit. Mr. Rubenstein provided the Magna Carta. And prior to the _Records of Rights_ exhibit, we built an exhibit for the Magna Carta that we worked with an outside design firm to design it. And it was installed in the West Rotunda Gallery and Mr. Rubenstein paid for that temporary exhibit until—and it was all planned all along—that document would be the centerpiece of the _Records of Rights_ exhibit, the Magna Carta, I’m speaking of. So that’s kind of where we’re at today. We opened that permanent exhibit in December of 2013. And currently, since that exhibit opened, Chris Smith, who was the head of our Exhibits Office. After Marvin Pinkert left in 2012, Chris became the head of Exhibits Office. She retired in December. Currently our office has an acting head. And, they will be hiring a new head of Exhibits within the next two or three months, I am told. Do you have any questions?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Yes, lots. Well, not going too off the beaten path here, how did you become interested in working at the National Archive?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "I was an exhibit designer at the Museum of African Art from 1987 till ‘94 when I came here at the Archives. And the Museum of African Art was a new museum. And the director at the Museum of African Art had announced to the entire staff, which was about 50 people top to bottom, that they should consider their jobs at the African Art Museum as a training ground, that they didn’t have the budget to give people promotions or raises and that you should consider this job as a good starting point in your career and a good experience in a museum atmosphere. The director’s name was Sylvia Williams. And she told the entire staff herself, whatever grade level you are, that’s what you’re going to be. Because, she said, we have about 125 world class pieces of African art. And she said, “In my tenure here, I intend to grow that number considerably so I’m using budget money as it comes in. I’m buying to grow the collection.” She said, “I see that as my vision here.” So I came to the National Archives when there was a job opening here. And came here, to be very honest, came here for a grade promotion. And I started here as a GS-12 in 1994. And I was a GS-11 at African Art. And African art was good training ground for me. And I had worked at the Detroit Institute of Arts, part-time and full-time over a fair number of years because I went to school in Detroit. I lived in Detroit. I went to Wayne State University in Detroit. And that’s where I first got interested in working in a museum environment but at that time I never would have thought of myself as working in an archives kind of environment. But that’s how it happened. To be very honest here, I came here because there was a one grade higher opportunity than where I was. And I knew that where I was, I wasn’t going any further than that grade level. So that’s totally honest." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "What was your first impression of the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "I think I had been in the Rotunda and what we call the Circular Gallery, which no longer exists, but it was a semi-circular gallery, a hallway about 12 foot wide that wrapped around the Rotunda, that was our temporary exhibit space for many years. And the West Rotunda Gallery was also part of that exhibit space. It was used more as an introductory space. And the East Rotunda Gallery was a really small gift shop all crammed into that East Rotunda Gallery, where they had a cashier. So our temporary exhibits started in the West Rotunda Gallery, then you went around and you came out of the exhibit into the gift shop, which made a lot of sense. A lot of museums are like that. When they have major exhibits, they typically have a gift shop at the end of the exhibit, if you’ve been to art museum exhibits. My first impression was that it’s pretty darn dark and dingy in here. The Rotunda has always been pretty dark. And, it’s primarily because the light levels are kept so low in there to preserve the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence. Because those documents are on exhibit year- round, year after year after year after year. And, so that was my first impression, we need some more light in here. Of course that never quite happened, until recently. But I thought that the Rotunda was a grand space. But I thought it was, frankly, after having worked in other museums, I just thought the space was a little dark and dingy and took some getting used to. It’s still dark. I wouldn’t call it dingy anymore because I was involved in a recent upgrade of the lighting in there. So, hopefully, it’s better lighting in there than we’ve had in the time I’ve been here. Recently converted the whole lighting system in there to a new LED lighting system, happened this past February." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "So you mentioned your fine arts background. How did you feel beginning to work with archivists, historians, and conservators?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Well, it’s definitely a change from your own vision as an independent painter and artist. But that was something that I accepted well before I came here. And, you know, I actually enjoyed working with many of the people that I worked with here. We have some pretty interesting curators here. When I got here, and one of them is still here. Bruce Bustard, who is a Ph.D. historian, was here when I got here. He’s been an excellent curator. He’s been great to work with over the years in the various projects I’ve worked with him on. And another curator that was here, her name was Stacey Bredhoff, who now works at the Kennedy Library. She left here to go to the Kennedy Library, I believe, about four or five years ago. And Stacey, I worked with Stacey on a number of projects. I’ve worked with a lot of conservators over the years, from our Conservation Lab. Because the exhibit designers have to work with the curators. There’s restrictions on how much light is on documents. There’s restrictions on how documents can be displayed, how they can be fastened or not fastened to a mount. If you’re displaying volumes or books, you have to work with the conservation people on specific openings and the angles of the openings. And so the exhibit designer interacts very much with the curator, the conservator, and the registrar that’s working on each exhibit. And my experience has been, overall, positive with all of them. I mean we certainly had our—if you get designers and conservators in the same exhibit, designers and conservators their interests are going to conflict. The designers want to enhance the presentation. And the conservators want to make sure there’s very minimal amount of light necessary. And minimal amount of handling and fastening of original documents within an exhibit case. So, yeah, there’s sometimes conflicts. But I believe that probably happens in every exhibit project where you have conservators and designers and registrars and curators. I mean it’s in everybody’s best interests that the documents are preserved a long time. So, you know, there’s some people that would rather we not exhibit original documents. In fact, the idea has come up over the years, at various times, of exhibiting facsimiles of documents. Having come from an art background and an art museum background, I believe people come here to see original documents, not facsimiles. I can’t imagine going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and seeing a facsimile of say a Rembrandt painting or in the more modern world, a facsimile of a Jackson Pollock painting. So I bring that kind of belief and feeling about that here. We used to exhibit new documents in all the Rotunda cases. And we changed them out once a year. And in between that documents that required less light exposure, we changed those out every three months or six months. But about five, four or five years ago, we went to all facsimiles in there that more or less tell the story of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. So gradually we’re moving in that direction where we show more and more facsimiles. And, of course, the electronic components of our exhibits, like the large computer table in _Records of_ _Rights_ exhibit, there probably are about 300 images of documents. But people have access to see more and learn more about the variety of documents we have through that process. But they’re not seeing real documents. They’re seeing, you know, digital images on a monitor. And so the positive thing is people can interact and go into folders and pull out various documents through the table and see a larger variety than we’d be able to show them if we were just showing originals in that space. My hope is that we continue to always have original documents in whatever new exhibits we come up with, along with the electronic exhibits where we can show them more content of what we have here in the Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well you came in with a lot of experience with already being trained. Did you come in and have a mentor or have somebody provide you guidance or training to work for the National Archive?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "When I came here I was replacing another designer. And, so there were two designers here. The other designer that was here when I got here, his name was Steve Estrada. And Steve and I, I would say we were sort of on equal footing as far as experience. Stephen actually came here two years before me, maybe three, maybe even longer than that. And, and he worked at the Museum of American Art before he came here. And so there was another fellow that was working with Stephen here. And I can’t think of his name. But he left here to go work for the Museum of the American Indian. The Museum of American Indian on the Mall hadn’t been built yet in 1994, but it was in the planning stages. And, I believe they were doing exhibits up in New York where a lot of the Smithsonian’s American Indian material was stored in a facility up in New York City. So I can’t say that I had a mentor here. I had a mentor at African Art, whose name was Richard Franklin, who was a very disciplined and understated kind of exhibit designer. And I learned a lot from Richard. Two of which I try to pass on to people that I know here that are working in exhibits. Richard taught me that good exhibit design is the sum of all its details. And I take from that good exhibit installation is the sum of all its details. In other words, if you have sloppy detail here, and a sloppy detail there, that somebody’s let go because of time constraints or whatever, it lessens the quality of the installation. Most museums are very detail oriented. Everything’s done very well. So the exhibit will hold up over time. But two, because it’s been designed that way. Designers are very attentive to detail. You know, are the miters on the picture frames put together, you know, as well as they can be? That kind of detail. That’s my mentor. And, you know, another term for it, and, and I’ve heard it as kind of a cliché, but I think it’s true. Designers and artists have used this term for probably centuries, but I’ve heard the term, God is in the details. So that’s my overall mentor. The details have to be done well or the overall design is lessened. If the details aren’t paid attention to, if the details aren’t carried out. So Richard Franklin from the Museum of African Art was my mentor. And there was no design mentor when I came here. That’s not a criticism of the Archives, it was just the way we’re set up. I came in here as an equal to one other designer. And Emily Soapes was our supervisor in 1994. Chris Smith became our supervisor. Chris had been a long- time Archives employee, who was a curator before she became a supervisor of the curators and the exhibit designers. Chris became the supervisor, I believe in the late 90s." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "So was there any sort of education or training?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Well, you know, in my generation, and I’m in my sixties, most of the people that worked in exhibits, in exhibit design, in the museum world, whether it was a history museum, a natural history museum, an art museum, most of the people came from either a graphic design background or a fine arts background. But, beginning in the 80s, as museums grew, as budgets grew, as there’s more and more exhibit work, there began to be college programs for exhibit designers. And even writing design was covered in some college programs. So there are several programs around the country now in universities where you can get a degree in exhibit design. But when I finished college in the 70s, I don’t believe any of those programs existed. Yet there was a need for exhibit designers in museums. For example, the guy that first hired me as an assistant designer to him at the Museum of African Art, the Smithsonian’s Museum of African Art—Richard Franklin. Richard, his first passion was, was art. And he had a graduate degree from Yale, a fine arts degree, has a painting degree. And, you know, painters have a pretty hard time making a living. And adjunct teaching doesn’t pay very much at all. And it’s even worse now, I think, than it was 30 years ago. So Richard started working as an independent designer and gradually got into a full-time opportunity at the Smithsonian. And I think that’s what happened to a lot of people who came out of art school with a bachelor’s degree or a fine arts degree. They either ended up teaching or some were successful and could make a living on their art and others moved toward the museum world to get jobs. And I was one of those that came from an art background. But I think most people in design now either come from an architectural background or they’ve gone through a graduate school program, younger people that are coming into museum design field. We’ve got a young lady in our office who’s a graphic designer. But she’s got a master’s degree in exhibit design. And I think she’s got an undergraduate degree in graphic design. The graduate degree is from a college up in Philadelphia and I don’t remember the name of it. And she got her undergraduate’s degree in an art school in New York. She’s very well educated. And those kind of programs were not around when I went through school. I don’t think people came out of school in the 60s or the 70s, and said, “I’m going to be an exhibit designer.” I’ve sort of just gravitated to it over the years because I needed, you know, I needed a job. I wasn’t making any money painting, so I needed a job." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "That’s a good reason." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "So how does the process work for creating a new exhibit?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Well, here at the Archives, it’s changed over the years. When I first got here, it was, you, you know, the curators, and the head of Exhibits would agree on a theme for an exhibit, say two or three years in advance of the exhibit’s opening. And a curator would do the research. And come up with the materials that were going to be in the exhibit after a theme is approved by the head of Public Programs and the curator or the head of Exhibits. And then once the curator did the research and chose the artifacts, whether they’re documents or a combination of documents and artifacts. And, typically some photographic materials that give some context to the documents and artifacts. Then the curator works with the designer. They discuss the curator’s vision or idea or the story that that curator’s trying to tell. And the designer works with the curator in a kind of cooperative effort to come up with an idea of the layout of the exhibit, the look and the feel of the exhibit. And then the designer proceeds to make the drawings. And as the drawings come along, you know, there’s more interaction with the curator. And I think at the end when the drawings are done or when the curator and the designer have pooled their efforts, they get approval for their final design layout, you know, the wall colors are chosen, the exhibit case designs are made. There’s a process where the conservators are brought in to approve the exhibit, the method of exhibiting documents or artifacts, and they often give guidance on that, working with both the curator and the designer. And then, and then once the designer has created all the fabrication drawings, created the layout of the exhibit, made color choices for graphics and wall colors, maybe fabrics inside cases, the finishes on the cases, all of those drawings and specifications are sent out to an exhibit fabrication company. We typically solicit three or four bids for, from known exhibit fabricators and, in the area. And, there are a lot of them in the D.C. area. And, and then we review their proposals. And we choose the one that—w e don’t always go with the lowest price—we go with what we describe as best value. We know what quality of work we’re going to get from different fabrication firms. And, you know, in that process there’s probably the head of Public Programs or the head of Exhibits takes what we’re doing to upper levels for, you know, for final approval. But over the years it seems like the process has—now we have the Foundation that’s involved in the planning of exhibits. They’re not necessarily involved in the planning of contenting for the exhibits. But, their interest has grown because more and more we are funded by outside either corporate funding or private funding that the Foundation goes out to solicit funding for our exhibits. It wasn’t that way until about the early 2003, 2004, we began to get funding for our exhibits from the Foundation for the National Archives. And through the 90s we had, you know, our office was budgeted. We had budgets with government funds for exhibits. And more and more we have less government funds. And we have to work with the Foundation. Therefore, as we plan, we go through the exhibit selection of subject, selection of title, selection of documents, there’s more and more interaction with the people in the Foundation. So that they have an idea of what we’re doing. And they are able to communicate more clearly to the outside people that they are trying to solicit funding from. And so it, so over the last ten years, the process, there’s been more and more people brought into the process of developing an exhibit from outside our office, including the Foundation. For several years, before the most recent restructuring, we were under the Office of Washington Records. And the head of Washington Records was a man named Mike Kurtz, who started working here right out of college in the early 1970s. He has since left. But, until recently he would be like the final approval. And I imagine that he would run whatever we were doing by the Archivist and let them know what the exhibit was going to be next year or six months down the road. So I’m sure everything that we’ve done, and I’m not in touch with this stuff, but I’m sure everything that we’ve done is taken to the highest level at some point before we proceed to get it built and installed. But more and more it seems there’s more-higher level people involved in it now than there was prior to around 2003, prior to 2003. And even in the last five years it seems like there’s more people involved than, than 2003 to say 2010." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "So does the time frame from concept to opening the exhibit, has that time frame expanded with the more elaborate structure of processing the exhibit?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "That’s a pretty good question. It depends on the size of the exhibit and the cost of the exhibit. We also do a lot of what we call feature document exhibits, which we set up either in the East Rotunda Gallery or the West Rotunda Gallery. And typically it’s a one case exhibit with one document and some graphic, some information about the document. And typically those exhibits are, you know, like the anniversary of the Constitution or some President dies. And I’ve been here for, through a few of those. Those are very impromptu exhibits. But, I remember when Ronald Reagan died. I don’t remember what document we exhibited but we put an exhibit, we put an exhibit together within a few days. I think the curator on that was prepared for that because everybody knew, because he was ill for a long period of time. And so the curator who did that exhibit had something picked out, probably a couple of years ahead of time. But we do a lot of impromptu exhibits. This facsimile of the _U.S.S. Constitution_ , we exhibited that original drawing, which we have. It’s a record here at the Archives. That’s a facsimile copy. We exhibited that at the request of the Archivist, the current Archivist, three years ago, I think. Maybe for the anniversary of the beginning of the War of 1812. I can’t remember specifically. So, small exhibits can happen within a very short time frame. But an exhibit like the _Records of Rights_ , which was big money, lots of money, outside exhibit design firm, a lot of time, and a lot of bureaucracy to get it done. Because there were so many people involved in it, that, the concept of that exhibit, I believe, we started talking to the design firm about that exhibit two and a half to three years before that exhibit opened. So I would say the curators started talking to the design firm about two years. And our curators were researching the topic, the theme and coming up with ideas for documents, I believe, about three years before that exhibit opened. So that would be three years out beginning research for an exhibit to the time it opens to the public, for both the _Public Vaults_ exhibit, as well as the _Records of Rights_ exhibit, both permanent exhibits here. The Public Vaults Exhibit opened in November of 2004. And I believe the research for that exhibit probably started around 2001. And, again, that was an outside design firm. And, but an exhibit in the O’Brien Gallery. And that’s where we have our somewhat major, but temporary exhibits. I would say the idea, the theme of those exhibits, are being discussed sometimes three and four years out from the opening. And they go through approval process through the upper levels before they’re finalized, before they decide well, there’s an exhibit coming up in there that’s going to open, I believe, it’s going to open in the fall or next winter, on Prohibition. And the Archives has a lot of records on Prohibition, various posters and laws, and I believe there’s been talk amongst the exhibit staff of a Prohibition exhibit probably started three to four years ago. And it was a curator that came up with the idea. And, you know, curators come up with ideas and they get talked about in meetings and some of them take and some of them are discarded. And, but I would say that the ideas start to germinate three or four years in advance. But the actual work, the researching for documents and the writing of the script for the exhibit, the research starts, maybe two years ahead of the exhibit opening. And the designer gets involved maybe a year ahead of the exhibit opening, approximately. Ideally, further ahead but, in reality, it often doesn’t happen more than a year ahead. Because sometimes when a designer gets involved the curator is still coming up with final choices for documents. And there is input from other offices once they know what we have. Our curators go to the archivists for different Record Groups and seek out suggestions. We’re thinking about an exhibit on Prohibition so they go to these different Record Groups and ask them, “Do you have any records that we might consider for our exhibit?” So archivists are brought into this process too, but in that kind of way. I think every once in a while we’ll have an archivist come forward and make a suggestion for an exhibit. I think it happens, but it doesn’t happen often. I think they would like to have more input than they do. I don’t know that first hand. But it’s a big place and the Exhibits Office has become public face of the Archives in some ways. And I think that there are archivists that would like to be more involved in what’s exhibited. And I don’t have any specifics on that, but I do know that that goes on over the years. It’s not a problem, it’s just part of our process of developing exhibits and the content of exhibits." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "How has the touchscreen technology influenced exhibit design and creation?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Touchscreen technology probably has been around maybe about ten years now. It’s gotten more and more complex. We have a big table touchscreen in the _Records of Rights_ exhibit. I can’t remember the size of it. But I know it’s at least 20 feet long and 6 feet across. And people can work from four different positions. And they have access to the same records from two on one side and two on the other. And, and it’s a big draw up there in that exhibit. So how do touchscreens influence exhibits? I think that, you know, Marvin Pinkert, who was the Director of Exhibits and Public Programs here from around 2000 to the time he left about 2012. Marvin Pinkert is the one that introduced the use of touchscreens in our exhibits. We wanted more interactive exhibits. He believed that interactive exhibits were more attractive to younger people and would bring more families to the Archives. And make our exhibits more attractive to a wider audience. So I think they have influenced how we do exhibits because you bring kids through an exhibit and if you watch them, I mean that’s where they go. They go to the interactives. And they figure them out pretty quickly. They figure out how to use them. Sometimes I think a certain percentage of them are mostly interested in figuring out how they work. And then they move on to the next one, whether or not they get involved with the documents, I’m not sure how, how successful that is as far as getting people involved with more documents. I’m sure it has a certain level of success and is successful in that way. I just don’t know to what extent it is. I do know that interactive exhibits are very expensive to bring them into our exhibits. You pay an outside firm for the computer program. You pay our own people to do the research for the documents that we want in the program and the script, the text that we want in the program. We have to pay an outside exhibit fabrication firm that has the technical skills to purchase all that equipment, put it all together, and specify what we need. Typically our exhibits with interactives in them, computer interactives, we have to maintain a contract with outside firms so there’s a constant, monthly outlay of maintenance contracts for all of our interactive exhibits. And the more interactive exhibits in an exhibit, the bigger that monthly cost— currently we have a contract with a fabrication contractor in Lorton called Design and Production, they go by D&P Inc. They installed both the _Public Vaults_ in 2004 and the _Records of Rights_ in 2013. And the Foundation maintains a contract with them for servicing those exhibits, X number of hours per month. They show up here in the morning hours, prior to opening. So we have ongoing contracts. I don’t know exactly what those contracts are, but, you know, I think they’re a few thousand dollars a month. And just maintenance, not to mention stuff that breaks and needs repaired. Sometimes that’s covered within those contracts. And if it’s a major problem, then it’s probably not. But, you know, interactive exhibits have changed museum visitors’ experience greatly here at the Archives. And it’s going on across the country. I don’t know if you see them as often in big art museums. You see some of them, some in art museums, but not to the extent that we have them in the _Public Vaults_ and in the, in the _Public Vaults_ exhibit and the _Record of Rights_ exhibit." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "I asked that because, compared to some of the other national museums here in D.C., the National Archives Museum actually has a lot more of them per gallery than most of the other museums do." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "I think part of the reason is Marvin Pinkert came here in the year 2000. I believe he was hired in, 2000 or 2001. He came here from the Museum of Science and Industry, which at that time was a very progressive, large, well-funded museum. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but it’s along Lake Michigan, south of Chicago and it’s a huge place. And it’s a museum that is based on the concept of interactive experience as opposed to putting pictures on the wall or putting scientific gadgets, you know, in a vitrine, a display case. They have one of the early commercial airliners hanging up. That you can get on the airplane and sit in a seat and the pilot gets you ready for takeoff and you go through the process of taking off with the noise and, so Marvin brought that here. That, interactive experience, whether it was an interactive with a computer or it was interacting with an environment. They have a coal mine shaft there. I think that’s where I was with him when we went there. I think they have a coal, I may be thinking of a museum in Minneapolis that he took us to. When Marvin first came here in 2000 or 2001, he made a mission of teaching our staff about interactive experience, whether it’s interactive with an environment in a history museum or computer interactives. So, Marvin was the visionary behind the _Public Vaults_ exhibit and the _Records of Rights_ exhibit. And so you see more interactives in those exhibits because that’s part of his vision, part of his belief for museum exhibits." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "So what’s your preference?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "I’m still, you know, I’m an old codger. I still really like to walk in and see a document, a real document, a label describing the document, maybe a contextual image that gives me a little more idea about what the document’s about. I like to see real documents. That’s my preference. But I was working in exhibits long before computer interactives come along and I came from a fine arts background. I’m not a computer person, although I’ve used computer in my work for the last 20-some years. But I started doing all my drawings on the board. I actually have an associate degree right out of high school of architectural drawing. So I learned to draw. I went to college for two years to learn to draw architectural drawings for buildings and highways, and bridges and that sort of thing. So, it’s been an adjustment for me, interactive exhibits. But I sincerely believe they enhance our _Public_ _Vaults_ exhibit and our _Records of Rights_ exhibit. It’s just, I think we have seven cases in the _Records of_ _Rights_ exhibit that have real original documents that we change out regularly, keep them fresh. And so there’s still enough people here that believe in original documents that we still have original documents interacted with the interactive exhibits. I wouldn’t be surprised to walk in here eight or ten years from now and find no more original documents in one of our temporary, you know, year-long exhibits. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that happen. I’m not saying that it will. But, you know, there’s a growing trend of more and more interactive, computer interactive, specifically, exhibits." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well, one particular question I had with the exhibits was how do you choose the voices for the narrating the audio exhibits?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Wow. You know that’s a question I’m not sure I have the answer for. We have a couple of people on staff. And we have somebody down in the education department who works with outside contractors when we have to get a narrator for something or when we have to have footage put together in a, in a kind of a video for presentation in the exhibit. We work with outside businesses that do that kind of work for the museum industry, the advertising industry, the movie industry, whatever. And we have two people, Darlene McClurkin, who works in the Exhibits office. That’s when she usually gets involved with an exhibit, when it involves photographic imagery, when it involves footage of video. I mean the Archives, as you may know, has all kinds of footage of, you know, World War II, for instance, just an incredible amount of footage. So when a curator wants to bring some sort of footage and it needs to be narrated, usually Darlene and a man in our education program, Tom Nastick—Tom Nastick runs the film program here at the Archives where we show films down in the theatre on a regular basis. So those are the people that are brought into the exhibit design and conceptual stages of the exhibit to go out to the contractors that will get us a narrator or whether or not they’re looking for a specific voice, you know, whether they have this idea they want, say, Robert Redford to narrate. I don’t know if they go that far or if they just work with a narrator that’s a professional, local actor. I mean a lot of actors get into doing that, that’s part of their repertoire, in order to make a living. So I don’t know how the narrator is chosen." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "But, but there is a process." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "I was going to say, you have a volunteer here if you need one." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "You know, I wouldn’t be surprised. Is that something that you would do, is that what you’re saying?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Yeah. And your interest in architecture. And I was touring one of the galleries last week and saw that there is a couple architectural drawings hanging up on the walls to showcase some of the documents that the Archive has. I was interested, why isn’t there anything about the Archives building itself? It’s such an interesting icon." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "[Interposing]—that exhibit’s been there since 2004. And I was not involved in exhibit, the early stage of it. And then for a period I was involved in changing out the original documents. Through the core of that exhibit, the big hallway, is called the _Record of America._ And when you come into the west side of the exhibit, the entrance to the west side, are records from our early history. There’s probably a George Washington letter in one of the cases on the left or right as you walk in. And as you go around and come out the other side, there’s more contemporary and different kinds of records, like sound. There’s some sound recording. There’s an interactive with some Vietnam War, I want to say casualty lists, but I’m not sure about that. But, the architectural drawings that you’re referring to are kind of in the middle, kind of like early 20th Century, or late 19th Century?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "And there’s a chronologic order to the _Record of America._ And I’m not sure how the drawings are chosen. And the Archives has a lot of like what I call presentation drawings where architects have drawn—like sometimes we see elevations of a new building, like a new postal museum from the 30s or a new courthouse from early 20th Century. These projects that were funded by the government. We have, we have a lot of the architectural records. I don’t see too many actual architectural drawings. I think we did exhibit an architectural drawing of the Washington Monument in that space several years ago. And they’re typically originals, so they’re only out there for, depending what the media is, sometimes it is six months, sometimes it’s a year. If the drawing has watercolor in it or a certain kind of ink, they don’t like to leave it out there. Watercolor has some pretty strong restrictions by conservation, typically three to six months. Because light will eventually fade watercolors. Not all watercolors because they’re all made with different pigments and different metals. But some watercolors will fade quickly. And the same with oil painting over the long term. So there are a lot of drawings of this building, I’ve actually seen a lot of the blueprints. I think we have the original vellum drawings done by the architect John Russell Pope out in College Park in the records division that has the big map-size, you know, Richard Smith used to be the head of that operation until he retired about four years ago. But I can’t tell you for certain if I remember architectural drawings from this building. But I’ve actually been out there and looked at the architectural drawings myself." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "I was just, I was just curious about that." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "So have you worked with any odd or strange or interesting materials?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Probably the most interesting project that I’ve worked on here at the Archives is when the Archives started planning for a renovation of the Rotunda. And the Rotunda was closed down from 2001, the summer of 2001 to September 2003. I think we reopened the Rotunda on Constitution Day, which is September 17 in 2003. And in that time, I was on a team of people, Archives people, and then there were a lot of people from the National Institute of Standards and Technology out in Gaithersburg. The acronym is NIST, N-I-S-T. The conservators, designers, engineers, optics engineers, paper conservators—there was a large team of people from inside the Archives. And then consultants from the outside of the Archives, a team of I would say 20 to 30 people, that began planning for the removal of the Charters from their old sealed encasements that were also built by NIST in the 1950, ‘51, ‘52, somewhere along there. And so when the Rotunda was closed we started these meetings and planning, I think in 1999. And most of the meetings took place out at College Park or out in Gaithersburg at National Institute of Standards and Technology. And it was a group of NARA people along with NIST people and some other private consultants, physics people, and engineering type people to come up with a new plan to take the Charters out of their present encasements, which were pretty thin. Encased between glass and I believe bronze frames. And they were sealed. And were sealed with helium gas to keep oxygen out—apparently oxygen’s not good for the documents long term. And so I was on that team representing the Exhibits Office from an aesthetic point of view. Because we had conservators, we had a lot of conservators on the group. We had, as I said, engineers, physics people, optics people, but we didn’t have anybody to have some say about how these are going to look in these new cases, what the new encasements are going to look like. And how they are going to appear in the new exhibit cases that are being built in the Rotunda for these encasements. And I was that person representing exhibits. My boss, Chris Smith, was on that team of people. And it was a two-year process, the design process. And, you know, Exhibits got to weigh in pretty well on the look of what’s out there now. The way the documents are sitting on a platform, kind of floating in a dark space so you can’t see the interior of those encasements. Just another example, we had lot of influence on the shape of the frames. Because we had some understanding of how the lighting would be in those cases, which nobody else did. Nobody else was an exhibit designer on this this team of people. And one other thing that we had a strong influence on is the gold frames. The materials for the encasements, the frames are made of titanium. And in the year 2000 titanium was kind of the metal du jour around the country. I don’t know if you’re a golfer, but that’s when titanium golf clubs became very popular. Because titanium shafts are lighter and stronger than steel. And so there was a lot of titanium in the atmosphere almost. So there was this company, somewhere in the northeast of the country, who heard of our project. And they wanted to donate the titanium that would be part of the encasements for the original Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. And there were some people in the project, in particular one guy who was one of the higher-up engineers in charge of the project, who had direct contact with this company that was donating the titanium, which is an expensive material. And these encasements are—I can’t remember the size of them, they’re about 30 inches or more high. No, they’re closer to 40 inches high because the documents are close to 30 inches. So the encasements are more like 40 inches high, 30, 32 inches wide. And so it’s a lot of material. And the Archives accepted the donation. So there were people who wanted to the frames to be raw titanium. You know, to sort of pay homage to the people who made the donation, not to put their name on the cases or anything like that, so my boss and I thought that was a bad idea, the raw titanium. Because raw titanium really looks like your stainless steel kitchen sink. It has that same gray, silvery, so we pushed for gold plating." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Yeah. So it can breathe." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "And, and probably at that time, gold was probably $300 or $400 an ounce. And now it’s, you know, it fluctuates between, I don’t know, $1400 and $1800 an ounce now. Maybe if it was at that price, and I went out and did some research and I found a local company that did gold plating down in Lorton, right off, you know, like within a mile off 95. I can’t remember the exit. But I actually went down and visited them. And talked to them about it. And so what I learned is they can’t plate titanium. They have to put a nickel plate on the titanium, and then gold on the nickel. So I think that we ended up getting the nickel plating done somewhere else and the gold plating down there. And the, and the gold is 23.999% pure gold, 20 karat, 24 karat is pure. And this is 23.999. I mean this is pure as 24 karat. Yes. It’s pretty thin plate. I don’t know what the micron measurement aspect, but anyway, our office definitely made that happen or voiced loud enough that it happened. Our conservators weren’t crazy about the idea because they were concerned that, you know, if you touched it, it might scratch. Or if you, you know, people handling it, and they, they were going to be handling these things. There, the, the, the conservators have to maintain the, the vaults and the documents. And so they’re concerned about people touching, their staff touching them, and the fingerprints not coming off the gold very well, but that’s how we got gold plated. And of all the projects I’ve been involved here, I was involved in the project in ‘99, 2000, and 2001 until we had a final design. And then NIST built the encasements in their shops out in Gaithersburg in 2000, 2001, and 2002. And I wasn’t really privy to the budget, but it was a few million dollars to build those encasements. Because there were so many high level consultants involved in part of the team—you know, there was a lot of research on what glass we use. And how do we finish the interior of the aluminum bases, which turned out to be, again, Exhibits had a big influence here. We suggested a black interior so with the minimal light you couldn’t really see the interior. If you could see the interior of the bases are made of aluminum. The black that you see around the document on the platform are hard anodized aluminum. And if there was enough light in there you could probably see the machine marks. Because the aluminum, the bases, were machined from about 4 inch deep, 4-1/2 deep by 45 or 42 inch by 30 inch, 30-something inch blocks of aluminum. And there was research on what grade of aluminum are we going to use. I mean, I didn’t know there was so many different kinds of aluminum. But we used something that was referred to as aircraft quality. And there’s a designation for it, anyway. The NIST people were very knowledgeable and they made the recommendation of what aluminum we used. But, the bases are all machined out. There’s no welds. So those encasements with the frames and the bases are about that deep, outside dimensions. If you ever get a chance, up in the _Public Vaults,_ which would be the southeast corner, is a little film of one of our meetings at NIST. And there’s kind of a quarter model, a full-scale quarter model of how the encasement is built. And it’s a pretty interesting thing. Because it’s machined just like, before they machined the final, so that we had some models to work with and approve. And so you can actually see how those encasements are built if you look. We have a quarter model in an exhibit case that’s the quarter model is displayed, I believe, on a 30 degree angle. Maybe it’s a 45, I can’t remember, with a mirror on the bottom so you can see what’s going on in the bottom of the encasement. And, so that was one of my major projects. Probably the project that I’ll always feel the best about. Very interesting project because I got to see the actual sheets of documents, actually, you know, set on the platforms and make sure they fit. And where that work was done in a secret location in College Park, where they were located for a few years. You know, while the Rotunda was closed down. So it was very interesting to get to see those like that close and outside of any kind of glass or encasement. I think that was your question, what interesting projects." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "That was, that is definitely fascinating." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Yeah. The most recent project that I worked on that was a pretty interesting project to me, was the exhibit about the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis. Because in 1963, I think I was in seventh or eighth grade. And sat in our living room with my parents watching Kennedy give that speech about the danger that’s at hand because he gave the speech about the Russians have missiles in Cuba. And the missile range pretty much covers the United States. And, and that, you know, people need to be prepared. Because Kennedy was determined to force Khrushchev to take the missiles out. Anyway, the exhibit was designed by Ray Ruskin and me. And it was, 50 years, ‘63. So it was the 60th anniversary. No, 50th anniversary in 2013. It was called _To the Brink: the Cuban Missile Crisis_ or, I think the _Cuban_ _Missile Crisis_ was the sub-title and _To the Brink_ was the title. And a lot of original documents, and the curator was Stacey Bredhoff, who works at the Kennedy Library. She used to work here. And she worked with Ray and me to come up with that exhibit. So that’s another exhibit that I’m very proud of. And, you know, it was an exhibit that was important to me because it was an event that I remember very clearly. And it was a scary time. Because Kennedy went right on national television, you know, right after evening news. And made this announcement that this was happening. And, it was scary because it was at a time when people were making bomb shelters, you know. The threat of nuclear war was pretty high with the nuclear testing was going on. The Russians were testing and then we would test a bigger bomb. And then they would test a bigger bomb. And that was going on in that period. So I remember it well. And so working on that exhibit was very interesting for me. There’ve been a lot of other exhibits between now and when I started here in ‘94. But that one stands out. The Charters encasement project stands out." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Now, do you have any interaction with tourists or with researchers?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Well, our curators research their own exhibits. Do you mean if I have, oh, do I have interaction with tourists?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "In the process of conducting your job with the exhibits." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Yeah. I understand. It’s not part of my job to interact with tourists. But sometimes I’m up there. I mean, I’m up in our exhibits frequently. And if tourist asks questions, you know, typically they’ll see the badge. And, you know, so every once in a while a tourist will come up to me and ask a question about an exhibit. And if it’s something I have an answer for, I’ll interact with them. If it’s something I can’t answer, I will try to get information and either get a way to contact them or give them the name and a phone number to contact. Usually one of our curators. So I don’t have a lot of interaction with tourists, but it’s not part of my job. I’m not a spokesman for the Archives. I’m a behind the scenes guy." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well have there been any challenges that you’ve had to face working here at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "I’m going to try to say this as, as simply as I can. Having worked at the Detroit Institute of Arts, which was a quasi-city organization, but was run more by a foundation. Having worked there for a few years in the 70s and into the early 80s, and then working at the Smithsonian’s small Museum of African Art, which had a staff of 50 or 53 people top to bottom, the level of bureaucracy was very minimal in those places. And so, probably one of the biggest adjustments for me here at the Archives, to do your job, it’s a heavy bureaucracy. Sometimes I think that it’s that way, not because it’s a government agency, but it used to be part of the GSA. And I think when I first came here there was a lot of the paperwork, a lot of work orders and, you know, Form SF, standard form, number, number, number. I mean we had a lot of that. And I think it was a carry-over from when the Archives split and became an independent agency from the GSA, I believe in 1985. So I believe some of the bureaucracy has carried over. But, in my experience, it’s gotten heavier. Especially in the last five years. So that’s a challenge for any creative people. Now, I think the curators there’s maybe not as much so, but the designers, we’re involved in designing and getting the things built by outside contractors. And so there’s a lot of laws and restrictions about, you know, contracts can only be a certain amount. And if they’re over a certain amount, then they have to go out widely available to bidders. And there’s a lot of hoops to jump through. And, and I’m going to say this very straight forwardly, the most recent restructure, from where I sit, has not made anybody’s life better here. I haven’t talked to one person who feels that it’s made our operation more efficient and better. That’s just the way I feel about it. That’s been my experience. I hope it works out in the long run. But I’ve been here for 20 years. So, you know, every time we get a new Presidential appointee, two out of the four that have been here in the time I’ve been here, have restructured the place. The first one was John Carlin, who was, who was a governor. And he was a pretty dynamic Archivist. And I think that his restructure worked fairly well. He was here during the renovation, during the changeover from when we shut down the Rotunda for two years and had the renovation. But the most recent change, combined with the government budget cuts, I don’t know. A lot of people are not happy about the change, they don’t see how it’s really helped us. In my mind it makes more sense for the Archives to hire the Archivist and not the White House. And let the Archives hire, you know, either someone who knows how the place has worked in the past. And knows how to make it work better. Or, you know, or have a national search for an experienced Archivist, whether it’s the head of a state archives but, I don’t know that the Presidential appointee thing works best for the Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "You mentioned the sequestration of recent years, but has there been any other significant events that have, that’s affected your career? Like Presidential elections or September 11th attacks, any interesting stories?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Well, September, September 11th has had a big impact on the Archives in that the people who ran the security operation in the Archives prior to September 11, was, well, there were two people down here and there were more people out at College Park. And things were quite different. We didn’t have our bags inspected as we left each day. We didn’t have all of these magnetic passes from one part of the building to the other. People like myself and the curators had access to stack areas. And, of course, the stack areas that had the more valuable things, the priceless things, those were locked and those were maintained by archivists. And you had to make arrangements to get in to see, you know, for example, the Emancipation Proclamation was kept in a vault along with some other documents, and sometimes we would have to go up there for one reason or another, either to take a measurement because it’s going in our upcoming exhibit. So it’s a lot harder to get access to the storage areas now. Although, I just heard recently that they’re reintroducing the idea or somebody’s trying to reintroduce the idea to give curators access again because curators actually used to go into the vault areas when they’re looking for certain subject materials, they could go into these storage areas and go through the storage boxes and just kind of leaf through documents and look at them without having to check them out and go to a reading area or, you know, one of the public research areas out in College Park. In fact, I think, there was a time when curators checked out those materials and took them to their office to look at them more closely. There were proper procedures for doing that. It wasn’t just sort of they walk in and bring something back to their office. So the security of the building and the size of the security staff, the professional NARA staff, has changed a lot since 2001. And I think early on there was thought that those documents could be a target. I don’t know where you were September of 2001. But, you know, a lot of us were waiting for the next shoe to drop after those initial bombings. I remember I’d take the bus to go over to the Pentagon. I mean, I took the train to the Pentagon. I live in Annandale. I take the train to the Pentagon and then I take a bus from the Pentagon out to Annandale. That’s my public transportation route every day for a lot of years. And I remember after 9/11, my thought was Washington, you know, Washington is going to get hit again, sooner or later. And I always thought, in that period, we didn’t know if there was another hit coming shortly, the logic was, very possible there is. So I avoided the subway. I thought the subway, you know, a place like L’Enfant Plaza or, you know, these big intersections where there’s a number of trains stopped at once and a lot people, so L’Enfant Plaza and what’s the one up here on the Yellow Line, the first one up? Well, the next two stops on the Yellow Line where they intersect with the Red Line and those kind of places I thought there were perfect places for a bomb. So for six months I went out here on Seventh Street and caught a bus over to the Pentagon rather than the train. And in the morning I would transfer from one bus at the Pentagon to another bus, a local bus that came in here. For six months after 9/11. So, that was the effect on me personally. So I’m not surprised that the Archives’ security was beefed up and changed significantly. In fact, we have a lot of ex-military security people running the security operation here at the Archives. Dave Adams is a 20-year Air Force guy. I’m not sure what his position in the military was, but I think he was in security. So we have a lot of, Dave Adams, who’s the head guy here in this building. What was your question again?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "If any major events have affected your career?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Affected my career? Well, I think coming here in 1994 from the Museum of African Art changed my career a lot. Because it’s a very different kind of place than an art museum or a cultural, African Art is kind of a cultural museum as much as an art museum, African culture museum. And, you know, I stayed here. I stayed here a long time. I had one possible opportunity for another exhibit design position when I was about 50 years old. It was out in Kansas City, in Nelson-Atkins Museum. I had an interview but I wasn’t offered a position. But it was at a point in my career where I had to decide am I going to stay in the government or am I going to go back and work in an art museum where I came from? And after I had been given an interview date, I went out there and checked out the museum, incognito. I went out there on my own money. I wanted to look at the facility and their collection before I went out there a couple of weeks later for the interview. And so that’s when I made a choice to stay here at the Archives. And I had been here, at that point I had been here five or six years, I guess. So I think just coming here changed my career a lot. And, working here I’ve gained an appreciation for what the Archives does. And the rich variety of the kinds of material we have here, the history of the country. And, and I’ve come to appreciate these old, original documents, even these very simple 19th century typeset with the big signatures. I don’t know. And the only other thing I would say changed my career here, was being involved in that encasement project. I think I met a wider range of people who work here. And developed somewhat of a kind of a solid guy kind of reputation. Interacting with a number of people from other offices and outside people, including the people out at NIST. I became golfing buddies with a couple of people at NIST as a result of working with them for two years." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well do you have any associations or organizations you’re a part of, such as the SAA or any of the others?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "I’ve been in and out of the American Association of Museums, as a member. I’ve gone to AAM conferences off and on through the last 25 years. But other than that, no. I don’t belong to any kind of exhibit design organization. I’m sure there are some out there. I’m not aware of them. No. I guess I’m just not that ambitious about this, this career, to be involved in a lot of different, frankly, for many years the job has been very demanding. And there’s just not a lot of time for a lot of other kinds of committees and outside organizations. At least from my perspective. A lot of other people, professional people, join organizations. I don’t know. It’s just never been my inclination." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "That actually reminds me of a question I had for you earlier. In your work, do you have any connection with the Boeing Learning Center, since it’s also on the museum side of the building?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "No. I did not. One of the people in our staff who was a curator, left a few years ago to go work for the, I think he’s working for the White House Visitor Center. His name is Will Sandoval. And Will is a former military man. He was a major in the Army, who was in the Gulf War. And still talks about it with great fondness, his experience in the Gulf War. Of course, most military experience in the Gulf War was a lot different than the Iraq War. But Will was a very capable person. And he had the discipline, had the follow-through discipline of his military background. I was in the Navy a long time ago. So I kind of know there’s a discipline that you learn when you’re in the service. If you’re in the Army now, and you come out of boot camp and you go to Iraq. And then you come back for a few months and you go back to Iraq. I don’t know if you have that same discipline that you carry into your professional world after you get out, as Will might have had. But Will Sandoval was part of the planning, working with the Foundation and Marvin Pinkert and Lee Ann Potter, who was the head of the Education Program at that time. So, Will worked in our office. Lee Ann Potter worked for Marvin Pinkert. And between Lee Ann and Marvin and Thora Colot, who ran the Foundation at that time, the Boeing Learning Center is their vision, a combination of the group. And Will was the one from our office that worked with the contractor to get it built and installed. And we miss Will because Will gets things done. He knows how to communicate with the contracting world. And a respectful communication and therefore gets cooperation and we miss him here. But, Will Sandoval, in our office, was responsible for the fabrication, getting the fabrication and the installation done. And Marvin Pinkert, Lee Ann Potter, and, to some extent, the Foundation, who paid for it with Boeing’s funds. The Foundation is the one who solicited the funding from Boeing. They’re the ones responsible for the Learning Center, the in-house people that are responsible. I had nothing to do with that project. That work was all being planned and done in a period between 2001 and 2004. I can’t remember when the Learning Center opened. I think it opened around 2004. But Ray Ruskin and I were involved in planning and working on designs of the exhibits that were going to in the new O’Brien Gallery, which was also new in 2003, I think, when the building re-opened we opened a new exhibit in there. There may have been a few months delay on that. But, in the O’Brien Gallery we have changing exhibits. Some of the exhibits have been as short as three months. And other exhibits has been up almost a year over the last 10 or 11 years. But those will continue to be changing exhibits in that space." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Do you think it’s going to be difficult to let go of your duties and responsibilities from the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "I do. And this is something that is sort of becoming clearer to me. I announced to my boss and our staff that I was going to retire sometime in late March. I made the announcement that I was going to retire April 30th. And then in April there were some financial advantages to changing to the end of May. And so, two weeks after I started processing for April 30, I changed my mind to May 30th. And since then I figured out I do have some apprehension about retirement. I feel like I have a lot invested our Rotunda. There is one other project that I would like to talk a little bit about that was very important to me. But I’ll talk about it after, we recently redid the lighting in the Rotunda and in the East and West Gallery and in what we call the Constitution Avenue Foyer, which is that area below the steps up into the Rotunda where the big vaulted ceiling is. And we used to bring the public in that way. But, what was your question again?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Letting go of the—" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "[Interposing] Letting, letting the work go, yeah. Yeah. I think I have cared about a lot of the work. I care about the Rotunda. And I care about the quality of the work in the galleries. And I care about the upkeep of the galleries. And part of me worries that, and maybe this is just an egoistic thing. But part of me worries that if I’m not here, other people don’t pay attention to those things. And you know how, if somebody in the office is taking care of something on a daily basis or weekly basis, nobody else worries about it, because so-and-so’s taking care of it. Now another guy in our office is tasked with overseeing the day-to-day maintenance and operation of the two permanent exhibits, the _Records of Rights_ t and the _Public Vaults_ . But, I don’t know. The Rotunda is kind of like this hallowed space. And, yeah. I kind of worry and it’s hard for me to let go of making sure that everything goes well up there, because I was involved in the design and the eventual production of the exhibit cases up there, all of them. I wasn’t the designer. But I was involved in the team of people that oversaw it, come up with the requirements, what we needed there. And in all those cases, so I have a lot of my work and time here is invested in a lot of what’s in the Rotunda. Even including the inside structures of the exhibit cases, the side cases on either side of them. So it’s, yeah, it’s hard to let go. Because right now we don’t have anyone really in charge of the Exhibits office. And I don’t know who they’re going to hire. But I hope they have a provision for maintaining. Because it really does take the Exhibits office to keep an eye on things, to keep things clean up there. And, because it’s kind of our exhibit areas. And so, if somebody’s not paying attention, stuff can go in disrepair and not be paid attention to and I’ve kind done a lot of that over the years. And so it’s hard to let go of that. And I’ve watched our exhibit program sort of be, well, more people from the outside are involved in our program. And I’m not always sure that’s for the best. And I’m worried about where that’s going. I’m not going to go into any detail about that, but I worry about the direction our Exhibit Program is going. Because we really haven’t had anybody in charge of it, anybody with a real strong vision since Marvin Pinkert left here two years ago. Chris Smith was our director in the time that Marvin was gone. And Chris is a long-time employee of the Archives who retired in December. And she was well-liked by a lot of people. And she did a good job of running the Exhibits Program. And, you know, her vision of the Exhibits Program was not the same as Marvin’s vision. And frankly, Marvin was a very dynamic person and I hope we get somebody like that to replace Chris, who has been gone now for nearly six months. And I hope we get a person to run the program that has vision and has influence with the people outside of our program, who has the trust of them. Yeah. I’m concerned about where we’re going. But, so, the Archives, you know, to a large extent, I’ve defined myself by my work here in the Archives, and the other museums that I worked in—I didn’t get married till later in life. I don’t have kids. So I think many of us who are single through most of our career, we tend to define our self-esteem and our identity is more about what we do rather than about our family, you know what I mean? I’m mean, it’s a generalization and I know. I have some, I have some apprehensions about the adjustment from being part of this all these years and getting up on the first Monday morning and realizing I’m not going to work anymore. But I’m also ready. I’m 65 and there have been a lot of stressful years, but it’s been pretty relaxed around here since we opened the _Records of Right_ in December. And within our office it’s been a little more relaxed. There’s still a lot of work going on, but there’s a lot of pressures, exhibit deadlines, they’re never changed. That deadline got changed a month because of the government shutdown. The government shut down in November, October, I can’t remember when we were shut down." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "October, I think." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Yeah. It was, almost three weeks. And that exhibit was initially supposed to open in early November, I think. And it got pushed back to mid-December. I can’t remember if we opened, I think we opened before Christmas." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "And wasn’t the Archives, or the Federal government closed that day, when the exhibit opened? Or that was the Signatures exhibit." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Yeah, the Signature exhibit." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "It was the closed the day of the snowstorm." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "The snow, yeah. No. But it wasn’t, yeah. I was here for the opening of the _Records of_ _Rights_ exhibit. __ I remember coming to work that day, going home, changing clothes, picking up my wife, and coming back for the evening." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well you mentioned the lighting in the Rotunda, I wanted to the talk about that." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "I’ve been thinking about retirement for two years. And one of the things that I wanted to see finished that I had been sort of talking with the facilities manager about and talking to my boss about and we had a new lighting system put in the Rotunda when we opened in 2003. It was a fiber optic lighting system. And there had been some changes made to the fiber optic cabling that diminished the light quality a few years ago. And so we began to look into how to improve that. And meanwhile, LED lighting is sort of growing and getting better and better, the commercial LED lighting. And so I was involved in bringing an LED lighting designer and another company into the building who would install whatever lighting we put up there, whether we redo the cable, fiber optic cable lighting. They convinced me to not spend a couple hundred thousand dollars redoing the fiber optic or upgrading the fiber optic lighting that was already ten years old, and we would be better off investing a few more thousand dollars and tearing out all of the fiber optic lighting and putting all new LED lighting. And there was efforts on my part and my office’s part to have that happen. And we got facilities interested in the idea of having it happen, upgrading what we have. And so it was something that I started working on to make it happen, you know, kind of behind the scenes. I don’t have the authority to make something like that happen. But, over the years I have gained a certain amount of influence with certain people. And, and so we finally got to a point where people agreed with the idea of replacing the old system with the LED. So I worked with an engineer out in College Park, Ron McGanty, who’s a COR, who’s kind of in charge of big construction facilities projects like out at the libraries or this facility. And we wrote up a statement of work with some guidance by the LED people about what we needed. And so we wrote up a statement of work a year and a half ago. And got approval for it from people out at College Park, facilities management people, to go ahead. And when we got prices some people backed off and thought it was too much money. But in the end, the person in charge of facilities out at College Park said go ahead. And we were trying to get it done in a period, because scaffolding would have to be built. Because all these light fixtures up on the high ledges in the Rotunda and in the vaulted ceilings, everything’s up on high ledges. So, we thought scaffolding would have to be built. It would be on wheels and moved out into the work areas at night and moved back into the corner of the Rotunda in the daytime during public hours because we couldn’t shut the Rotunda down; the work had to be done at night. And we were working with Grunley, which a general contractor who’s been in the building now for, I don’t know, 12, 14, 15 years. And they get these kind of projects. The Archives does the funding through them. And they work as the general contractor. So I was determined to stay here till we finished up the Rotunda lighting. And finally got a contractor and got proposals last fall. And then we finally got a schedule to get it done in February. And our office certainly didn’t do it but I felt like I was part of that project and part of getting it done. And it goes in that territory where the lighting in there was kind of dingy, the fiber optic lighting. It had a certain color to it, and so we got this cooler light that’s a little cleaner looking with the new LED system. And, not to mention part of the reason the project got approved out in College Park by the facilities manager, the over-all facilities manager out there, was the Archives is on a mission—and it’s all in Federal government is on—to use less and less carbon energy. So by taking all of those 100, 200, 150 watt metal halide fiber projectors, the source of the light goes through the fiber into the light heads that disperse the light. By removing all of those and putting in this LED system we’re using about 20% of the energy that we were using for the same space just six months ago." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "The LED fixtures are not cheap. And they only last six to eight years and you got to replace them. But, but they’re not using carbon. The fixtures themselves, you know, like 8 or 9 watts is equivalent to a 65 watt fixture, the LED 8 or 9 watt output is, produces the same light that a 60 or 65 watt fixture does. So—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "[Interposing] Wow." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "So we’re pulling a lot less electricity to light the Rotunda. Probably about 20 to 25% of what we were using before." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well have you been recognized with any awards or citations in your career?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "I think I got an Archivist Achievement Award, a group, you know, along with a larger group of people, for both the Charters Encasement Project and the new Rubenstein Gallery project, _Record of Rights_ exhibit. I certainly earned other spot awards over the years. I can’t really sit here and tell you what they are. I’ve never been motivated by awards. But I’m appreciative of the awards I’ve got. I may have gotten another one for the Magna Carta exhibit that we put up a couple of years ago, but I can’t remember. But I’m the kind of person that all of those certificates that I’ve gotten over the years are stuffed in a couple of folders in a file. I appreciate them but I’m not one of those guys that’s got them all up on the wall in my office. Not even one of them. But I do appreciate that I’ve been recognized. Yeah. I feel like I’ve been recognized, well-recognized for my work here at the Archives through the years." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. What do you see as the biggest challenges for the National Archive in the future? From your perspective." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Yeah. Well, I don’t have a lot of insight, I have no insight into the Archives side of the Archives. I don’t interact with the Archives side very much. And I don’t know the archivists in the Archives. I’ve always been on the exhibits area and pretty much stay to myself and within our office over the years. So I’m sure there’s a lot of Archives issues. I know that there’s a lot of issues with electronic records and how does the Archives collect those from government agencies? How do we store them? Because there’s so many different forms and formats. And I know that’s a big issue. I think that the, I think that the current structure of the Archives is going to be a challenge through the years with, in the incoming years. I know that the people who created the structure probably don’t like, hearing that, but that’s my perspective. I think, I’m not sure it’s going to work over the long term. I don’t know what the right answer is, so I don’t speak up a lot about it to them because I don’t have a better idea. I thought things worked okay before. And I don’t think that things work better now. So I think that that’s going to be a challenge. The, I think one of the big challenges for the Archives and will be for the Archives, I think the idea of a changing political appointment for the Archivist in the United States every time we change presidents, I think that, I don’t know that that works good for the Archives itself. I think they come in meaning well and wanting to make a difference, wanting to, but, you know, sometimes you’re, they’re only here for, we had one guy that was only here for two years, Mr. Weinstein. And I don’t know what the background reasons for that were. I mean I’ve heard things, but I, and then, and then we got the current Archivist after Mr. Weinstein left. And he’s the one that brought in the corporate structure. At least that’s the way I understand it. And I, I’ve heard it described that way. So I, I, I think that having a new Archivist every several years that wants to reinvent the wheel, and that’s happened several times in the 20 years I’ve been here, I don’t, I don’t know that that is, is good for the Archives. It frustrates the people who, the people, the career people here who, you know, nobody likes change. I mean sometimes change is necessary and sometimes change is good. But change for the sake of change is not always necessarily good. I’m not saying that’s what we have now. I don’t believe that the change we have now is for the sake of change. I believe that, that the Archivist and his team, you know, genuinely believed that a new structure would be beneficial. But I know a lot of employees around here who don’t see it. And so I think that’s going to be a challenge. And, but I’ve, I really, I have, I have, I have nothing against the current Archivist of the United States. I mean, I’m sure he’s doing the best he can do. And he’s doing it in good faith trying to do the best he can do. But I think we need career archivists who are excellent, to have the ability to rise to the level of the Archivist of the United States. And several years ago, and I can’t remember if George Bush appointed John Carlin or if he’s, if he’s, I think it was George Bush that, in early, no, it had to have been, it had to have been Clinton. John Carlin was a pretty good archivist even though he didn’t have any, he didn’t have any archives experience. He was a politician from Kansas. He was a conservative Democratic governor of Kansas. And a successful one that served, I believe he served two terms out there and then he got, and he was a pretty effective archivist because he trusted the Archives’ staff to, to reorganize itself. And he brought about the reorganization. And I think, I think, I don’t think he wanted to leave when, when the new president, I think it was George Bush that appointed Mr. Weinstein. And Mr. Weinstein replaced John Carlin. Are you familiar with, have you ever looked at the photographs over here?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Mm-hmm." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Yeah. I think Carlin was, was pretty well liked by the staff. He was a, he was a hands-on archivist. Our current Archivist is a hands-on archivist. As far as the other challenge, it’s probably recovering from the drastic budget cuts that the Archives has taken, you know, in the last four years. And in that time the Exhibits Operation budget has been trimmed to, to very minimal amount. And now we’re depending on the Foundation to raise money for exhibits. And if we keep, if we keep trying to create these expensive interactive exhibits, they’re, they require a lot of funding and, and maintenance. And so, I think funding of exhibits is going to continue to be a challenge. But I, I think they always will because it’s a real positive face of the National Archives. It is our, the public face of National Archives and it introduces to the public that come in here as tourists to see the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And they happen to wander into our galleries. It, it opens their eyes to the fact that we’re, we have all this other stuff. And that, that our records of the history of the country or the history of the government of the country. And so I think there’ll always, you know, I think the exhibits will always be funded. I just think it, I think, I think the government, the Archives recovering from these budget cuts, which doesn’t look they’re going to grow anytime soon, or they’re going to grow our budget anytime soon. It’s going to take, take a while. It’s going to be a challenge." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well my last question for you is, what are you going to miss the most?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "There’s a camaraderie here amongst the exhibit staff. So I’ll miss a number of people that I’ve worked with for a lot of years, especially within the Exhibits and the Public Programs part of the, part of the Archives. And, and frankly, the work has been very gratifying. The actual work, not, not the hoops that you have to jump through in the bureaucracy to get the work done. But, the actual work has been, has been very gratifying. And the exposure to a lot of very interesting documents. I mean, being with them, you know, on, on, you know, in, in back rooms and storage areas and seeing these things first hand. And just learning about what’s here. But I would say two things, the people that I’ve worked with, not all the people I’ve worked with, but a lot of the people I’ve worked with. And I’m being a little facetious. I think, I think if everybody’s honest, you know, you don’t enjoy working with all the people you work with, but you enjoy working with some or most of the people you work with. But, but the work and the people, you know, the people I’ve worked with has been the most, the most gratifying. And then, of course, within the work was, was the projects that I’ve mentioned, have been most, to me, it was a privilege to work on the, the encasement of the charters documents project. I mean, it was just downright lucky for a guy who grew up in a small town in Michigan. And fumbled his way through college on his own. And ended up here at the National Archives. And when I think about it, it’s pretty amazing to me because it wasn’t planned. Just, just kind of happened. So, working at the National Archives, for me, is a pretty big deal. And I’ll always be proud of that." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. Is there anything else you want to discuss or mention?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "I think I’ve talked and babbled on long enough." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. Thank you for your time sir." }, { "speaker": "MR. JACKSON", "text": "Thanks. Thanks for giving me this opportunity. I appreciate it. I— National Archives History Office 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW Washington DC 20408" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. JACK KABREL", "text": "This is the oral history recording of Marvin Kabakoff on April 15, 2015, in Waltham, Massachusetts. This will be Marvin’s history, as his retirement is on April 24, 2015. Marvin, describe, if you can, how you came to work at the National Archives and why." }, { "speaker": "MR. MARVIN KABAKOFF", "text": "Okay. I was doing part-time teaching in St. Louis and looking for jobs as a full- time professor and there were no jobs. A friend of mine from grad school, Alan Perry, who was already with the National Archives, suggested that I apply for a position. He said that it was history-related and it paid okay and it had benefits, so it seemed like a good thing to do. And so I took the civil service exam and, a few months after that, was selected for a training position to be an archivist, starting at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What were you doing prior to the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "I was teaching part-time, mostly at community colleges in St. Louis, but actually wherever they would hire me. And jobs were getting scarce, so I needed something permanent and full- time." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "How did your education influence your decision to come to the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Well, I was a history major undergrad. My Ph.D. was in French history, so I wanted to do something that was history-related. And certainly the National Archives has a strong history component and, in fact, to be an archivist at the time, and I’m not sure if it’s still the case, you had to have 30 hours of American history or politics or some related field. And so it’s definitely, my history degree was something useful in a job and actually having a PhD helped. The National Archives was good at the process of hiring a lot of history PhDs who could not get jobs in academia." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Interesting. What would this timeframe be? Can you encapsulate a timeframe period that we’re talking here as your history in the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Yeah. I started in October 1977 in St. Louis, and so, that’s 37 and a half years ago." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What were your impressions of the agency at the time that you began?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "It was certainly very different from academia. There were some things that were just funny. Part of the trade-in was that I was a CIDS trainee, which is Career Intern Development System, and so as a CIDS trainee you were expected to work in all the different parts of the National Personnel Records Center. And then I got sent out for training in arrangement and description at Missouri Historical Society and training in exhibits at the Jefferson National Memorial Expansion Museum, which was the Gateway Arch. But, yeah, for the first time I realized that not everybody got the day off after Thanksgiving. I didn’t know that was a work day for people. More significantly, the style of writing was very different. I was used to writing academically and there was the Cloud Index, when you wrote something for distribution within the Records Center, you know, any kind of memo, the Cloud Index measured the number of multisyllabic words in a sentence and if the measurement was too high then you had to rewrite it to use simpler words. And I was kind of floored by that. But the people were great. And I actually ran into some students of mine. At the time, NARA, or then it was NARS, paid for students to take American history classes, and so several of my coworkers had been students of mine when I was teaching American history at the community college. So that was actually very good. But it was just a very different environment from what I was used to, and challenging in that way. The work was mostly interesting but not all of it; the memorizing was not my favorite part. But there were two of us who were hired who were being trained. We were essentially apprentice archivists with somebody who was out from Washington working on a project and we worked alongside him. And so it was on-the-job training to be an archivist with, yeah, some classes in Washington. There were about 100,000 cubic feet of military organizational records, which most people didn’t know about; they thought we just had personnel records. And those, the organizational records, were unscheduled and so we started out working on the 50,000 cubic feet of Army records. They were all field command records. The military had all field commands send their records to St. Louis between, from the late ‘40s to the early ‘60s. But a lot of the material that was sent dated back much earlier, some of it, the late 19th century. And then that part of the work was really interesting, although coming from essentially a pacifist background and dealing only with military records was certainly a challenge. And again, coming as a historian, when I first started I wanted to save everything because I could figure out some kind of use for every sheet of paper. And then after a period of time of working with the records, I actually wanted to destroy everything. And then came to a happy medium where I just was focusing on what was really historically significant." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "The National Archives had a program in place that would cross-train you in different areas of the Archives? Is that what CIDS was about?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Yes. And so at NPRC I worked there writing memos and doing, and part of the time I was doing appraisal or being trained in appraisal. So I worked with the Navy branch doing searches, trying to find records or working on responding to requests from veterans for records. And I did a little bit of work with the Reconstruction Branch. When I started, it was only four years after the fire in 1973, so the Reconstruction Branch was still, and continues to be a very active part of the National Archives, Reconstructing records that were burned or trying to find material. And so part of our job was to help the Reconstruction Branch find associated material that could fill in for the 18 million records that were burned. And that was fun. That was really a challenge and very interesting, and dealing with the burned records. So you got some conservation and as well as everything else." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So that early training gave you a better appreciation of the scope of what NARA had, as well as the appreciation of what is actually permanent as opposed to what would be temporary?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Right. We didn’t, at the time, have an archives. NPRC has an archives now, so all the permanent records that we were dealing with went there. The plan was for them to end up in Washington or possibly some field units. So the reference that we did was for military personnel records and individuals or organizations, looking for a specific veteran’s records. Sometimes it was the veterans themselves. Sometimes it was police departments. We got involved with finding the record of the individual who was holding the Washington Monument hostage. And we had to find his record, of course, very quickly. So we ended up getting involved in some interesting things." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Before we move onto your next course of work after St. Louis, can you just tell us a little bit about the agency structure at that time?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Just some examples we wrote up a lot of 115s, obviously, on appraising. You had different echelons of the military so, one for the commands, one for centers, you know, schools, whatever. And we’d send them on to what was a Military Archives Division in Washington. And at one point we got a response back from them saying that these were nice but maybe they should have NARA archivists looking at the records. And my colleague and I were floored. You know, “Hello, people. NPRC is part of NARA. We are NARA archivists, pay attention.” Another time we were doing an exhibit on 20th century Presidents in the military. And we wanted some photographs from still pictures. And my colleague called them to see what it would cost to get a copy, and it was a fairly high cost, like $50 for a copy. My colleague asked if that was a cost for outside or was it an in-house cost, and the other person responded that it was for outside requesters. And my colleague said, you know, we’re part of NARA, and the person said, \"No, you’re not.\" And you’re trying to convince folks in Washington that field units and particularly NPRC was not part of the military but was indeed part of the National Archives—it was a constant struggle and sometimes really painful. So, in many ways that attitude has not improved over the years. Just a constant source of difficulty and actually irritation. And what made it worse was that in the field as CIDS trainees our supervisors were kind into this, holier than thou thing because we were in the field we have to do even more work than the CIDS trainees in Washington. And so we worked harder. Our quarterly panels were more stringent, all of the requirements were more stringent because we were in the field and that we felt like we had to prove ourselves as being just as good as the folks in Washington." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "How long did you stay in St. Louis and where did you go after that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "I was at NPRC for almost ten years, from October of ‘77 to April of ‘87. And then there was an opening for an Appraisal and Disposition Branch Chief in Boston and I applied and I got the job. And being a New Englander I never felt at home in St. Louis, and so once again back to New England and having went to college in Boston, Boston was sort of an ideal place for me to live. So I came back in April of ‘87, and became A&D Chief in Waltham and stayed in that position through a couple of reorganizations. I think when we reorganized and a Records Management division was set up. And I applied to be a part of that because A&D was going to become part of the Record Center, or the service section. We were part of the Record Center, but we were going to be under the service section instead of a separate unit. And so it made sense for me to go into Records Management. And so that occurred in probably ‘99. And the work didn’t change all that, well, the work did change but the focus was still on relating to working with agencies in the region, which is what one does as an A&D Chief. And then I stayed with that until the next reorganization which was 2010 or ’11, when Records Management was broken up and we were all put on teams. And then I joined the Agency Assistance team, which again, continued the same kind of work that I’d been doing in Records Management, and again, a continuation of some of the stuff that I had done as A&D Chief—working with Federal agencies and helping them with their records problems and concerns. And so I’ll be retiring from the Records Management division from the Agency Assistance team." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Thank you. This second grouping of questions are going to be general questions about the National Archives, and then we’ll finish up with final reflections upon the National Archives. What would you view as some of your greatest successes or the most significant projects that you were involved in with the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Yeah, the first and probably of all my time the most interesting group of records that I worked with was in St. Louis with the Philippine archives. This was a collection of about 1,000 cubic feet of material accumulated by the Army in the Philippines during World War II. It was in an open space in the component of the Army that shared space with NPRC in St. Louis and it legally belonged to the Army. And my colleague Patty and I had to appraise the records to see what actually was there and what its value was. There was a lot of administrative stuff, there were lots of things on Douglas MacArthur, which was exciting the first few times. And the most interesting things were records created by the soldiers. A lot of them had kept diaries and a number of those had been preserved and so we got to see the soldiers’ view of what was going on in the Philippines during the war. And related to that were the POW records. These were records that were kept by the POWs, by American POWs in Japanese POW camps, and they felt the need to document what was going on, and so they used whatever scrap of paper they could find to keep records. Some of these were medical records, some were administrative things, some were just documentation of what the Japanese were doing, who was being killed, who was being executed. And just as our favorite example, the kinds of paper that they used, they would occasionally get Red Cross cartons of supplies and those included milk cans. And they would use the back of the milk can labels to create records and these were saved. A lot of the things were buried, were put in bottles or some kind of metal container and buried in the POW camps and then when the Japanese were defeated in the Philippines, the POWs went back and dug them up and they gave them to the military. And the military kept these and we thought these were just amazing. Even though the data itself had been put into other forms, into regular recordkeeping systems, we kept the milk can labels as just an example of these are records that show in themselves how important it was to keep records. And then for how important the records are. Another part of the collection were the guerilla recognition files. After World War II, a lot of Philippine groups or individuals claimed that they had fought against the Japanese for the Americans, and some were real, some were not. You know, some were legitimate. And so the Army sent in groups to evaluate the legitimacy of the guerilla claims. And there were probably 100 or 200 cubic feet of these files. And included in them were the claims by Ferdinand Marcos for his guerilla record. One of his claims to fame as he rose to become dictator was that he was a guerilla fighter. And his opposition said, no, he wasn’t, that this was, this was a sham. And so we kept getting requests to look for them and we later found out that they never gave us the right name. And when we finally did get the right name, we found the record, his file right away, and indeed it was a sham. The Army determined that he was not a guerilla fighter, that he was just doing it for the money. And, you know, our immediate reaction was he was told that they were helping to bring him down. And so we went to the Assistant Director for Military Records and showed him and he of course got excited. And then somebody said that technically these are not our records. They still belong to the Army. The 258 had not been done yet. And we were unclear as to whether the Privacy Act applied to foreign dictators. And so a call was made to Washington and these records, which had been in open areas in the Army part of the building for decades, were all of a sudden classified. And so they were in our vault and nobody could look at them. And they got sent to Washington to the National Archives, and I think it was about a year later a reporter found the guerilla file. Since Patty and I were the archivists which did the appraisal report, he tried calling us and he ended up talking to me. And I was very honest about what the record showed, that Marcos was a fake, and it was in the paper the next morning. And the next morning I also got called in to our Director’s office and learned that one should never talk to the press without clearing it first through our Public Affairs office. So it was an important lesson, but, more importantly, the records themselves were just amazing and probably one of the high points of my NARA career. Court case files have been an issue for the National Archives since at least the 1980s. I know there were many meetings between the courts and NARA in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s trying to figure out what to do with case files. And NARA attempted various times to deal with case files. And it seemed to be going along well and then priorities changed and it was dropped. And it came up again in the early 2000s, for the most part because we were now charging the courts for storage. Once they were paid, the courts really wanted to get something done with their close to two million cubic feet of case files, of civil, criminal, and bankruptcy that were in the Records Centers. And in the mid-2000s another team was set up to work on this different parts of our first, and I’m blanking on the letter designations, but NW, which is based in Washington, said that they would do it and then they didn’t follow through and so Tom Mills and the office of field records would do it. And since I had experience working on the project in the ‘90s, Tom asked if I would work on this. And, you know, so I volunteered, or was volunteered to do this and it became a major part of my NARA career since then. You know, first we did the civil cases and we came up with a fairly elaborate way of appraising and looking at having people around the country from both Archives and Records Management to look at every record and case files from every suit code and make a determination by suit code of the value of the records. And it ended up being about 30 suit codes that were permanent in their entirety. Another 30 or so were permanent if they reached a certain stage in the court process. And the remainder were disposable. And so we kept things like civil rights cases and death penalty cases and environmental cases. And then other cases like medical malpractice, if they reached a certain stage, were decided were significant. And so it ended up being about, oh, 18 or 19% of actual cases were being saved but, in terms of volume, because we were saving things that were significant and once they reached a certain stage in the process, many more documents, much more documentation, and we ended up saving about 40% of the total volume of records. So of the 600,000 cubic feet of civil case files, we’re saving over 200,000 cubic feet. These case files had all been scheduled for disposal before our appraisal. And so, even though we ran into some public relations difficulties, people saying, “Oh, you’re destroying things that should be permanent” in actual fact we were saving a lot of things that had previously been scheduled as disposable and would have been destroyed." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Are there any examples of that that you can think of?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "A lot of civil rights cases and certainly the environmental cases and Freedom of Information Act cases. These were all going to be destroyed because they didn’t reach the trial stage, which heretofore had been the other kinds of cases that were destroyed. And as part of our process for determining how to do the appraisal we worked with a lot of law professors. And one of the law professors pointed out that a trial determines what happens factually, or what happened in a particular case factually. What happens before the trial is often what determines what kinds of issues are significant and what kinds of issues should be looked at. So it’s not an issue of did somebody commit a particular deed, but was the commission of that deed itself an important thing to have as part of our history? And in fact some are explained there further. We’re pointing that out because then that became a really good pointing factor in how we look at things, that the trial itself isn’t necessarily a factor in whether something should be permanent, even though we did continue that because the court wanted all trial cases to be kept. But we ended up saving for research just a huge amount of material on significant issues of our time that would have been destroyed otherwise. And so I think that that’s a significant accomplishment. So we worked really closely with the Record Centers system and I ended up writing the procedures for doing the screening of case files. And working closely with the courts, so the courts with their databases were able to send us lists of all cases by suit code and identify which cases were in the suit code that were significant. Suit codes that are permanent or, in those suit codes, you know, those cases that reach a particular stage in the court process in the other suit codes. So we’re able to really pick out every case that had been determined to be part of the permanent collection. And there were errors. There were court errors on the Record Center side, but probably we have gotten well over 90% of all those case files that were appraised as permanent. And because we weren’t looking for specific cases but samples of what do civil rights cases show? And what do environment cases show? You know, what do they document? What was going on in the country that was important that shows up in the cases?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So in some ways you had to think like a researcher?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Oh, yes. Yeah, and that’s why it was important to work with the legal community and with stakeholders. Now with NARA so much as within the research community, and then we followed that same ideal when we started with the bankruptcy case files. Bankruptcy case files are voluminous, we had a million cubic feet. And we weren’t sure how to approach it. And again, this was something that happened over the decades. NARA had tried different approaches and in the ‘90s we tried sampling them. There were two approaches that started in the ‘90s, one that we looked at every case and had parameters set up to see what cases were significant based on whether it was a major industry or the amount of money involved in the bankruptcy or issues like that. And then there was the Atlanta approach, which said you needed to have a certain number for a comparative sample. And they decided it would be something like 1,000 cases per court per decade, or per district per decade. And we actually tried it here in Boston, what we did was a combination of the two. We looked at every case because we didn’t want to miss the historically significant cases, but we also in addition to those cases we also did the sampling. The sampling was kind of based on the Atlanta method but because bankruptcy courts do not retire things by decade. And so you have transfers that are ‘58 to ‘63 or cases that came in later, so there was no way of getting an actual run of 1950 through 1959 of every case where you could pick out, you do, in every 1,500 cases you’d take one. That was not possible from the way the courts would actually retire records. In the real world, the Atlanta sample didn’t work, but we did attempt to do that as best we could. And then combining that with looking for historically significant cases based on what industries were important in New England and the significance of any, or a monetary level that we thought were significant. And so we did that in the ‘90s for some courts and then, again, as with NARA, the priorities shifted, and we stopped doing it. And as it turned out, very few Records Centers actually went through that process. We were one of the few that did it. And it had turned out that Atlanta was not one of them. Not to attack Atlanta, but that was a sore point. Anyway, so after we finished the civil case file appraisal, we went on to the bankruptcy and this got very involved. We ended up trying to see how bankruptcy case files were used. We had done this to some extent with civil but we did it more deeply with bankruptcy because we knew we wanted to do a sample and we didn’t know how to do that. And so we ended up looking at articles and actually talking with and contacting a lot of experts in bankruptcy, law professors, historians, economic historians, researchers. You know, we went to them to see if, “How do you do, how do you do a sample?” And one of the things we looked at were Elizabeth Warren’s books on bankruptcy, she being one of the important experts on bankruptcy and how it affects people. And she did three different samples a decade apart using a 1% sample per court in given districts for a year. And, I’m sorry; it was a 2.5% sample. So we came up with a couple of possibilities of doing a 2.5% sample of a court every ten years or, you know, we tried different things. So we went to the law professors who were experts about this and based on their input, we ended up coming up with a 2.5% sample per district per year. If we did it every ten years we would miss things likes the depression of 2000, say, or the almost depression of 2006, 2007, 2008. You know, if we’d only did 2001 and 2010 we might have missed that. So getting records from each court each year wound ensure that we didn’t miss anything. And we were told a 2.5% sample would be sufficient. And so we ended up doing that. The courts first picked out, you know, their historically significant cases, so we went through those. And so we ran up the appraisal based on the 2.5% sample of the courts per year and that was accepted both by NARA and by the stakeholder community. And so we started doing that and it ended up being about a 4% sample just because 2.5% accurate sample of every 100 boxes would be easy to do but courts don’t retire things in 100 box segments. And so we wanted to make sure that we got something from every year, so if somebody retired 20 boxes for any given year, we’d take one of those boxes. And so it ended up being a higher percentage. And so once the bankruptcy appraisal got done, we then moved on to criminal and did the criminal appraisal and, again, we did that similar to the civil where certain suit codes were selected as being significant and we would keep all those cases. So anything relating to treason or terrorism would be kept." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I think it’s important information." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Yeah. And that’s been a major part of my career for the past ten years. The other one of the other major parts of my career was working with the National Park Service and there’s a whole history of that with NARA and the Park Service have not always gotten along very well. Part of it is that we have competing missions. You know, we both have to preserve historic records. We do the records themselves. The Park Service has to preserve historic sites and, in order for them to do that, at least for part of the job, they need documentation of what went into an historical site." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Can you give us an example of that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Yeah. The Park Service is responsible for historic buildings. And so, for example, at the Boston Navy Yard, the Navy turned it over to the Park Service, so the Park Service is responsible for documenting what was done at the Navy Yard so that they can present that information to the public. And they’re also responsible for preserving the different buildings that are still at the Navy Yard. And to do that they need records. And some of those records of what the Navy did at the Park Service or how they were built, are also things that should be in the National Archives. And so there have been competing interests over the years with NPS complaining that NARA wants to steal their records and they won’t be able to do their work, and NARA complaining that our mission is to hold all the historic records of the nation and NPS is not taking over what should be in the National Archives. And so that’s been an issue. And I’ve been working with the Park Service for probably at least 20 years. I started out just working locally and Liz is the archivist for the Northeast Region but based in Boston. And so we started working together, and one of the things Liz taught me is the importance of records that NARA does not consider important. You know, things like contracts. And so if they have an historic house, say, in Concord, documenting the upcoming Patriot’s Day, and then the start of the American Revolution, they need to keep that house looking the way it looked in 1775. And so they have to keep records of what the house looked like, when the house was restored, what kinds of things were used to restore it, what the gardens looked like, so that the gardens can be recreated to look the way they looked in 1775. And so those records are vital for NPS to accomplish its mission. And a lot of that stuff actually NARA doesn’t care about. We don’t want records of what paint they bought or paint samples. And so it’s fine for NPS to keep that. There’s some crossover of, you know, things that are important both to the National Archives and for the National Park Service. And in some of those cases we can make copies, and so when we redid the National Park Service schedule into a big bucket schedule we indicated that there are some things where NARA should have a copy and NPS should have a copy. And that’s worked out here. I’m not sure if it’s worked out quite as well in other places. It’s certainly much harder with not having a lot of records to make copies. But it’s still very doable. We did it when we went out to Acadia National Park. I spent a couple of weeks with the Park Service looking at records of the Naval Security Group activity at Winter Harbor, which was closing and giving the land back to the Park Service. And so the records of the Navy’s time in what was Acadia National Park from 1930 through 2000, you know, some of the records there were Navy records. Some of them belonged at the National Archives, but some of the records are also needed by the Park Service to maintain and interpret what the Navy did out at Winter Harbor. And so copies were made and they have a set and we have a set. And it’s worked out really well. We did the same thing at the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, where the National Park Service is still responsible for some of the buildings, and NARA also wanted the records of some of the buildings. And so they made copies and so we have a set and they have a set. And it works. With electronic records, it’s certainly much easier to have a digital copy than to send a copy to the National Archives, and then they keep a copy. So I think as time goes by that the kinds of things where we have our set of records and they have their set is going to be much more manageable. And locally, with the Park Service, we have a really good relationship, and a lot of our relations with Federal agencies, a lot of it’s based on how we get along with them. And so if we go in with an attitude of, oh, we can work together to resolve this as opposed to going in with an attitude of “These are NARA’s records, you have to give them to us now,” we’re going to get a lot further. And so by having some really good friends in the Park Service who will continue to be good friends after I retire, and certainly after they retire, because we’ve developed these relationships that have led to getting records to the National Archives. The National Register is one of the Park Service’s what they call one of their crown jewels, the National Register of Historic Places. You know, every significant historical place within the United States is listed on the National Register and they have case files for every, every site. And they offered these to the National Archives. They were going to give us both the paper to use as an archival copy, but they were also going to pay for digitization of the records, give us a digital copy that we could use for reference. And the National Archives’ response was we only wanted the electronic copy. We don’t want the paper. And the Park Service was fine with that. And there were issues getting this going, some within NARA, some within the Park Service, but it eventually got approved. This is a huge project for the Federal Records Center system, which is doing the digitization. It’s a $3.5 million project and one of my friends, from the Park Service, is involved, she’s the project manager. And it helped moving all the case files from Washington to the Fort Worth Record Center so they could be state-by-state sent to Tucson to be arranged for scanning with all of the metadata created and then go back to Fort Worth for the actual scanning and then transferred to ERA. So several states have been set down for scanning. Once they have been scanned, it’s about getting ready to be transferred. And it’s been a huge undertaking. When I was in Washington for SAA, I stayed a few extra days just to be in at the beginning of the packing up of the National Register records in Washington. And there they created this video with the National Register folks, some of whom were not happy that they were not going to be in charge of the digitization, which they actually tried and failed at. And so that’s going well. And because of that project and because of our relationships with the Park Service, the Park Service has a number of other records that they want to digitize and they want NARA to digitize and then they will come into ERA and eventually go into OPA, including records relating to Little Big Horn, records of National Historical Landmarks, which is a different project, and so it’s been fun working with NPS and these are hugely significant records that will finally come into the National Archives. And I’ve worked with and had fun with working a lot with EPA, working with the Coast Guard. Locally it’s been fun. The Coast Guard nationally has not been. But just one of the things that has an AMD sheet that we had to do in the ‘90s was to go through and see what was unscheduled in the Records Center and then go ahead and schedule that. And so it was just finding odd things that were unscheduled and getting them scheduled. So there were Fish and Wildlife records, Corps of Engineer records, Coast Guard stuff. There was this one set of Immigration and Naturalization records that were fascinating. It was just about five feet of records of the INS looking at potentially subversive organizations and people relating who were part of those organizations to see if they should get citizenship or should not enter the country. And so you had the INS viewpoint on these organizations. They’d been retired as just regular A files, but obviously were not. They were investigations and were interesting to the Archives. There were records of the Selective Service system from the 1960s, just administrative records, and having been at the agency and having gone through the Selective Service system in the 1960s, sorry, did I say, records from the ‘60s or ‘80s?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "‘60s." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Oh. Yeah, I was certainly eager to see what the Selective Service was doing from an administrative point of view. And some of the records related to how they reacted to anti-war demonstrations and draft-card burnings. And since I was involved in some of those demonstrations it was kind of fun looking at it from the other side. And, yeah, so they appraised those records as permanent, because it was such a significant time in our history. Looking at U.S. Attorney’s files, there was a period when U.S. Attorneys were just not doing a good job designating historically significant cases. And if you have a look at records before they were destroyed, and I was looking at a group of U.S. Attorney’s files that were ready to go to the recycle mill and just check and see what they were, and came across the Dryden v. Nixon case, which was Congressman Dryden suing President Nixon for the illegal invasion of Cambodia in 1970. And they were going to throw it out and so I saved it and called the U.S. Attorney’s Office and they said it didn’t go to trial so it’s not important. So we realized that the attorneys had a very different, a very legalistic view of what was historically significant than NARA had. And so we started going through U.S. Attorney’s files before they were thrown out and somebody from the Archives and I would spend hours looking at every case and picking out a lot of fascinating cases. So that was fun, but incredibly time-consuming and there had to be a better way which we’re still trying to work out, you know, 20 years later. So it’s, you know, a lot of the good things have been with working with Federal agencies. And then working on relations again within our facility here where, relations of the Records Center, Records Management and Archives are probably better than they are at most places, and have always been, you know, historically, back in the Archives in the 1980s. Yeah, there were some difficulties, but for the most part we were committed very well. And that was, that was a very good thing." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Now, let me ask a follow-up question. How important do you feel it is for an archivist, an appraisal archivist or anybody working in the National Archives, to have a general and basic history of their country, of national events and the history of their regional area? I mean, how has that impacted you? And you’ve described some things but overall how did that impact you in your performance as an archivist?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "I think it’s really important, particularly in appraisal. You know, I’m not sure if I was just doing with working with computers or it wouldn’t be as important, but when doing appraisal of, I’m sure for giving reference is also important. But understanding the important events nationally makes you more aware of what is important, how things should be documented and what things should be documented. And so, just a story, like with Selective Service System, sometime in the ‘90s the Selective Service System wanted to destroy all of its records from the 1960s and ‘70s. And the appraisal archivist, a very nice person, young, hadn’t lived through the ‘60s; he approved it and sent it around for comment. And at that time, because all the field units were involved, you know, it came around to all the field units for comment and those of us, both in Washington and in the field, who lived through the ‘60s, said no, you cannot do this. You cannot let them destroy these records. And the poor guy just got inundated with negative comments and, but he hadn’t lived through it and he wasn’t aware of the significance of the Selective Service to the 1960s and early ‘70s. And so that lack of awareness would have led to the destruction of some really significant records. So being aware of what’s going on, being aware of the civil rights movement for the imports of that, being aware of the environmental movement and environment and climate change, which does exist. I mean, we have records here. One of the other great collections that we have is from the Woods Hole Laboratory of the National Marine Fisheries Service, and so we have records of fish statistics, of quantity and sizes of fish, all species of fish going back to the 1880s. And so we have a continuous running, a hundred, more than 100 years of records of fish. And that contains so much about climate change and how fish populations vary and overfishing and all of that. And if you’re not aware of that, then you wouldn’t think the records are important. Or keeping records of, we have records that include the old weather observatory going back to the late 19th century also. And so, again, another way of documenting climate change. So if you’re not aware of those kinds of things or, I now believe we were missing the importance of certain kinds of records of labor. And there’s so much that has occurred over the past 50/60 years that the records are, yeah, some of them have already been appraised, but a lot of them are still being appraised or re-appraised. And not having the knowledge of that is a detriment to doing appropriate appraisal. And then locally, when we were doing the U.S. Attorney’s files, we got to know the names of all of the Mafia families in New England, so if we saw a patriarch, we knew it was Mafia, we knew it was important, and so we kept it. There was a case involving some corruption thing in Medford that was referenced by—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Medford, Massachusetts?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Medford, Massachusetts, yeah, and we didn’t know that but we thought, yeah, it looked really interesting. And so we asked the Archives Director, who lived in Medford, and he said, \"Oh, my God. You’ve got to keep that.\" Yeah. And that was such a huge part of local history. We found the record of the whole FBI/U.S. Attorney’s investigation of Catherine White. That was huge locally. Nationally, it probably wasn’t important, but locally it is really significant because it was an overreach by FBI and U.S. Attorneys. And nothing ever came of it except a lot of bad publicity initially for White and therefore the Government. And so we kept that. So not having a knowledge of local history, again, can make an appraisal and selecting significant cases difficult because we’ve learned we can’t always rely on the agencies to figure out what’s significant." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. Is this part of discovery, is this one of the aspects of the job that you enjoy the most?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Yeah. When I was working on my Ph.D. the best part was actually the hands-on part with the records. And a year after I’d done all my research and had to go back and write my dissertation, that was painful, that was difficult, but looking at the records, that’s great. And so the good part of my job was actually the hands-on work with records, be that court records or Park Service or Coast Guard or whatever. But actually, you know, looking at the records themselves rather than, trying to make a decision without looking at the records or, or being involved in some aspect of the National Archives that doesn’t relate directly to the records, yeah, the records, it’s fun." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And I think your background as a historian must have helped you when it came to making decisions about records, what is significant, what isn’t significant. And looking at it all through a researcher’s perspective." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Right, because I had spent several years as a researcher working on the dissertation, so yeah, trying to figure out stuff. So I had the researcher background to know what kinds of things as an archivist, I should be looking at for researchers to make sure that we have them." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "You’ve just talked about a lot of the most interesting projects that you had or some of the discoveries that you’ve made throughout your career with the National Archives. Is there any other projects or anything else that maybe doesn’t necessarily rise to that significance, but that you found to be very rewarding in your career with the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Yeah. One of the things I really liked about my job is that it varies; I’m not doing one thing all the time. Yeah, I’m doing appraisal, I’m working on an agency schedule or done reference work. When I was in St. Louis, we were doing exhibits and reference and appraisal and just all sorts of things. Here, as A&D Chief, I worked on overseeing everything coming into the building and everything going out, in addition to doing appraisal, also doing training. One of the things I was, as A&D Chief, the former, when we had a regional administrator, the former administrator was very active in the Federal Executive Board of Greater Boston. And actually that goes back into the late ‘80s. And probably 1989 or 1990, the Federal Executive Board set up an AIDS taskforce to work on training Federal employees and educating them on what that is. And the Director of, the FIC Director asked if I’d be interested in being on it. And I said yes. And that was so amazing to me, that NARA was, that part of my job at NARA was to be doing AIDS education. That was cool. That was amazing. And growing up in a period where doing anything that identified you as gay was, you certainly couldn’t do it, and my first few years at NARA I was very much in the closet. To come to a point where I could be, you know, open and actually essentially get paid by the Government to train, to teach Federal employees about AIDS and about what was really happening and about how to prevent the spread of AIDS and what the real risks were. And that was astonishing and just, it gave me a really good feeling certainly about NARA and about the staff here and about my bosses that they would not only allow me to do this but, essentially ask me to do it. So that was great. And that’s an aspect of life at NARA that probably doesn’t get mentioned often because it’s not part of our regular job, and I don’t know if people are still doing that kind of work now with the Federal Discussion Report. You know, we’re doing some things with COOP, but not major involvement as we did in the past. But that was an important thing and part of keeping employees happy, keeping me happy. But also part of the varied routine that we had and that we continue to have where we can do lots of different things, all part of NARA’s mission and all important, but ensuring that our work does not get monotonous and doesn’t get routine." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. In your career, what are some of the challenges and issues that you faced in your career? Not necessarily for the future we’re talking here. We’re talking about in your long career with the National Archives; what are some of the challenges that you, initially that you may have faced?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Oh—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I mean, it can be very broad, but I understand that. But if you can just narrow it down to certain issues, whether it be technology, whether it be issues of too much, too little, as far as Archives go, what would you think the challenges that you had faced in your years? And how maybe have they evolved? I mean, that might be a better way to approach it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Yeah. Probably the major challenge has been when I joined NARA we were basically, we were paper and only paper. There were during our training back in the late ‘70s, we were shown things like laser disks and we were shown the computer areas. And I’m trying to think of the older names, you know, automated data and all that. And then we heard the stories about like the NASA tapes that NARA had, that we didn’t know what they were. We knew that they were significant but we couldn’t read them. And so we were holding on to them, you know, hoping that eventually somebody would figure out how to read them. But they were NASA and I think there were also some Navy tapes. And so, being at NARA during the change, there was a huge change in technology from paper to electronic. And that’s been, probably the major challenge not being particularly a techie and not having any prior interest in computers, it’s personally it’s been, you know, a challenge trying to figure out what do I need to know and how do I find it out? And how do I deal with the emerging technologies? You know, when I was doing my dissertation, I actually had to have a friend write the program. And I did the punch cards though. Shows how long ago that was. But that was the extent of my interaction with computers. Oh, and my history department had to rent time for me at the computer lab for me to go in and do the punch cards on the program. Isn’t that amazing? Of course it doesn’t really seem that long ago, but it is. So dealing with the technological issues and, both in how NARA leaves in and maintains records, but also educating agencies. You know, e-mail certainly is an ongoing issue." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Has your views on temporary and permanent records changed due to the emerging technology? How have your views on saving records, what is a record, processing, whether it be processing or appraising of records, have they changed with the emerging technology?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Not really, although I could see different possibilities. For example anything that is permanent in paper is going to be permanent electronically. You know, I still believe in that. However, there are things that are useless in paper that have, that could be much more valuable and permanent electronically just because they could be, they’re so much more easily manipulated. They can be repurposed. If you have 50,000 special orders of the Army that have gone from being, they put everything, they put six years in and 15 years in unscheduled. Individually, you couldn’t do anything like that. If they’re all electronic, you could find patterns; they would be much more valuable as a resource. You know, even with financial records, which are, you know, usually pretty restless. You know, again, electronically you could much more easily and quickly get information out of them. Not that they would necessarily be permanent, but some of the results might be permanent and things that you could not get in any other way because the staff hours it would take to go through them in an analog fashion would be just impossible. And so there are things, you know, electronically that have a lot more value. With the huge amounts of data that we’re getting now, it’s always a question of do you look at the data in the same way or is it easier to just bring in everything and then develop faster and better search engines? Is storage cheap enough where it might be easier for NARA to just take all electronic records the Government creates and spend their money on search engines and huge servers to get this done? And that’s actually been mentioned, I’ve been on sessions talking of the issues. It might be easier to do that rather than go through the appraisal process. I have doubts about spending most of my career as an appraiser and actually having spent five years teaching appraisal, that when you take everything, then it’s almost like taking nothing. That you’re not making any decisions. And one of the roles of the archivist is to make decisions on what’s important and what’s not important. And so, by taking everything in, you make it harder to find what really is important. Even if you have good search engines, it’s, you know. If you do a Google search, which Google has or has access to all data in the world, and so you run a search and you get 5,000 pages of responses. Theoretically, the one, the first page that will be the most relevant , but not always. And it would take you years to get through all of that pages, filing away your report. So if you take in everything, I’m not sure that’s the appropriate way for the National Archives to go. Yes, it would be easy, but I don’t know if it would be right, you know?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So when you were starting out with the National Archives many years ago, we’ve come full circle in the sense that we have these paper records and now we’re up upon the challenges of electronic records. That also brings up the question of space within the National Archives and I know you’ve been interested in that as well." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And space as it pertains to permanent records in the Archives. Federal records are dealing with their own issues of space. But just on, as what you’ve seen and not looking so much into the future, how do you see the space issues presently as we’re dealing with? How do you see that as something that would benefit the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Yeah, certainly if we digitized everything, it would be a lot easier. But that’s just not realistic. We don’t have the budget to. It’s all well and good to say, oh, we’re just going to go ahead and digitize. We don’t have the budget to do it. We’ll never have the budget to do it. We’re in archives. We’re at the bottom of the heap in terms of budget appropriations. When I was still at NPRC and the National Archives budget was something like $100 million or, I don’t know, $150 million, and there was an article in the paper in the news saying that two fighter planes having fallen off an aircraft carrier. It was like, “Oh, my God. That’s the National Archives budget right there.” And so the idea of us ever having enough money to digitize everything in our holdings is just, it’s just not possible. And so, when I think about being in records, if something is historically significant, it should come to NARA. Space, we shouldn’t be telling the agencies “Oh, we don’t have space so we can’t take it. You know, sorry.” It’s our job. It’s our mission to take that to do that and we need to find space. And I’m not sure of the best ways of doing it. Certainly we can digitize some and destroy the hard copy, which is anathema to some archivists. We can’t, we can’t say that, you know, we’ve reached the limits of our space; our footprint can’t grow. We have to make it grow, one way or another. Yeah, we send a crew out to Kansas City with shovels and then take out more space, I’m not sure." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Well, these challenges are certainly different than when you faced the challenges that you faced in 1977. And we’ll talk more about these when we look at some of the challenges that will be facing NARA later on in this interview. Before we get too far into that, I just wanted to bring this back briefly to how you move from unit to unit in the National Archives. I know the National Archives tends to change things. The nature of your work changes through presidential administrations, right, or through different directors. Can you just name a few of the directors that you worked for and how maybe briefly touch upon how your work maybe changed during the course of that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Actually, to be honest, the local directors have not had that much of an influence. Other than St. Louis. When I was working in the Philippine Archives, the director called Patty and me into his office and yelled at us because, reprimanded us because we were having too much fun, that we were enjoying our work too much, and that was just totally amazing. And that’s where we were just talking about smiling and all, you know, telling other people how good the records were, although we thought that was part of our job, spreading the word out on significant records. So when he left it was a lot better and when we finished, we got an award from his successor, which was used new chairs that we had gotten from some of the Army. They had bought new furniture and so we got their old stuff, so Patty and I got new chairs and that was great, which was a lot better than being told we’re having too much fun. Nationally, the change in Archivists hasn’t been that significant. There have been different emphases on where we go. You know, sometimes more emphasis on public programs, sometimes more emphasis on, you know, process. But at my level it hasn’t had that much of an effect. The biggest thing was when we got our freedom from, from GSA." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What year was that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "1985. 20th anniversary this year. We should celebrate it. Thirty, thank you. Math has never been my strong point. But, which is part of the thing with computers. But anyway, GSA always, we always felt we were restricted and we had to be really careful on what we were doing. And NARA, or back then NAS, the National Archives and Records Service was—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So it was called NARS at the time?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Yeah, it was. From 1949 through ’85. We were NARSians. Sorry. We were. That was, that was the term. GSA was kept. We weren’t sure how they would react to, or how careful we had to be with identifying the records because they had to, you know, approve everything. I mean, they didn’t do the appraisal and we don’t think they looked at the appraisals, but they actually tended to be pretty conservative, certainly during the Reagan years. There were some pretty conservative, you know, actually some pretty corrupt people who were heads of GSA, or involved with GSA. And even going back to the whole thing with the Nixon papers with Nixon and Sampson, you know, we never really trusted GSA. They didn’t have any historical sense and we were very aware of that then. And they thought of NARA, or NARS, as, you know, we were a warehouse for records and that’s all we were. And so by getting our freedom we felt that we had, you know, a lot more latitude in what we were doing and how we could talk about what we were doing. So that was a major shift, and a really important one for us. And I guess the other thing would be, with records management, with, under Carlin, of being more proactive with Federal agencies, which I think we were doing here in Boston and probably in the regions. It’s something other regions, and so we were doing it anyway, but he had more of a greater emphasis on reaching out to the agencies. And so I think that was important. And it had been a noble shift." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Do you feel that Carlin had a greater, was more, since he was not really an archivist, I have heard that people felt that he was able to help the National Archives politically." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Yes. Yes. Yeah, he wasn’t an archivist but he was able to get us money. And that was, he was a politician and he was able to work with, I don’t know, I guess with Congress and he was much better on our budget than anybody before or after. And that was a big help." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Now that we’ve spoken a lot about your time with the National Archives from the very beginning to the present and a lot of the major projects and significant projects that you had a part of, I’d like to ask you how you envision the future of the National Archives. And I know we’ve touched on it briefly before, but if you’d like to expand upon that answer a little bit, how do you see the National Archives going forth from 2015 into the next maybe 10, 20, 30 years into the future?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "I think NARA has to get a better handle on electronic records and electronic recordkeeping. And there’s different aspects to that. One is there’s still a lot of analog records out there that should be part of the National Archives. And we keep saying we don’t have space and so we need to come up with alternatives. And I think we need to revisit the question of affiliated archives. There are a lot of agencies that they’re going ahead and doing it anyway. So the National Park Service has been getting private money to build archives. And so we’re ending up with unaffiliated archives, and we need to take the next step and say, and work with the agency rather than just telling them “You can’t do this. The records belong with us.” They’re not going to listen. We have no enforcement power. And so, essentially, we need to make nice with the agencies and say if you want to, if you have the money and you can set up an affiliated archive, we will work with you. We’ll have legal ownership, you’ll have physical ownership and we’ll work with you to make sure that you’re keeping, that you’re taking good care of the records and making them available to the public. And that’s one way of essentially gaining space since other ways don’t seem to be working. We should try harder, perhaps, on that. We also need to make NARA more user friendly for the agencies and for internal stuff with. I certainly had my issues with ERA, particularly when I’ve lost an agency schedule that was being worked on. But a lot of agencies are really, they like the concept of ERA but they complain about the user friendliness of it. So that needs to be approved as well as certainly the capacity of ERA. And of OPA, because it’s not only important to bring in the records, the electronic records into the National Archives but we need to be able to make them available to the public and that’s the point. It’s why we exist. And so just having ERA without the public access component or really good public access component is not sufficient. So we have to work to improve that. And I know the folks in ERA and in OPA who worked with the National Park Service on the National Register, they’ve been great. But one of the issues was just having the capacity to handle the huge amount of data coming in. And so we have to improve that. I’m trying to think of other issues. We need to become more agency friendly. The agencies are not our opponents or our enemies or our rivals; they’re our allies, and so we need to improve our relations with them. In some cases we do really well, but in other cases we have, in a case that we have people in the National Archives at high levels who don’t do a good job of dealing with other agencies. And that’s a problem and we need to address that." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "How do you see the future of the regional archives within the National Archives itself?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Regional archives were first organized in the late 1960s to ensure that you don’t have to go to Washington to visit the National Archives, which was good for a long time; I haven’t seen it recently. And perhaps electronically, so it’s the National Archives without having to go to Washington. But the Regional Archives are important for maintaining records that pertain to the regions that they’re in and so it ensures that the people who are doing research don’t have to all go to Washington to find records. And so if you live in Boston and you want to do research on the Boston Desegregation Case, school desegregation, you don’t have to go to Washington to do that. You know, you can just come to Waltham and get the records or get the records of the MIT lab that developed radar in World War II. You know, or local court cases. You know, all these things that happened locally. The greatest interest is locally, people interested in the Boston Navy Yard or Portsmouth Navy Yard or any of the military facilities or environmental issues in New England that EPO is involved in. Why should they have to go elsewhere? It’s much easier than Washington to come to Waltham to get their research done. One of the agencies that I’ve worked with is the International Boundary and Water Commission in El Paso and the bulk of their analog records are in Fort Worth, which makes sense because people in Texas have the most involvement with the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. And why should they have to come to Washington? So I think it makes sense to have Regional Archives. One of my concerns is that we’ve cut hours for the public to visit. So, if you work a 9:00 to 5:00 job, you can’t come to the Archives. That makes no sense. And then we complain that we’re not getting this interest in the Archives. And so I think it’s important that we expand staffing, certainly, to be able to do this but expand our outreach to the public and make the hours available. I was really bothered when the Archives had the affiliates closed because it was very important. If people who want to do research instead of being able to get downtown have to go to the very end of northeast Philadelphia, which is like 18 miles, but can take at rush hour probably an hour and a half. You know, that doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make us user friendly for the public. The same thing with the Archives in Alaska. Moving the stuff to Seattle and saying, oh, it’ll be digitized. Okay. Wait until it’s digitized before you move it. The main interest in those, the Alaskan Archives are people in Alaska. They’re not people in Seattle. And so by closing that and then saying, oh, people aren’t coming anyway, but you’re making it difficult for people to come and then complain that they’re not coming and so you close. I think it’s really important to have our regional archives, our regional, and not just the archives, but have a regional presence. So have regional records management to work with agencies in the field. Not every agency is based in Washington and even those agencies that are based in Washington, a lot of them do most of their work in the field. And to not have that presence makes it really difficult for agencies to get assistance. So I think it’s a mistake to downgrade the field. And granted my 37 and a half years have all always been in the field, but it made me really aware of how the field is looked upon by Washington, that we don’t do the same work. We’re not as important. We’re not as significant, blah, blah, blah, and so we don’t need the funding or the support. And yet if you look at Federal agencies, they’re in the whole country, yeah, they’re not just in Washington. Some agencies have most of their presence outside of Washington. And we need to have staff in the field to deal with the agencies, to work with them to get those records in. And the Archives doesn’t get records by some kind of magic event where all of a sudden all the permanent records appear in Archive space. Yeah. It involves a lot of work by people in records management, by people in appraisal working with the agencies. And work by the agencies to get those records into the record centers and then from the record center to the Archives. And by ignoring that process, we do great harm to ourselves." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So you feel that there is still a lot of significant permanent records in the field that record management could retrieve?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Oh, yeah. Yeah, without question. Certainly with just locally we have National Park Service records, which are coming in at a decent pace. We have records of Portsmouth Navy Yard from the 19th century that we’re still working on getting in without people having direct contact, people in Boston having contact with Portsmouth, we’re not going to get those records. And that’s just one example, I’m sure I could come up with a lot of other examples. Not only in New England, but throughout the country." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. Is there anything else that you would like to add, any anecdotes or words of wisdom or, so to speak, of anything? And I know it’s a pretty broad question again that we’re asking of you here, but is there anything else that you’d like to address before we end our interview?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Well, I guess just that I didn’t grow up saying, gee, when I grow up, I want to be an archivist. And even in college and grad school, I wasn’t doing that. I was using archives but I didn’t want to be an archivist. Yeah, I was going to go, you know, teach people, and yet it’s a really interesting and rewarding career. And, yeah, so you have fun with the records. It’s been great and the people have been great. So, you know, although it was not my initial career path, as it turned out, I’m very happy with it. I’m happy with what I’ve done." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Anything you’d do differently?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "That’s a hard question. Yeah, I’d probably make some different appraisal decisions, but, keep this, throw out that." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "But as a career move you feel that this was a good direction?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Yeah. And I think, yeah, because I’ve really enjoyed working directly with the records. One of the things in RSA, if you get too many promotions you get separated from actual contact with the records. And sometimes very consciously chosen not to go for a promotion where I’d be doing more management and less records work. And I think that’s, for me that’s the correct decision." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay, Marvin. Thank you for your time, thank you for your service." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "Thank you." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Appreciate it, and I’m sure for the record everybody who looks at this recording in the future will come, will come away with a better perspective on the National Archives and certainly a better perspective of you as a human being as well." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABAKOFF", "text": "All right." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And this is Jack KABREL interviewing Marvin Kabakoff in Waltham, Massachusetts on April 15, 2015. Marvin’s retirement date is on April 24, 2015. Thank you. ######### 1-(I ## -, ## -~- **.Y** **_:** **g'7\"\"+-** **t '**" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. BRIAN KNOWLES", "text": "I am Brian Knowles. I am acting as an oral historian for the National Archives and Records Administration. Today’s date is 20 June 2014. I am conducting Oral History Interview at Archives I, in Washington, D.C. with Mr. David Kepley. He was an archivist, a branch chief of several departments and has recently retired from the National Archives. And I know you’re a Ph.D., so—" }, { "speaker": "DR. DAVID KEPLEY", "text": "[Interposing] That’s right." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Dr. Kepley or?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Sure. Sure. That’s fine." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Doctor, okay." }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "That’s fine." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. If you would just begin by telling me your dates of service for the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "I began working for the National Archives in 1976 and I retired the last day of 2012, December 31, 2012. I’ve been retired for about a year and a half now. I began working for the Archives in 1976, as I say. My career goal at that point, and this is kind of as an interesting demographic comment, was, in the 1970s, there were a number of people like me who got advanced degrees in history. I got a Ph.D. in American history, but turned to the National Archives. The reason why I describe it as a demographic phenomenon is those of us who were baby boomers who were coming out with our PhDs were all seeking jobs in academia and there just weren’t jobs there. So we’re all searching around for what else we can do. We continued to try more, you know, harder to get into jobs in academia and they just weren’t there to be had. The demographic problem was, as this huge bulk of baby boomers came into college in the 60s and 70s, colleges expanded to meet that demand, but then the people who came right behind us, there weren’t as many of them, so there weren’t as many jobs. So there’s a contraction of the market there. So we didn’t quite know what to do with ourselves. A number of us came to work here at the National Archives. I did my graduate work at the University of Maryland and a couple of my buddies said, “Well, geez, you ought to look at the Archives. I mean, at least you can get a summer internship kind of a thing or like a student internship.” So that’s how I got my first job here in ’76. I was a student intern, as many people here at the Archives are right now, while they’re going to undergraduate school or graduate school, they start as students. In fact, both of my sons were students working here at the National Archives, the same kind of a deal. That’s what I did. I only worked, I don’t know, 20 hours a week or something like that, while I was teaching part-time at Maryland and finishing up my degree work and trying to find a job. A number of us finally decided that the Archives is a pretty good gig—this is very much in keeping with what we were trained to do. It advances the larger cause of trying to honor and push forward the ideals of history in American society. So, whoa, this isn’t so bad and you get paid a good paycheck and a number of us came and worked here at NARA. There’s a number of people that you could interview that are in that same boat. You’ll see a preponderance of people with higher degrees from my age demographic because of that issue. And the previous generation of leaders really did not have those advanced degrees because people of that generation could get academic jobs if that’s what they wanted to do. So there’s the first observation—there’s a bunch of us who did come in with those advanced degrees and making this a kind of a, well, a fallback position. But I found it was very rewarding. I found that I was advancing the larger cause of history, and I was delighted to be working here at the National Archives. I worked here for about 35 years. While I was searching to find a job, I worked in several other U.S. government history offices. I worked for the Labor Department as a historian for a couple of months. I worked for the National Parks Services as an interpretative person for a couple of summers between classes. I worked for the Forest Service history section for five or six months trying to catch on permanently, until finally, my first permanent job at NARA was at the Philadelphia Regional Archives. That opens another whole set of questions. Regional Archives, what’s that all about? What happened was, the main building, the one we’re sitting in right now was the National Archives. It was all housed in this one building. Then the obvious thing happens; we outgrew the building. The spillover effect went to a building we had in Suitland, which was in the late 1960s’. Also out of necessity, we expanded then into the many Federal Record Centers. The Record Centers have been around since the 1950s, but out of necessity, we outgrew this building so we had to put stuff some place. They started inventing these Regional Archives. The idea was—well, at the regional level, those records created by the regions were permanent and housed there. The usual way it would work was they were living in their temporary storage and they were in one section of the Records Center. You could just move them across the hall into the Archival section. That’s sort of the birth of the Regional Archives System. It was not terribly well thought out or planned. As a brand new, almost PhD at that point, I’m out at the Philadelphia Regional Archives. The thing you have to remember is, these Regional Archives, some of them were located in nice buildings. Philadelphia was in a miserable building is the best way I could put it. It was the old Atwater Camera factory. Atwater Kent was an old industrialist who didn’t believe in labor unions and when the Wagner Act of the 1930s required that they unionize, he closed the plant. Somehow, the Federal Government got this piece of property and most of the building was the IRS. They had a huge filing, you know, auditing tax returns and all that. We had another part of the building, like another whole floor for record storage. The building was built in the 1930s and I got there in the 1970s. I was there for about a year and a half. The facility was pretty bad and it was not terribly well located. Here’s to me what’s interesting about the Regional Archives—what kind of a public did they in fact serve? Who were our customers? The answer is, well, from when I got there in 1979, the “Roots” phenomenon had hit in the late ‘70s. Everybody in America, it seemed, wanted to know their roots. Everybody started wanting to know their genealogy. The one thing that we had in these Regional Archives that was extremely helpful, in that regard, were the census records. We had immigration records. People were very much interested in those kinds of records and those records were all on microfilm. The originals were here in the main National Archives Building, but sets of the microfilm were deposited in each of the Regional Archives around the country. Those kind of became local magnets. People would come and see us and we had a very active program in loaning out the microfilm rolls to people in local libraries in our area. I was in Philadelphia Regional Archives and we served Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. If you were in Pittsburgh, you didn’t have to ride all the way to Philadelphia. You could get your local library to borrow that roll of microfilm. There was an extremely active inter-library loan program for people to borrow this stuff. I would say 98% of our researchers were researchers looking at our microfilm collections. Okay, so we had all this hard copy stuff, but almost nobody looked at that, with the exception of the ships passenger arrival lists because those are genealogically oriented records. I spent most of my time processing records, in other words, doing descriptions of records. We didn’t do much in the way of exhibits because there was no space for that. It was mostly descriptions. I probably did 95% of my work describing new accessions and moving them over from the Record Center. Occasionally we would have a researcher. I used to say to people that we would average about one researcher a month looking at our hard copy holdings—one a month. The rest were all looking at microfilm stuff, which is fine. I think that’s probably true of most of the Regional Archives at that time. They were microfilm research centers. That’s what they did. Later in my career, when I was in administration, in the late 80s into the early 90s, we did a study of the Regional Archives for the Archivist. The Archivist of the United States put together a group of people to try to study the Regional Archives. This was Don Wilson. I was on that group. We took a look at why did the Regional Archives come into being? What’s going on here? What’s the level of research they’re doing? What’s this? What’s that? The idea was, should the National Archives expand this program? Should it redirect the program? Where should we be going with that program? That’s where I pretty much confirmed my impressions from being in one regional archives that the entire collection of them did relatively little research work in original records but lots and lots of microfilm research. At that point the decision had been. The Archivist decided to expand those Regional Archives and put more staff into them, give them more of a public presence, have them reach out to their congressional delegations or to local, regional libraries, and other archives, you know, the state archives and that kind of thing, to give NARA a larger nationwide presence. One can argue about the wisdom of that. Do you need that many Regional Archives, especially given the low research volume? Especially in our own time, it really comes into question, because all of those microfilm resources have now been digitized. So is there a reason to have them? If so, do you have them as a storefront kind of an operation downtown, which is expensive space. Alternatively, do you have them out in the suburbs? It’s less expensive space, but there’s still an awful lot of it. Should you reduce the numbers of them because not too many people are using the physical records? There are many questions surrounding those, especially when you get into fiscally difficult times, which we’re in right now and we seem to always be in. Let’s face it; where can you save money at the National Archives? Well, we only spend money on renting space, okay, and people. But of that, renting space is by far the greatest amount. So if you could take, say the Regional Archives, reduce the number of them and put them in bigger facilities, would that help us? Maybe yes, maybe no. We just closed or are about to close the Regional Archives in Alaska. It is probably a wise idea. We have some Regional Archives in downtown areas where the space is extremely expensive. I remember when we did this study in the early 90s, for the cost for the Regional Archives in New York. Because it was in downtown Manhattan, it was greater than the next three Regional Archives put together, in terms of the rental costs. Does that make sense? Do we get a decent return on our investment? I have to say I don’t think so, but okay. We wrestled with those kinds of issues then and I think we are still kind of wrestling with now. My time at the Regional Archives in Philadelphia, for me personally, was good because I really got to understand how to describe records. I learned that basic, fundamental building block of what it means to be an archivist. That is critical. Not so much on reference, but lots on that particular one." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "[Interposing] How were you instructed to do the descriptions?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Oh, good question. As a brand new archivist, what kind of education did I get? The Regional Archives generally did not train people very well. They sort of said, “Here’s your job, and maybe your boss would kind to work with you.” Because I worked down here as a student intern, I knew that brand new archivists went through a rigorous training program. I said, “geez, that’s what I need, so I can be really good at what I’m trying to do here.” I asked and the answer was, “no, we can’t send you down to that training program.” There is a training program which is offered to members of the public, which I think might be useful to me. I persuaded people to send me down to that program. It’s called the National Archives Institute. The Institute has been going on for probably 40 or 50 years. You’d have to ask folks who have been involved in that. Its mission is to bring together archivists from around the country, almost none of which are National Archives people, generally. It is almost all people from somewhere else to teach them the art and craft of being an archivist. I came down here for two weeks and got my training in basic archives management kinds of things and that was my basic training. Had I been hired centrally, I would have had the advantage of having rotational assignments in different units, which would have helped me learn more about the art and craft of being an archivist. You go back to Philadelphia and it was, no, we’re not doing that. I felt like this isn’t too cool. Regional Archives, what one of the problems is, they are been a backwater. They’ve been always trying to fight to be brought on an even par with folks in downtown D.C. I did eventually get a job down here in Washington. I felt there was better career advancement here. It turns out I was right." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well, you were in Philadelphia from 1977 to ‘79." }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "That’s right." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "And then you came here to work at the Legislative Archives Division?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "That’s right. I had worked in Legislative as a student intern. I worked there actually three different points in my career. The first time I was there as a student intern and I did reference work. The second time I came on board I was a full-fledged archivist and worked there for, I think, about four years. There, I really learned an awful lot about reference. Reference was my basic role, working with researchers, which I found really very exciting and enjoyable. I think I enjoyed teaching most in my graduate work. When you’re in graduate school, either you like publication or you like teaching or hopefully you like both. I liked the teaching part of it. What I liked about being a reference archivist was that it allowed me to exercise that teaching dimension of my personality I suppose. I guess I’m more of a people person. I really enjoyed working with a researcher who would come in and say, “I’m trying to figure out everything which relates into what.” Then I would talk with the person about their project, and we would work together to develop a research strategy. I would bring down records for this person to look at and that sort of thing. That was a lot of fun for me. I found that personally very rewarding. It was fun seeing, when their books came out many years later, an acknowledgment that I had done some great work to help them out. That, you know, that is always fun to see that you are advancing the cause of scholarship two or three millimeters. You are moving the needle in the right direction, right. I enjoyed that a lot. I also got a chance while I was there to work on some other stuff with respect to legislative records. Legislative records has a very interesting history. The National Archives and Records Administration is unique among the national archives of the world in that we have the records of all three branches of the Federal Government here. None of the other national archives have that. Most of them have just the records of one branch of their Federal Government, usually the executive branch. We have executive branch records here. We have records of the Supreme Court and District and Appeals Courts. We also have the records of the United States Congress here. That is unusual and it’s a unique relationship that we have with them. When it comes to Federal records, they come to the National Archives. Legal custody is transferred to the National Archives and that is what accession into the National Archives means. When it comes to legislative records, they are deposited with the National Archives but ownership is still retained by Congress. The legal relationship, therefore, is very different. What does that mean? That means, for example, the laws that apply to access to Federal records derive from the Freedom of Information Act. When it comes to records of Congress, Congress has certain resolutions or rules of the House or Senate to which we must refer for access. When I was there, the rules on access were antiquated. For example, records of the House of Representatives were closed for 50 years. It did not matter what they were about. If you wanted to see records, even from the First Congress, even on the most inconsequential thing, you had to get permission from the Clerk of the House. This was all pro forma, but you have a researcher sitting in front of you and you say, “well, I’d like to show you this, but I can’t show you until you get permission from that guy up there.” Then, you place a phone call and it had to be in writing. You had to jump through a bunch of hoops. Did anybody ever say “no” in answers? They always said yes. It was an arcane, silly procedure especially when you had scholars who were here. DC is an expensive city to stay in and now you are wasting their time with these hoops you had to make them jump through. When we finally became the Center for Legislative Archives, Mike McReynolds and I pushed against one of these rules of access. Can’t we make them more streamlined? Can’t we try to take these silly hoops out of the way? Eventually, this is when I was Chief of Reference, we did get the House to change its procedures. It modernized its rules. People no longer had to ask permission first. The same was true with the Senate. We worked with the Senate Historical Office and they are a great bunch of people to work with. We got them to modernize their rules of access and that was very satisfying to see that happen. In one case, in the late 1970s, we got records of the Senate Watergate Committee. When they came over that was really a hot button set of materials. Normally, they would have been closed for 50 years, no matter how mundane the stuff was. We were able to get the Senate to consider some rules of access to these materials that mirrored the Freedom of Information Act. This was a first step at trying to get the Senate and the House to apply more modern concepts of access to their materials. Were we completely successful? No, but again, we moved the needle forward in the direction of trying to open things up more and to try to get our researchers into those things on a more timely basis. I would argue a more rational basis, more in keeping with sort of the Freedom of Information Act. The other thing that we had done at time seems like a tiny thing now, but, again why don’t we microfilm some of these materials? That was the cutting-edge technology at the time. Now we digitize, but at the time, we wanted to microfilm, probably the most popular records of the House, the records of the Southern Claims Commission. This was a commission set up after the Civil War to review the claims of people in the South who lost property as a result of the Civil War. You know, the Union Army marched through and took away all their cows or whatever, and they are turning to the United States government saying here is a bill for 20 cows. Then the question became, did you lose the property, number one? Number two; were you loyal to the Union? These people had to submit affidavits on this. Because it related to people’s claims, genealogists today find these extremely rich and extremely interesting because they have all these affidavits and they are describing their personal situations. Moreover, they are describing the depredations of the Union Army and all this really cool stuff. We tried to get the House of Representatives to agree, saying it would really help our researchers if we could microfilm these records, actually microfiche these records and allow people to look at them anywhere they wanted to. Well, you have to have permission for each one of these. We tried to say, “Couldn’t we let that rule go for this body of records? We are wasting a lot of your time and our time.” They eventually agreed to do that. So we microfiched those and we sent copies of the microfiche to whoever wanted to buy them and out to our Regional Archives for the research room. Again, was that an earthquake? No, but it moves the needle in the right direction. I think we felt very proud of the fact that we got those records in the hands of more researchers. People really liked that. I think we all felt pretty good about that and the Watergate thing. The other thing we did during that period was look into the earliest records of the United States Senate and started working on that. There is a wonderful publication that predates the congressional record, called American State Papers. It was an attempt by the early government of the United States to publish its most important state papers, many of which were congressional, some of which were executive branch, such as letters from the President to the Congress. Why not the originals of those and other ancillary materials? Because the American State Papers covered, I think, the first 16 Congresses, which gets you past the War of 1812 or something like that. We launched a project to microfilm all of those records. I didn’t see it through to its end. One of my protégés, the one I was working with, she did see it through to the end and that was pretty cool that we got all of those records on microfilm. Again, it helps our research community do their jobs a little bit better and try to make things work a little bit better for everybody." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Do you remember her name, the—" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "[Interposing] Yes. Mary Rephlo. Mary is a wonderful person. She was on Senator Danforth’s staff and as he was leaving office, we were able to hire her down here. She is still working for us and she is another good person you might want to talk to. She was with the Modern Archives Institute. I said I was a student on that and she managed it for 20 years maybe. She was instrumental in that. One other final point on Legislative Archives. It began back in the late 1940’s when their materials first came to us and had a fairly powerful presence here with a lot of close connections with political figures on the Hill. I think the Archives tried to use it to its advantage, but herein lies a bit of a problem. The folks who ran the Legislative Archives could sometimes use that political leverage for their own ends, which can be a problem. Whom are you working for? Are you working for those guys or are you working for us, you know? Then some of the more powerful figures retired or died. That was well before my time. Then Legislative Archives became kind of a stepchild to some executive branch agency branch here within NARA. When I got here, it was the Legislative, Judicial, and Fiscal Branch. Next, it was Legislative and Natural Resources Branch. Then, it was Legislative and Diplomatic Branch. We were always stuck in with some other unit and we kept trying to make the argument that you really ought to have us as a separate unit and elevate our status to give us a little better relationship with the Hill. It might help the Archives out. Eventually that was done during my third time I was with Legislative. We set up the Center for Legislative Archives, and the idea there was to elevate the Center, to make it more prestigious, to get better relationships with the Hill, but to maintain that balance. I think Mike McReynolds and I understood we worked for the National Archives and promoted our interests, but tried to work closely with the Hill to try to keep that balance. I have not worked there since the early 90s. I think there was a different emphasis that came in after me. Mike Gillette came in and kind of fashioned that group as more like a Presidential Library, which has its pluses and minuses. I was not working there then, so I cannot comment too much on that but you might want to talk with those folks about how it changed over time. I wanted to talk to you about those things with respect to Legislative. Did you have any other ones that you wanted to ask me?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "No. You covered that very well. That was, archivist in Legislative Archives Division, ‘79 to ‘83. Then you went on to an archivist in the Program Analysis Branch, ‘83 to ‘85." }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Yes. Let’s talk about that. That was in policy and administration, a very different kind of a job. I was an archivist there by title, but not really, for all practical purposes, I was more like a program analyst. We would do things like go into certain units and work with them to see if their procedures were efficient, effective, and efficient. We did a number of different studies with units. The Federal Register was one. Our microfilm sales unit here was another one. I worked with probably the most controversial program there was. We brought in an outside vendor, a contractor, Management Analysis Incorporated to work on how to make the whole art and craft of archives more efficient. At the time, work processes very idiosyncratic. Each archivist did it his or her own way and each technician pulled and re-filed records his or her own way. As we moved into the 70s and the 80s, the constant refrain that we in the National Archives and throughout government had to work with is, do more with less. It was constant cutting back of government. You had to be thinking about how could we use the resources we had; mostly we’re talking about personnel resources, much more effectively? To give you an example, when I worked in Legislative, we had this wonderful filing system for which any letter we wrote to a researcher we would file a little card on whatever the topic was that might be something that was interesting to somebody else. The card would refer you to the reading file and you would pull out that letter. When I would look at letters written in the ‘50s and the ‘60s, somebody would write in and say, “What do you have on the Battle of Little Bighorn,” or something like that. We would write these letters that would go on for a page and a half with detailed references. When the next guy wrote in asking what we had on the Battle of Little Bighorn we could reproduce that letter and tell them to take a look at this. What it also speaks to is the time we had to devote to a letter. It probably took that researcher, that archivist, maybe a whole day to write up a letter back to that person. Were we providing good customer service? Well, yeah. The researcher benefited from that. Obviously, we had the luxury to be able to do that. As you get into the ‘80s and the ‘90s, we were getting slammed here and the byword of government, starting with the post-Watergate period well up into our own time is, do more with less— cutting back government, denigrating government services. It hit the Archives. It hit all aspects of the Federal Government. We had to start looking at what we can do more effectively. We had to start cutting back on how much research service we did give to people. We had to start saying that when you get a letter you must answer the letter in, I think, an hour or two. If the person asked you 20 questions, you would say I’m going to answer your questions, serially. I’m going to give you an answer to the first several questions. Then I have to move through the rest of my list of letters and I’ll come back to your letter and answer several more. That one person can’t dominate your whole week and you’re giving good customer service to as many people as you possibly could. We had industrial engineers, that’s Management Analysis Incorporated, come in and look at our work processes. They looked at how we managed the whole process of giving service to our customers, both in-person service, pulling records for them, or corresponding with people through the mail, through email eventually, and that sort of thing. Then trying to figure out, well, about much time did we spend? We found the numbers were wildly different. Or, how much time did we spend to pull records for different requests? Again, the numbers were all over the place. For certain kinds of research or certain kinds of questions we get thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands of requests, for example, for military pension records there is a certain procedure you do. You look it up in a register. You go from the register to the units, military service records. You pull the veteran’s record, you make a copy, and you mail it off to them. For those we developed certain standards for how many minutes it should take you to do this kind of thing. Therefore, they would batch the work by that type of record. For example, all military service records would be one. Immigration, naturalization records would be another kind. You’d say an average person should be able to do, I’ll just make up a number, about 20 of these a day and the person would be expected to do that. This makes sense on some levels. It is an efficiency kind of a thing. On a cultural level, this was a difficult thing for the National Archives because we’re sort of, especially on the side of the archives that I dealt with, the historic record side, we see ourselves as a cultural institution. We are kind of like an adjunct to a university, you know. Universities see themselves as being something that you cannot turn us into a factory. You can’t turn us into a widget factory. No, this is about culture. It is about art and those are the cultural values that we value. This really went against the grain. Most of the archivists really did not like to do it. It was difficult for me to have to try to sell this program. Portions of it stuck, particularly in the rote kinds of areas where we’re pulling by rote, like the one I just mentioned. In the other areas, it didn’t really catch on and probably just as well. It did compel us to rethink how we were giving service out and to reduce and try to systematize the work that we did, but that was a difficult thing to work on. The other thing I worked on in the Program Analysis Branch was the transition from the National Archives and Records Service to the National Archives and Records Administration. Independence. I was on the periphery of that, but once independence hit and we were an independent agency, our unit was in charge of trying to develop procedures for the National Archives. Up to that point, GSA developed all of our major procedures. We inherited their procedures. The first thing we did was make the argument to GSA that if we are going to have to do all these services that you were doing for us we are going to need slots to go hire some people to help us do personnel and procurement, and all those kind of general services kinds of things. What GSA did was say they’ll give us “x” number of slots. I forget what it was. They sent over some people to fill those slots. Now, do you think they sent their best and their brightest? I see you are laughing and so I think you got the idea. They sent the worst people they had. Oh, it was terrible. They had some people whom if GSA had had any integrity they would have fired them years ago. But, of course, instead they dumped them on us. Eventually those people either retired or left. They did not stick around for too long and various strategies were developed to try to move them along. We had to develop the basic procedures for running the National Archives. My unit had to particularly; I had to get smart in procurement of all things. Geez, I did not know anything about that. I’m an historian for God’s sake. I went out and took a bunch of classes in procurement. Government procurement is a highly procedure-driven activity. I mean, you can get in trouble so fast on it. My unit developed the basic procedures for how NARA would buy stuff. I had to get smart in all that. I even had a warrant to issue contracts up to a certain dollar threshold. Our theory at the time was an archivist could learn to do just about anything. Well, I guess I’m the proof of that, huh. Procurement stuff, give me a break. I learned that stuff. I didn’t particularly like it, but it gave me an appreciation for that. Throughout the rest of my whole career, I was really smart on procurement stuff. When people would say, “Oh, you’ll never get that done because you got to fill out these pieces of paper for procurement.” I would tell them to give me the piece of paper. I can fill it out. No big deal. They are looking at me like, “really?” I said, “Well, yeah, my unit wrote the first procurement handbook for NARA, so I kind of know that stuff.” We also worked on Archives II. That was also in that unit. One of my people, Michelle Pacifico, worked closely with Adrienne Thomas, and the whole planning for Archives II. When this building that we are sitting in here, Archives I, was state of the art for the 1930s. Now we are talking about the 1980s and 1990s and we have learned a lot about how to build buildings in between time. The way I would describe Archives II is that it was our lessons learned. If this is the way, this is what we like and do not like about Archives I. Here is our chance to do it right, so to speak, not that we did it wrong here, but this is how I’d do it better at Archives II. In Archives I, since we outgrew the space, we had people who were working and their office was in the stacks. My first office was in the stacks. You are surrounded by documents. You are not near too many humans and you are not allowed to take anything to eat or drink in there. You couldn’t have your morning cup of coffee in there or a snack or any of that sort of stuff. The air conditioning here was considered state of the art in the 1930s, but by the 1980s, it’s not so great. There were portions of the stacks where it’s just freezing no matter what time of the year. You have wind blowing in your face. They had to retrofit this building, I think in the 1950s, for water, so that we could extinguish any kind of fires. You are walking through the stacks, and I’m a guy of about six foot one, okay. Those water pipes, they had to put them some place. I think I still have a permanent crease in my forehead from smacking into those pipes. You come around the corner and wha-boom. One of your questions Brian was what was it like to work here. That was what it was like to work here. You had to know that you don’t go flying around a corner too fast or else you might get clocked. I worked with a guy who started working in the late 1940s, so he was there, not quite at the beginning, but pretty close. He would tell me one of the essential pieces of equipment for early archives was to always have an incandescent bulb in the pocket of your stack coat, because in those days incandescent lights were used in the stacks. By the time I got there, they were fluorescent lights. An incandescent light puts out light a certain kind of bandwidth, but there are dead spots in between. Inevitably, the records you are looking for are in that dead spot or the light bulb was burned out. You’d always have a spare bulb in your pocket and take out the burned out light bulb, put a new one in, so you could see what you were doing. You know, quite, quite incredible." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "[Interposing] Who was that gentleman?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "George Perros, P-E-R-R-O-S. George Perros was a Greek immigrant, worked in Legislative Archives, remarkable mind, and remembered stuff about the records, just a classic kind of a stack person. He had been there for a long, long time. He had some interesting stories about what it was like, being present at the creation kind of thing. That was cool to learn about. When we built Archives II, we said people would never work in the stacks again. It is kind of a, from a human being standpoint, not too cool working in the stacks. I mean, you would come in here in the morning in the wintertime, and it was dark. You leave in the evening, and it was dark. You never see daylight. At Archives II, you had offices where you had access to either direct sunlight or ambient light, which was very, very nice. You had an atrium in Archives II which would give you access to natural light. It was much more human friendly. The other thing that here is we have a few elevators, but, if one breaks down you are suddenly moving records from the stacks to the research room. If one elevator breaks down that really puts a crimp in your day. At Archives II, there are a lot of elevators. These are examples of things, well, we are not going to make that mistake again. When I got here, we had a really crummy snack bar. Oh, my goodness. Just dreadful. There was no real practical place for people to have lunch. They would have to go out of the building. At Archives II, they have a nice cafeteria, a nice menu with a selection of items to have. Here, the research room is very nice, very ornate, very beautiful, but not terribly practical from some standpoints. In Archives II, we have a whole cylinder of research rooms, six of them, depending on the record type you are researching and lots of access to natural light. You are looking out to the woods, which is really quite beautiful. So that’s the way we tried to kind of think about how to make it nicer for people and, of course, secure for the records. The records were always not subject to sunlight or anything and in air-conditioned controlled stacks. We do that well here and we did that well in Archives II as well. I would say the focus was on making it more human friendly. The next major assignment I had was Chief of the Research Rooms of Archives II, for about a year or so. I had been in administration. We were among the first people to move to Archives II, and that was interesting, because we were the pioneers. The whole place was empty. It was a break-in period—they are still doing punch list items. I remember we had computers, and the way computers were networked was for something like word processing. It was provided to you from the network, but if the network went down there was nothing to do. Your computer was dead. We all wanted the computer people to load copies, I think we were using WordPerfect at the time and we asked them to load WordPerfect on my PC. Why? Because if the network goes down I can still keep working. They thought that was the craziest idea, but eventually they did it. When they had to do any kind of updates to the software program they had to literally go around and touch every PC. You could imagine how incredibly time intensive that was. Then I moved to Branch Chief of the Research Rooms, which is how we were first organized in Archives II. We had to invent everything from scratch. How we manage researchers. How we manage staff. The whole process had to be invented and that was kind of fun. It had its frustrations but it was kind of fun trying to figure that out. The way it was initially conceived was there would be this reference branch— my branch—that would manage all the interactions between NARA and the researchers. That was how it was going to work. Not with the individual custodial units and the units had always run their own research rooms. They really resented this. They did not like this idea at all. We had to try to manage this relationship between researchers coming in and the folks in the custodial units who were pulling the records and trying to make that work well. I think at the end of the day the experiment in doing it that way did not work particularly well. I think they were better off running their own research rooms, which is what they eventually did too. Eventually, still pictures ran its own research room. When we ran it, it did not work because they knew all the questions to ask. Same with motion pictures. Same with cartographic and same with textual. I tried to manage that whole thing for about a year and the good thing was just trying to get everything to mesh and to try to get researchers to move through the way we thought it would work. Of course, it did not work that way in the real world and then we tried to make that work out better. That was a fun assignment. I enjoyed that a lot. My next assignment was one of my most fun here at the National Archives, which was when I was a Branch Chief of Motion Picture, Sound, and Video. We have a fantastic collection of motion picture, sound, and video materials. Itis just a wonderful, wonderful set of stuff. I had a really good time working on that. When I first went in, the branch was in a real difficult spot. There were a lot of personnel upheavals, a lot of EEO complaints, and suits. It was a real train wreck. At the outset, I was just trying to get folks to treat each other nicely, play well together, and that sort of thing. Then we also had to integrate the old downtown unit, the Archives I unit that went to Archives II. We had another unit that worked out at Pickett Street in northern Virginia and they came to Archives II. We had two units that had physically been apart for probably 10 or 15 years now working in the same space together. It was getting them to play nice together. It was a great experience in team building and trying to get people to think beyond what I want and then what do we need to be focused on, which is what do our customers want? That was what should be driving us. That was the mission and if you are not supporting the mission, then you need to change the way you’re doing it because you’re not supporting the mission. Getting them to think that different way was my biggest challenge through that. Also, there was an active set of researchers who were professional researchers. This is probably the only time I’ve ever dealt with professional researchers. In Legislative, you’d get someone who comes in, they’d work with you for a few weeks, boom, they go and you never see them again. With motion pictures researchers, you had a group of professional researchers who were there as many days in the week as I was there. They were there all the time. They are always under contract with some documentary filmmaker or whatever, putting together the next project. It’s a group of people who are very intelligent and very demanding. For them, this is money. This is dollars and cents. This is their living. I had to figure out a way to work with my staff, work with the professional researchers, and get them to kind of all move in the same direction. It was not that everything they want, we’re going to give them. It was not that everything that our staff wants, we’re going to give them. We’ve got to kind of move together here. I started setting up meetings, I think we did it quarterly, in which it was an open meeting and I’m going to tell you what kind of things we’re thinking of doing. I’m going to solicit your thoughts on it. Then I want you to tell me what’s bothering you. If, in the meantime, you’re upset about something let me know so we can talk it through. I was just trying to improve that whole communications dynamic, which was pretty much absent. They were treated mostly like the enemy. And they’re our customers. We really ought to be working together. We can’t give them everything they want, but we can probably work towards helping them out and helping us out. The biggest problem they had was, well, they’d say, “I placed an order for something today, and they don’t get it for 12 weeks.” Well, 12 weeks in the commercial sector is like 12 million years. They’re in a tight deadline and they are asking if there was anything, we could do to speed that up. The answer was that we actually figured out a way to do that. We sent all of our orders for reproductions down to our own lab, but our own lab couldn’t keep up with the production cycle. There just weren’t enough of them. It gets back to that issue we talked about a little while ago, which is government is continually contracting. That means when you lose people, you don’t get to replace them. Okay. In our labs, it’s contracting. Yet our demand for stuff goes up. In government that never matches. In the private sector, you can match that up. You can say, “we’ve got to hire three more people because look at the demand. And here’s all the money coming in that supports that.” In the government sector it’s a disconnect. Your demand can go up, your demand curve can go up, but Congress isn’t seeing the demand curve, they’re just seeing the bigger picture or some picture in which they feel like government in general has to go down. The fact that you guys are going up, well, you just have to organize yourself a little better. That’s the reality of the situation. So, what do you do? We turned to the private sector. Basically, we said, “you know what; let’s get our labs out of this business.” Frankly, they’re not cutting it and it’s not their fault. It’s not. They’re good people. They’re hard working people. There’s not enough of them. Why do we have a film lab at the National Archives? Is it to meet the demands of our researchers? Well, actually, it’s to copy things that are in danger of going out of existence forever. That’s their job, preservation, not reference work. The reference work was like a teenager. It’s eating you out of house and home. They’re taking over all the resources and you are not doing your primary mission, their primary mission, which is to copy this" }, { "speaker": "stuff. Solution to the problem", "text": "why don’t we turn to the private sector? There are about four or five labs in the DC area within an easy car ride that could do exactly the same work, and they can do it for a fee." }, { "speaker": "Okay. Here was the proposal", "text": "let’s tell National Archives labs that they are out of this business. Boy, they were really not happy about this. We’re taking that business away from you and we’re going to put it out to the private sector. We put out bids to four or five of these different companies and they had their own price schedules. And we turned to our customers and said, “Here’s the deal. Here is how we’re going to do it from now on. If you want to place an order, place an order, not with us, place an order with them, Lab ABC. How do we know what they’re going to charge? Look at their price list. What if they change? Then go to another one. We’ve got four vendors. If you don’t like the price of one, go to another one. It’s market driven.” They placed their order with the lab. The lab then places the order with us. The order is, could you please pull these five rolls of film? Boom. We pull the film, we send it to the lab, lab makes the copies, gives it to the researcher, comes back to National Archives, and we re-file it. Turnaround time goes from 12 weeks to under two weeks. Then it’s, “well, who’s going to pay for this?” “Who’s going to pay for it?” The guys who are asking for it. They’ve got money. They’re working for these filmmakers. Guys like Ken Burns. Money solves so many problems. It’s wonderful. That’s what they did and they loved it. They absolutely loved this. We would send our originals here, they made the copies, and we brought them back. We broke the whole earlier dynamic. You may recall in the early years of the Clinton administration they developed a number of initiatives that related to making government more responsive to people, more responsive to customers. They got us government folks much more customer oriented. I think it was a good thing. One of the things that they developed to try to encourage government people to do this was the Hammer Award. I don’t know if you ever heard of that. I forgot—I’ll think of the name of why they named it the Hammer Award. But, you could say, “hey, here’s this project we’ve done and we think it deserves being recognized.” We turned in this particular process I just described and we got a Hammer Award. This was from the Vice President’s Office of Reinventing Government, or whatever they called themselves. We all got a little piece of paper saying we got a Hammer Award. Oh, and a little lapel pin that had a hammer on it. That was pretty cool. That was kind of fun. But, I think—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "[Interposing] That was 1996?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "I think so. Yeah. We got the Hammer Award but I think I was very pleased to see that we could think of a way around a pressing customer service problem. And I think it, again, moved the needle in the right direction. It made us more responsive to our customers. Did they get everything they wanted? No. Instead of beating us up for being so slow, they beat up the labs. That’s where it should be. They are the ones making the copies, not us. It didn’t take much time for us to pull something. That whole process worked really well and we were really, really pleased with that. Then we got the labs to focus on this vast body of materials that was in danger of being lost. That’s their job; you’re a preservation lab. And we start sending stuff to them. Now 100% of their time or some high number percentage of their time is devoted to preservation, which is a much, you know, really why we’ve got them there in the first place. That was very satisfying. Towards the end of my term there, we held a conference here, Association of Moving Image Archives. It’s kind of like the SAA for moving image archives. We had the national conference here at Washington and we showcased Archives II. We showcased our collections. Our folks were the ones who were on the program committee and did all that. So that was a lot of fun, too. And it was very satisfying to have people coming here and being able to show off Archives II and show off our collections and that sort of thing. We had some really wonderful materials there. We’ve got a lot of military footage, combat footage, from World War I, World War II, Vietnam, which is very moving and interesting stuff. We had the Zapruder film of Kennedy being killed. The Challenger tapes of these poor people exploding in mid-air and all of that. So we had a lot of really, as I say, really interesting stuff. To me that was a really fun assignment because of what we had and how we were able to kind of change the culture there of how the unit operated and our relationship with our research communities. That was that job. Then my next job was—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "[Interposing] Well, hold on for a second, just before we move on. I just want to go back and put the dates on some of the positions that you had handled. Let’s see here, Chief of Legislative Archives Division Branch, Archives Division Reference Branch, excuse me, is 1985 to ‘88." }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Chief of Program Analysis Branch, ‘88 to ‘93. And Chief of the User Services Branch, ‘93 to ‘94. And, as far as User Services Branch, is that Reference Services? What—" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "[Interposing] Yeah. That’s what I mentioned. We were running the entire research complex—of all the research rooms. As I said, in retrospect did that really work? Well, you had to get something started, but I think they were better off running their own branches. That was, that whole conversation about getting that whole research room complex up and running, starting it from scratch, that’s what that was all about." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "And I’ll ask you about the reorganizations a little bit later." }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Oh, okay. Sure." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "I’ll ask you about that then. Then next was the Chief of Motion Picture, Sound, and Video Branch—1994 to ‘97." }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "And now to Electronic Records Archives Transition Officer, ‘97 to 2012." }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "To 2012." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "That’s a mouthful for a title." }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Yeah. Too long. I moved from being Chief of Motion Pictures, Sound, and Video to working for the office head for, let’s see, we called it Office of Records Services-Washington, DC ( NW) at the time. Today we call it Research Services. But basically, that’s whom I worked for. My job was for Michael Kurtz, through all of it, except for the last year or so. My job was to try to be his guy to try to figure out how we can use technology to provide services to our customers more effectively in research services and the former NW. Okay, so what does that mean? It means interviewing people at the unit level. Interviewing the major division directors and talking to them about parts of their processes that we could automate. Would it make sense to automate them, and why? We gradually, you know, no, we shouldn’t do that. Well, maybe we could do that. So we’d get a lot of conversations going. It is basically doing an assessment. First, an inventory of all the little systems we were using. Then trying to get them to sit back for just a second and say how could we automate some of these? Or, could we take five of them and turn them into one? How can we make our own internal processes better? And our own processes, the interface between us and our researchers more effective? How do we do that? So we got them to think about those kinds of things and so, like, what? What happened? Well, okay. As a result of that interviewing process and brainstorming process, we talked. One of the first ones we got was we worked with the Exhibits Unit. Jim Zeender was the guy I worked with, and he was trying to figure out how he can get a system that helps him keep track of the documents that they use. So that you understand their process, they borrow documents from the custodial units and they use them in their own exhibits here. Sometimes they just borrow them for a short period, and then they return them to the units. They also borrow documents from the units and they lend them to units, to organizations outside of NARA, like the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress because they’re having a new exhibit on whatever. Managing that entire process, I mean, we’re not talking about three documents, we’re talking about hundreds of documents, you know. And they’re not talking about ordinary documents. They’re usually talking about pretty important documents. So you really want to keep track of this in a very rigorous kind of way. They came to us and he says, “well, you know, there’s some automated systems out there, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products that you can buy that will actually help you manage that process.” So I said, “Okay.” Our office, my unit, worked with Jim’s unit to try to assess the COTS products, figure out which ones of them had the highest percentage of requirements that met his requirements, and eventually we ended up buying one of them. It’s called ReDiscovery and I think they’re still using it to this day. What it does for them is you go and you get a document and now you scan it. Now you scan it and then you associate it with whatever project you got. Now you got a scanned image inside in ReDiscovery and you can track its process. You can use that for lots of different purposes within their unit. For example, they’re going to do an exhibit catalog. Boom, you got a copy of the document right there. You’re going to use it for, geez, the volunteers could use that. Oh, yeah, make a copy off of that and use it for the next school group that comes in. It had a lot of things going for it and it also had a module, which allowed them to track where that document went. The original went from the custodial unit to their vault to the Smithsonian. There are usually restrictions on how long it can be there, like, it can only be shown for two months or whatever, and then it comes from the Smithsonian and back to the unit. So it tracks that process to make sure we’re bulletproof. That we know exactly where everything is. That’s, I mean, that was a huge, well, I think it was a big success for him. He was very pleased with it. The other one that we did, which has even wider ramifications, was the National Archives, back in the late 90s, developed something we now call ARC, the Archival Research Catalog. The catalog was to replace our various systems that dealt with descriptions of records. I say various systems because each generation developed its own style for doing description. And so you had layers of these things over time. There was no standardized way of doing it. Each generation almost had its own standard and everybody wrote to that standard. Then the next generation came in, and no, no, that’s not right. So then they do it a different way, but we don’t go back and redo the older ones. You’ve got various different ones and then none of them are online. The Archival Research Catalog’s goal was to put it all online and to make it searchable, you know, keyword searchable. Stuff that you guys, you know, it’s so obvious to you, but less obvious to folks at the time. The strength of that approach was it answered the question, “what have you got?” You know, what do you have on “x?” Then it’ll pull together everything you have on “x.” Okay. The only weakness of the approach was the thing they didn’t take on was, “gee, you’ve got this. Great. Where is it?” In other words—where is its exact stack location? Because now I’m here in Washington, I want to see the blasted thing. Or, I want a copy of it. So one of the archives staff has to go find it. Same problem. Where is it? What is it? Where? Those two questions were instead of being married up, which they should have been done from the beginning, but then you make a hard job ten times harder. I kind of understand why they took on the first part, which was very difficult by itself, and pulled it away from the second part, which was difficult too, managing where it is. Well, when we did the move of archives from Archives I and from Suitland out to Archives II, they had to develop a database to track all that. It was called the Master Location Register, the MLR. It was absolutely essential for archivists to use to find stuff. Okay. It didn’t answer the question, “oh, what have you got on “x?’” It answered the question, “where is it?” You know, it’s like you could look it up and find out, oh, it’s in Stack 5, whatever, row, whatever. That was an absolutely crucial database. It was on an older software platform by the 2000s and so many of the branch chiefs and division directors thought perhaps we should take the MLR and we should make it somewhat more expansive. Let’s solve a number of problems here. Let’s not only solve the problem of where is it? But let’s also solve the preservation question of what kind of condition is it in? Have we done work on that one before? Because we don’t want to have to go back and do it again. Oh, is it checked out to the Research Room and checked back in again? It’s that same problem we talked about earlier with respect to exhibit items. Can’t we get something that tells us a bigger picture about the physical holdings themselves? Okay. And so what that grew into was the Holdings Management System, HMS, which people are using right now. Lots of bumps and grinds along the way. None of these software programs worked perfectly out of the box. This one certainly didn’t, but it has grown into something now where it’s an absolutely crucial part of their daily life. When an accession comes in you have to make an entry into the Holdings Management System so it knows where it is. It’s supposed to be the comprehensive inventory of all of NARA’s holdings. Now if you think about that, that’s a pretty staggering thought, but that’s what it’s supposed to be. I mean if you’re in Archives, what are we supposed to do? At the very least we have to be responsible for the stuff we have. Oh, what stuff do you have? Oh, you don’t know. That’s not a good question; that’s not a good answer. You have to say we know exactly what we have, and here’s where it is. I mean, it’s a property accountability system, if you want to think of it that way, but it’s intellectual assets. But they’re on physical pieces of paper or film or whatever they are. You have to be able to know where that stuff is and be accountable for every last piece of it. You can’t say, “Oh, well, it’s missing.” That’s not a good answer. “No, where is it?” “It’s in the lab.” Good answer. “It’s at the Research Room.” Good answer. “It’s with Suzy Q. She’s the researcher.” That’s a good answer. “It’s now back in the stacks.” Oh, that’s a good answer too. You have to know where everything is, all the time. And that’s the goal of the Holdings Management System. Not all of it has been built out to this date; at least I don’t think so. But the basic parts of it, and we’re not talking about just Archives I, we’re talking about Archives I, Archives II, every Regional Archives, is in HMS. I forgot how many millions of cubic feet of stuff. That’s a lot of stuff. So they ported a lot of the old National Location Register information into it, a lot of work to try to match that up. And then they’ve also barcoded each shelf. Glink, glink, glink, glink, down the row. So then the idea being able to associate a box with a location. Boxes are barcoded. Locations are barcoded. You associate box with location. Boom, boom. Now is that completely done? No. Because there’s a lot of boxes. So there’s going to be plan in place to try to eventually have all new accessions barcoded. Then old accessions, as you touch them or as on some systematic basis, you get around to, you know, barcoding all the boxes. The grand scheme here being, if you get a barcode scanner, you can just go, like they do in the stores. You scan the box, you scan the location, and it associates it. Boom, boom, boom. Now if I’m going to take it off the shelf, click. And if I’m going to go take it to the Research Room, click. It associates that it’s now no longer on the shelf, it’s in the Research Room. Perfect. When it comes back, you reverse the process, or it goes to a lab, or to Jim Zeender for an exhibit you know where everything is. Then the golden moment would be, geez, wouldn’t it be great if you found it through your discovery tool, ARC, which answers the questions, “What do you got on the Civil War?” And it gives you a gazillion hits. Then you say, “Oh, I want to see that one on the Battle of Antietam.” Now you can link over to the HMS system and find where it is and the process is complete. Researcher finds it, hands it to the Archives, generates a pull slip, staff pulls it, gets it to the research room, and it’s all seamlessly connected. That’s sort of the grand vision. I think they’re kind of, I don’t know, 60% done with that. I don’t what the percentage is, but that’s where we should be moving towards is integrating these systems, which were built at different times by different folks. I’m not being critical here, it’s just the way things go. This is the great challenge for the Archives, is to integrate these systems, which individually have their strengths, but to be so much more powerful if they’re pulled together. That to me was the vision that I kept trying to push to my bosses before I left—you’ve got to get pushing these things together. That was the HMS System which was being used now and I think to great effect. ERA, the Electronic Records Archives. It is probably the biggest software project the National Archives has ever undertaken by orders of magnitude. I mean in terms of dollar value. Hugely expensive. Hugely complex. It’s launched now. It’s being used now. It’s got some strengths to it. It’s got some significant challenges to it. Absolutely no question. What drove ERA at the very beginning, the guy who probably was there at the very beginning, who pushed it most effectively, was Ken Thibodeau. Ken formulated the vision around the fact that we’re all starting to use computers a lot now. We’re generating government records in electronic form. How will we manage those electronic records in the future? We’ve got a really good grasp on how we manage hard copy materials, paper and film, and all that. We’ve developed really good methods for doing that. We don’t always do them real well, but we’ve got our hands around a lot of that. How do we deal with electronic records, especially given that the nature of the industry is such that they’re always changing software and hardware? How do we keep up with that? How do we get out ahead of that curve and how do we maintain the archival materials that are there in perpetuity? That’s the huge challenge. Ken was able to push that forward. He was able to push that in front of the Archivist and the senior archival managers. They all agreed that’s the vision, that’s where we’ve got to go. Miracle of miracles they were able to sell Congress on giving us a lot of money to try to solve the problem. Now comes the next part of the problem. I was there on the source evaluation team that evaluated the contractors who were applying to get this monster contract, monster for us anyway. I learned procurement. I was on the team. It was a team of probably 20 or 30 people. They had us sequestered over at CACI, an information technology company. Their headquarters is right across from Fort McNair, I think, in Arlington, Virginia. They sequestered us there for two or three months and we read these gigantic proposals from these vendors. They’re telephone book-size proposals telling the names of their people, their proposals for solving your technical problem and all of this. We would come back with questions. It was a long, long process. The way the process ultimately worked was we hired two firms to work with us for a year to develop the concept of ERA. Then at the end that year, we would pick one of those two firms as being the winner. We picked Lockheed Martin and Harris Corporation and we worked with the two of them together for a year. I’m off the source selection team because we had made our selection. I worked for Michael Kurtz, the office head for Research Services, my job is to represent the interests of my office with the contractors, and with the ERA team here who work for IT services. I’m the lead guy for my unit, for my office. Then I have guys working with me who are working for the textual people, the still pictures, the promotion, all those folks, they’re all kind of reporting to me. I managed an IPT, Interdisciplinary Product Team, from these units to try to represent their interests effectively in front of the contractors and our own ERA team. That was my job for about ten years working with them, developing our requirements. The next major task we had was to figure out our business rules. This took me back to the period when I worked in program analysis, which everybody does differently. When you automate services, you have to start to regularize things because computers have a lot of trouble with that. They’re really good at having things done in a predictable way. That’s the way computers work. There can be some variation, but you have to get your processes, and define them. We asked people, “How do you do your job, Brian?” Well, “I do this, this, this, this, and this.” “Oh.” Then you ask the next guy who does the same thing and he does it very differently. Therefore, you have to say, “No, guys, you got to have a standard way of doing this.” Then we have to develop business rules around that activity. The activity might be pulling records. “How do you do that?” “We’ll we get the reference service slip.” “Then what do we do?” “We take this copy and we go there. You have to go down and pull the records. Then you take it to research room.” You have to get that all figured out. Because then you’re turning to the programmers and saying, “Here’s how we do our job. Automate it.” If you don’t know your rules, and with each rule there has to be some rules, it’s a true, false. We do it. We don’t do it. It’s a yes, no question. For other ones, it could be A, B, C, or D. Computer guys can deal with this kind of stuff. The third one might be something like, Yes, no, it might be A, B, C, D, or might be something else. They say, “Well, we sometimes do it, and we sometimes don’t. You can’t do that. You can’t automate, no, no, no, no, no.” This is a huge cultural issue for the National Archives. Guys like me have to go to our people and work with them and say, “this is your chance to actually think about what you do and ask the question: do you even need to do that?” You’re doing it that way and we could automate that, but why are you doing that? That’s a hard question. Human beings don’t really like that question. You’re making me make a decision on that. This is like herding cats. You have to kind of get out the cowboys and get them to herd the cats. It’s trying to get them to move in the same direction and try to say, well, “How should we do that?” “Well, that’s not the way we do it.” “Well, I know that. But could we think of a different way?” That’s a very challenging question when you ask that to people. People don’t like that because then it’s almost implies they’ve been doing something dumb all their lives. That’s not the way it’s meant, but that’s how people can take it. You have to kind of craft ways to try to get people to think imaginatively about how they do their jobs. How do you do accessioning? How do we appraise records? Eventually as ERA grew, it started with, well how are we handling electronic records? Then we said, “Well, let’s just think about this. The process for dealing with electronic records is really not that different fundamentally from dealing with any other kind of record.” Let’s see what we do. We appraise them pretty much the same. We say certain ones are permanent; it’s the same. We accession them at the appropriate time. That’s the same. The paperwork to this is identical and we take them into the National Archives. That’s the same. The way you do it’s different. Electronic will be different from paper, would be different than audio tapes. The physical format now starts to make a difference, and storing them is definitely different. The paper you put on a shelf. We have figure how to store the electronic. It’s really towards the end of it, when we actually get that it’s different. All those steps at the beginning, from appraisal through accession is identical. If you have to do it for electronic, why don’t you apply the same processes to all of them? Talk about an earth moving moment. Oh, my God. We’re going to do it for everything. Everybody said- “Well, yeah, we should do that. We should automate all of our appraisal processes.” Let’s use this, an opportunity to automate all of that, to get the entire life cycle of permanent records taken care of. When you appraise, we say something like what, 3-5% of our records are permanent. The rest are temporary. To get to the word temporary, you still have to appraise it. We’re talking about scheduling for all records that come to NARA, even to the Record Centers, even the temporary ones. You can see how this little germ of an idea has now expanded to the entire life cycle of all federal records, and is in something called the Electronic Records Archives. People kept telling me- “You have the wrong title for this. It really should be something like, not the Electronic Records Archives, but it ought to be the National Archives, because it’s the whole thing. We sold it based on electronic records. We couldn’t sell the Congress on that, I guess, but we could sell Electronic Records Archives. We had this branding problem, which I think still exists to this day. Most of the records it’s going to touch aren’t even electronic. They’re hard copy. We begin with developing business rules for each of these processes. We work with our subject matter experts and to do whatever it takes to get their business rules out. Once their business rules are done, they have to get it down to an extraordinary level of detail. For one sub-process, it might be several pages single-spaced of steps you have to go through and what the conditions are. Whether it’s a yes, no, or whether it’s an A, B, C. You have to write all that down because you can’t just tell the computer programmer- “Oh, automate appraisal.” He doesn’t know what appraisal even means. He’s not an archivist. He’s a computer programmer. We got those business rules done. We worked with the contractor. Now comes the sort of the sadder part of the story, which was, for reasons that I still don’t quite fully understand, our dealings with our contractor were not terribly satisfactory. You should probably talk to the folks who worked in the ERA contract shop as to why that did work, worked, or didn’t work so great. The initial product we got out of ERA after a year of working with Lockheed Martin was inadequate. It’s the nicest thing I can say. It was a disaster is probably the more accurate thing to say. ERA was designed to do the whole life cycle of records for NARA. When we appraise records, that’s a relationship we have between the agencies and us. Now the agencies are going to play in that little swimming pool and the agencies are the ones who transfer the records to us in accessioning. It’s not just for NARA. It’s for the whole Federal government. Success is widely amplified, and so is disaster. When you start saying to the government- “You know what, I know we deal with you and the way we deal with you guys right now is with these forms, but we’re replacing the forms with these electronic systems.” The screams could be heard from miles away. Some of them were more tech savvy and would say, “Well, that’s cool. You’re going to automate those forms. I don’t have to type them anymore. Wow. That’s fabulous.” Others, of course- “I like typing those forms.” We had to talk with them and we had a group of those folks come in and say- “Alright, so how do you use these forms? How can we best accommodate your needs when we automate that?” We work with OMB. And OMB was one of our greatest champions because to them, our argument was, if we automate those forms, it will take them less time, effort, and money. It’ll make the whole process more efficient. They’re thinking they’re not going to have to spend as much money in those different agencies, because we’re all going to do this electronically through this wonderful product called the ERA. You would have thought we’d asked them to go to war or something. It was really, really a big deal for people. That those kinds of culture changes are the hardest things humans have to deal with. By the soft stuff, the softer side of management is actually the harder side. The hard side of management, which is the numbers and the dollars and all that, it’s actually in some ways easier. Harder to do, but easier. When you’re dealing with the people side of it, it’s much more nuanced and complicated because trying to bring them into a common way of doing things without making them feel too regimented, and still feeling like we’re valuing what they do as an archivist is hard. Then we suddenly found out, “Well, we’ve been using this form for all these years, but if a box is missing we just write a little note on the side of the other box and that’s it.” That’s your way of keeping track of things? You get all this kind of irregular stuff going on. I said, “Well, then how do you keep track of it? “Well, we just stick it in the file cabinet.” There are file cabinets the size of this room that are just exploding with materials, and if you ever had to trace this stuff back, you’d be really challenged to do that. This is what I would pose to archivists, “At the very core of what an archive is, if we don’t do anything else, we have to be accountable for the stuff we’ve got and we have to preserve it.” If you don’t know what you got, you’re failing in that portion of the mission. This will help us solve that question or address that question. We worked with Lockheed Martin and it did not work first year. Very, very poor results. We had told the agencies, we’re going to field this to all the agencies. Then we push that date back because we aren’t doing so great. We had to push the next date back a little bit. We had to work really hard with Lockheed Martin. They had to dismiss most of their team and bring in new players. It was pretty ugly. We had a lot of skull sessions with them, “We told you what we wanted. Here are the business rules we gave you and you didn’t build it to the business rules.” They would put out a build and our people would review the build. They would say, “Oh, it’s not working here. It’s working okay there.” You’re trying to meet certain dates because you’re telling the agencies that they have to use these forms by a certain date. If you can’t make the forms work by that date, it makes things extremely challenging. At the end of the day, we now have an appraisal portion of it. It’s out there. Agencies are using it. They’re no longer using hard copy forms. That date came and went. They participated in the testing. They participated in lots of information sessions and all that. The second piece of it is accessioning. All accessioning, hard copy, whatever, has to come through that. Your accessioning form comes in through here. Now the stuff comes in and the way we keep track of this is with HMS. To let our researchers know about it (HMS is used by staff internally) we have to make an ARC entry so the researchers can know about it. You start to see what’s happening here. This system feeds data. ERA feeds data to HMS, which has to feed data to ARC. Instead of three systems, they really ought to be three systems that are integrated so the data can seamlessly move from your ERA system and we’ll attach the accessioning information over here to your HMS system. Staff write up a series description, and that gets pushed to your ARC system. Then your researchers should now be able to say, “Eh, I want to see that box.” They fill out a research services slip online and then we pull it, which speaks to the HMS system, which allows you to pull it. It accounts that Suzy Q has it in the Research Room, turns it in three days later, it goes back to the shelf, and then we all know about it. That’s how the whole system should work. The problem is we built all three separately on different platforms. It’s expensive. If we’d have been really smart, we would have tried to build one system that would do all these things, but we didn’t have the money. We said, “Well, let’s just do ARC. Let’s just really get our hands around all of our descriptions and put them all in this thing called ARC. We did do that and we’re still feeding ARC. Now we’ve got these other systems which need to start to speak to one another and that’s the convergence factor. That is a big challenge, to achieve convergence. We’re starting to go from hundreds of little systems that people use on their desktops and we’d like to move away from that model to several big systems that we all feed into and we all access. I spoke to the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and to my boss about that. That’s huge. You asked about digitization. I worked some on digitization we set up some guidelines. Mike Hamilton worked on that. You might want to talk to him as well as Doris Hamburg. Now the question is, “Hey, NARA ought to be providing its content to more people online. How do we do it?” Back in the 1930’s the cutting edge technology was microfilm. We went into it huge, big time but we don’t do microfilm anymore. No one actually likes to look at microfilm. It’s somewhat tough on the eyes. Especially, when you can look at it in the comfort of your own home on your PC. Our problem with digitization is the vast scope of the National Archives. We have something in our most recent strategic plan that we’re going to digitize everything. Holy smokes. That’s a lot of stuff. We have to figure it out, prioritize this, determine what’s the most requested, the most demanded records, and start figuring out processes for getting these records digitized. The other piece of this that people forget about, and my wife can talk to you more about this because she does it really well, is we can’t find this stuff because it’s images of documents. It’s not a Word document which you could do full text searching on. These are handwritten documents by Andrew Jackson. It’s an image. We can’t do full text search of it. At least we can’t so far, in today’s technology. What you need to find that image is you need metadata about it. You need information about the information, so a researcher can say, “That letter was done from Andrew Jackson to John C. Calhoun in 1816.” Ah, and it has to do with the Seminole War in Florida. How do you develop the metadata? Right now, humans have to do it and that’s labor intensive. When we say, “Digitize things,” it’s not as simple as taking a document and putting it on a scanner. Someone has to read it and put it in the metadata, so then the research world can find it. That’s the hard part and the labor-intensive part. The other piece that people don’t realize is many of those documents are not in great shape. Putting them through a scanner isn’t going to work. You have to go through it slowly and you have to do some kind of preservation actions on them to preserve them at some level. Where are we going to put all that stuff anyway? The Electronic Records Archives. These things are electronic records. We’re developing this giant server or series of servers to store this stuff. We should just be able to put it in ERA and let people find it as if they’re looking for any other kind of electronic record because it’s an electronic record. That’s kind of how we’re thinking about doing that. Again, convergence. We’ve got a group working on digitization, but they don’t seem to be working on the connections with these other pieces here, pulling things together, and making the whole thing work seamlessly for the benefit of our customers." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Was there any idea of how significant, as far as the information size, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte? I even had to look up what was bigger than the gigabyte and, or excuse me, the terabyte, and it’s a petabyte." }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Petabyte. Right. It’s petabytes—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "[Interposing] And they’re now over the petabyte range, so…" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "[Interposing] Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Was there any idea that this system or system of systems would approach this size? Did anyone—" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "[Interposing] We did—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "—foresee that?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Yes. There’s a lot of information that was developed by the ERA team in making the argument to OMB and Congress about how much stuff we are talking about. You’re right, we’re into the multi-terabyte, multi-petabyte stages and I think they were even talking about yottabytes, which, I think is next and a huge volume. How do you store that? How do you store it securely? I’m not a computer science guy, but there was a lot of work done and many studies into how much storage would be needed." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Mm-hmm." }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Wow. Overall, how would you describe the success of ERA? Up to what you can remember?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Well, as I say, at the beginning, it was not a success at all. It was pretty much in failure mode until they brought in another team. It’s been launched to the entire Federal government. As far as I know, the entire Federal government is using it and we’re not using paper anymore. Are they all happy? Nobody’s ever happy but I think people are adjusting to it. How is it working within NARA? Are people using it? Yes. It is the system of record for our accessions and our appraisals. Can it be better? When it comes to these electronic systems, they can always be better. There will be a constant need of fixing things. Is it a success? I think it is doing its basic core mission. It has been completed, has been laid out, and now they have to populate it. They have to keep using it and they have to keep revising it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "So who are some of the people who’ve helped you with your career at the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "That’s a great question. I was fortunate to have a number of really good bosses throughout my career that taught me an awful lot about archives, as well as dealing with people. I would name Ken Harris who was one of my bosses way back when we were the Legislative and Diplomatic Branch. An excellent, a great guy, but a really good person who could think about projects and help me figure out project plans. For example, we were trying to figure out after we received some money from Congress to preserve the early records of Congress. I think, $400,000 or something like that. He says, “Well, we go to the project line. I said, “What’s that?” He says, “Here’s how you do it.” He shows me the math and shows me a nice pattern. I built on that model that he gave me the rest of my career doing project plans. Now, it’s no big deal. Nevertheless, he taught me that and he was a very thoughtful guy. He went on to work for the Library of Congress for many years in preservation. He was terrific. Mike McReynolds and I worked together in Legislative Archives when we were the Center for Legislative Archives. He was the Center Director and I was the Branch Chief for Reference. He had a lot of good front office experience that helped me deal with folks on the Hill as well as people in our own front office. Probably the most important influence for me was Michael Kurtz. Michael and I worked together when I was in the Program Analysis Branch, and again when I was ERA Transition Officer. I probably worked with him for probably 15 years. He was a strategic thinker, a guy who could carry things through. He can articulate the vision and he can carry the vision through. I have a lot of respect for Michael. Those were key influences in my career." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Have any major events affected your role or your perception of the Archives, anything—" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "[Interposing] External to NARA kind of events?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Mm-hmm." }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Yes. The one that probably impacted me were when I first started in Philadelphia was the “Roots” phenomenon. Suddenly everybody is a genealogist. I forgot the statistics at the time. But, our number of researchers back in 1975 were ten or something silly like that. Then it’s like 300. It exploded through the roof and I didn’t know anything about genealogy or how those records worked. I had to learn about all that, which was kind of cool. Then they had me going out to local genie clubs and so forth to teach how you search for your roots. You do this, you look this up, and they had slide shows. I’d show them slide shows. That was great fun. The other one that was a big deal when I first started was Watergate. Watergate was gigantic in the late 1970s and we got the records. Where I wanted to work, at the very beginning, was at the Nixon Project- Whoa, that’s so cool. We seized the records of the President. Wow. Except I couldn’t get in because everybody wanted to do it. We thought, “There’s going to be so many smoking pistols in there and guns and everything. This is going to be so neat.” Then they were closed for a generation. If you’d have gone there, you’d have been in this deep, dark cellar and never been able to come out. Because, no, you couldn’t talk about what you were doing. I did work with the Senate Watergate Committee records. That was a major event, which then had a huge impact on my career. We had to deal with these really hot records. That was pretty cool. The other big one would be the general transition of the government and indeed the entire world to information technology. That was the stimulus behind the Electronic Records Archives. Instead of a single event like 9/11, that was a gradual thing that builds and builds and builds, but finally is now the natural order of things." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "How do you view the Archives transition under the various archivists of the U.S. or have you noticed a change?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Well, for the earliest ones, I was at such a low level I hardly had any inkling of the impact. I started under Bert Rhoads. I’m a beginning archivist, what do I know what he’s doing? I had no notion of that. Warner got us independence. I met the man a few times and he seemed like a wonderful guy, but I had almost no personal contacts with him. With Don Wilson, his focus was on Regional Archives and trying to expand that program. There was some wisdom in that, but there was lack of wisdom in the way he went about it. I think he left us with a legacy that was not as good as it could have been. Then John Carlin was able to get us an awful lot of money and that helped us during the Clinton Administration. I did not have much interaction with Weinstein. I had some with David Ferriero. He continued the push towards toward ERA, which is good. Again, I didn’t have a whole lot dealing with folks at that level, my dealings with folks at the level below that. I was just an archivist." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "What organizations have influenced your career, SAA or any of the other?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Oh, outside organizations?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Mm-hmm." }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "I was a member of SAA at the very beginning but it became difficult to stick with that just because the problem with being active in these associations was NARA, unless you can get on the program, generally did not support people going to the conventions. They’re almost always out of the city, so that’s a significant personal commitment of funds to do that. Once you start having a family, a mortgage, it’s hard to, so I didn’t do that as much as I would have liked to. I enjoyed it early on when I didn’t have some of those commitments and my wife and I were on a double income and no kids. Once we started having children, I didn’t have time to do that. SAA did not have much of an influence on me. MARAC somewhat more, because it’s local and you could get to those places more easily." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Have you had any work with the Archives Assembly?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Had any relation with them?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Yes. I was there when the Assembly first was formed in the late 1970’s. I was there for some of those discussions. It is a wonderful organization. It is what we should have been doing, all along, an organization of professionals and paraprofessionals sharing their insights. I very much believe in what they do and how they’ve done it. I think it’s terrific." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Now your wife still works here?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "No. She retired two weeks ago." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Oh, that’s right. Two weeks ago, that’s right. So, at one point your children and your wife and yourself all worked at the Archive. Can you explain how that worked?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Sure. My wife and I met here at the Archives. You’ll have to talk to her about her background and so forth. She worked at the Kennedy Library. In those days if you wanted to become an archivist, the Office of Presidential Libraries hired all their archivists centrally here in Washington and then they disbursed them to the libraries. They trained them all here for a year or something like that did training in rotations and then they assigned them out to the various libraries. She started at the Kennedy Library, moved down here to be a professional archivist, finished her training program, and then we met and we got married so she’s been stuck down here ever since. She and I have been working at the Archives. In fact, that’s another interesting cultural side of the National Archives is there are a number of people who met here at the Archives and got married. I think it’s just a function of, you know, we’re doing all this graduate school stuff and we didn’t have time to be thinking about spouses and all that. By the time, this is your first job and we start meeting people who are somewhat like-minded, I guess. It was funny when we got married, at our little party that our Branch Chief and she gave me a single-spaced two-page list of all those people they called the Orange Blossom Express. It was a list of people who met at the Archives and got married. “Archives Couples,” that’s what we were called. That was kind of funny. As my kids grew up, we had this program where we have student interns. In the summertime, you would hire students who were in college. When my kids came home for the summer, they both worked at the National Archives. One of them worked in Legislative, where I first started out. My other son, Patrick, worked pulling records, I think. Yes. He worked in record pulls. They did that for three or four summers during college. Patrick, later, applied for a job and got a job here after he graduated from college. He is still here. We’ve moved on, but he’s still here." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "What does he do today?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "He works for the Exhibits Branch. That system I talked to you about a while ago, Rediscovery, in which they’re recording all of these things, I helped develop the program or at least get it purchased and all that. He now uses that. He’s the guy that has to scan those documents in, keep track of everything, and make sure that everything works out okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "And what did your other son wind up doing?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "He’s now an MBA. Finished an MBA program at the University of Washington, Seattle and he got a job with Amazon now. It is a very different career line." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. And looking back from your career to what you know of NARA today, what do you think NARA could be doing differently, better or worse, just differently?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "Well, I think one of the greatest challenges it has right now is staff morale. When we look at these employee surveys, they’re very poor. We should be doing a much better job of figuring out why people are so dissatisfied and developing better ways, we could make things better for staff here. This should be a place that’s an exciting place to work that really motivates people. Whenever I’ve met people from other agencies, I’ve always felt like NARA people are far more excited about the mission of" }, { "speaker": "their agency than a lot of other agency people. We have a very clear mission", "text": "preserve and make available the permanently valuable records of the Federal government. That’s our mission and we live, eat, and breathe that. When I meet people from other agencies, it’s like, “Yeah, it’s a job.” Well, many of us don’t feel like this is a job. This is important. This is important to the republic, my goodness. I think that’s genuine and think that’s a strength that our current leadership should be building on and it’s not. It’s so sad to see people who are really dissatisfied, just because of the way decisions are made and the way they’re communicated and so forth. To me, that’s a source of great sadness to see that. Other things that I’d like to see us do, like I talked to you about a minute ago, is in the IT world we should be looking for opportunities for convergence. How do we pull all of these things together so that they talk together better and it makes things far more efficient for our customers? I think there’s so much we could be doing with digitization. It seems to me it’s being done so sporadically or haphazardly. There doesn’t seem to be a plan behind it and there doesn’t seem to be an established procedure behind it, because this is absolutely the way of the future. I think we’re kind of dropping the ball. Areas that I think we’ve done really well at, when I look back at the whole sweep of my career, is public programs. When I first started here, public programs were really downplayed. By public programs, I mean having speakers come in, having a symposium, having school groups come in, and have a place where you can show them stuff. The Exhibit Hall area was the rotunda with the documents of freedom. Then there was a wall behind it, which was made it into an exhibit area. In the early years of my career, I regret that my colleagues kept looking on that as fluff. “What are we doing that for?” Again, we went through this whole business about constricting budgets. That’s why we’re here. It’s a part of our mission is to help people appreciate the stuff that we hold in perpetuity. You have to think past today and you’re inspiring some little kid who might go on to be President or something. I thought Marvin did a fabulous job of taking the exhibit space we had and when we renovated this building, expanding the exhibit space and taking it to the next level. Wow. All of the interactives and all the displays to try to excite people’s interest in history. Yes. That’s why we’re here. To bring speakers in and to have them talk about their books, and to talk about controversial topics is what we should be doing. I said earlier, culturally, we’re kind of like a university. That’s the part where we are. I’ve always admired the folks that do that and I always think they’ve done a good job. I really like seeing how far it’s come. I’d love to see it continue and perhaps even do more. We’ve done traveling exhibits with facsimiles of great documents. There was a lot of stuff that we do, back at the very beginning that was almost looked down upon as kind of dumb, or why are we bothering to do that? I think it was very short-sighted. And we are trying to promote our name out there. I remember the earliest archivists would say, “Success depends on how infrequently your name is mentioned.” The thought was, well, if you’re mentioned, it’s only going to be for the bad. But why couldn’t it be for the good. It was a very different mindset." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well, a last question would be or is, has it been hard letting go, the duties, responsibilities, or have you transitioned into retirement pretty easily?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "I don’t know about pretty easily. It was hard to leave here. It was very hard. Part of it is, I believe in the mission of the National Archives. I do. I met my wife here. My kids worked here. I was trained as an historian and I wanted to go into an academic profession. I worked here and it was sort of a fallback position, but then it became a passion for me. I have a passion for the mission of the National Archives, absolutely. By the way, while I was working here I worked part-time as a history professor at Northern Virginia Community College. As I was coming to the end of my career, I went back to those guys and said, “Would it be okay if I came back?” And they said, “Sure, come on back.” That’s what I’m doing. Two weeks, a week after I left here, I was teaching a class at Northern Virginia Community College, a history class, of course. I’m a history professor. When I’m asked who am I and what am I doing now? I say, “Well I worked for the National Archives for 35 years and two years in other government organizations, so 37 years overall for the Federal government, but I’m a history professor. I’ve always felt like I’m kind of like both. I’m proud of both of those experiences. My wife and I, now that’s she’s retired, have done some traveling. We’ll be doing some more of that and just enjoying ourselves. It was difficult to transition at first, but once I jumped into the teaching that helped me. I could do something that I loved. I had never taught the class before so I had to work really hard to get ready for it, to get ready for all the questions and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. It was fun." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "[Interposing] Any other topics you’d like to talk about?" }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "I don’t think so. I think I’ve done it. Do you guys have any other questions?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "You sure?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. Well, thank you for your time today, sir." }, { "speaker": "DR. KEPLEY", "text": "You bet. Thanks, Brian." } ]

[ { "speaker": "Paul Santa Cruz", "text": "OK, hello, this is Paul Santa Cruz doing an oral history interview related to COCIV-19 for the National Archives Assembly. I'm here today with Daria Labinsky. Daria is an archivist with the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. Today is April 19, 2021. I'd first like to thank Daria for being here and sharing her insight with us for this. I'd like to start by asking if you could tell us some about yourself, your educational background, and how you started with the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Daria Labinsky", "text": "OK, well, I originally was a journalist. I got a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from Northwestern. My master's was in journalism. The bachelor's was in communications. I worked as a journalist for about eight years, and then I became a freelancer. I was a freelancer for quite a while. While I was a freelancer, I began researching a book that was a biography of an artist in New Mexico. When I was doing that, I had to travel to special collections all over the country because he had friends who had records at Harvard and Yale and Berkeley and all kinds of places. I was working on a couple of different projects, and that was one of them. It got me really interested in archives. So I lived in New Mexico and decided I was interested in trying to become an archivist. Just serendipitously, Emporia State University was doing a virtual program where classes were being held at the University of New Mexico. Part of it was online, part of it was instructor-led. So the instructors would come to New Mexico on weekends, and they would teach us classes. This was library science, not archival studies, but they would teach us classes. Then they would go back to Kansas or wherever. Some of them were based in Milwaukee and all kinds of places. We would work on projects and then they would come back and we would meet again and discuss our projects. It was a very cool program they had there. But one of the components was archival studies, so I got to do archival studies training with Randy Silverman, who was a rare book conservator for the University of Utah. I believe he is at the University of Utah still. He is very well renowned, and he had us learn basic archiving. We got to do a practicum at Rocky Mountain National Park and work on their archives and their land records. So it was really cool. Then I went to work as a public librarian. One of the things that happened when I was there is they said they were going to create a local history room. They had me do it because they knew I was interested in archiving, and they said, \"OK, you're going to be our local history librarian, but you also have to be our webmaster.\" So I had to learn how to create web pages! So that was great. Then we were building a whole new library, a main campus of the main branch of the library in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. I got to help with the design on that of the local history room and set it up and the whole thing from scratch. That was really a great experience and a lot of fun. I got to work on oral histories when I was there. I got to do everything. So it was really pretty cool. So then I got to NARA. What ended up happening is I really felt like that wasn't really so much being an archivist as being a librarian. I really was interested in trying to become an archivist because that's what I went to library school for in the first place. I got hired by the National Archives in St. Louis actually for the Preservation Department at the National Personnel Records Center. My husband and I moved to St. Louis, and my daughter. I worked my way up pretty much. I started off as a [GS] 6 and went up. I didn't make that much money as a librarian in New Mexico, so it wasn't like that really was a pay cut. But there was a year when I was the library supervisor for Albuquerque schools. I was the head of the audiovisual department for all of Albuquerque schools, which is more than 120 school libraries. I worked with them on their AV stuff, which was also good because I got to work on cataloging with that. I got to learn about AV preservation, digitization. So it was a pay cut from that job, but because I'd only been in that job for 10 months I didn't feel like it was that bad because I was so used to working for that other salary before that. I sucked it up, and my husband also had money so it wasn't like I was going to be starving or that badly off. But anyway, I became a lead archives technician and then I became an archivist. I moved to the archives department in 2013. Then I moved to the Carter Library in 2017." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "OK, excellent. So you had very much a background in libraries and archives before you got to NARA and the Carter Library. I'm always interested, but I have never been to the Carter Library—I haven't been there yet—I'm always fascinated by the differences between the different libraries, not just the subject matter, but also because of course, the histories are going to be— [TECHNOLOGY MALFUNCTION]" }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "Like I was saying, I'm always fascinated by the differences there are between the various Presidential Libraries and certainly the holdings, the differences in holdings. So tell us a little bit about what you do as an archivist at Carter, what kinds of materials you have there. If I were to come to the Carter Library, what can I find there?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "We have the prettiest campus of any Presidential Library. I think they're all probably on really nice campuses, but we're in the middle of a big park called Freedom Park, and it's just gorgeous. When I first started, my co-workers in St. Louis joked that I would be polishing the artifacts. They figured there was no archival work to do in Presidential Libraries. Well, we have collections from the Presidential administration that are still not completely processed. They're unprocessed. We've got new accessions since I've been there, too, but mostly smaller ones. I do a lot of processing. The collection I am just finishing up is the records of the President's Reorganization Project, when President Carter wanted to reorganize the entire government. The main things that came out of that were the creation of the Department of Education and the Civil Service Reform Act, and a lot of things that were the benefit of veterans, Veterans Affairs and those kinds of things. Because he created the Department of Education, that meant the HEW—Health, Education, and Welfare— that got disbanded. It became Housing, Health and Human Services, and the Department of Education. Of course, he also created the Department of Energy. So I've been working on those records. We also have records that were donated materials from people who were part of his administration. Our biggest collection from the White House that is not done yet is the records of the President's Personnel Office. It's a huge collection, and it is a ton of personal identifying information. So there is a lot of redacting that's going to need to be happening. It's probably going to be the kind of thing where every folder is going to have to be examined before we can give it to researchers or serve it to researchers. [TECHNOLOGY MALFUNCTION]" }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "So anyway, you were talking about how you've been processing, and you've got a lot of personnel materials that you still have to go through and it's going to be PII [Personally Identifiable Information] redaction nightmares and all that kind of stuff, which I definitely can identify with. And you had said that you still have gotten in a lot of accessions, people who had worked for President Carter. Do you have President Carter's gubernatorial papers there or are those elsewhere?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Most of those are at the Georgia State Archives, which is actually next door to the National Archives of Atlanta. It's two really nice buildings right there. We have some, though. We have some really nice gubernatorial stuff, some great audiovisual stuff. We have a ton of audiovisual material, most of which hasn't been digitized. It's a big project that more resources need to be devoted to. We get so many requests for AV material. We're actually going to be taking in his post-Presidential material at some point. We've had it in courtesy storage. So we have a lot of boxes and they're inventoried. Mary Ann McSweeney, who recently retired, that was one of her projects that she was working on. That's the next thing, once processing of the Presidential administration stuff is finished, because we're almost done." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "What is the extent of the material that you have at Carter? Cubic footage or a number of pages, if you prefer it that way?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Honestly, I don't know off the top of my head. We have basically three and a half bays of shelving, and the fourth bay is also our processing room, so there's not that much on that floor. In the LBJ Library, they have the windows and you can see the files. We have a similar thing in our museum. Those are name files, boxes and name files, from the White House central files. They go all the way up from every floor t here's name files on. I don't know how much that is. Sorry. Again, some of that is Carter Center material, which is the nonprofit next door. Not all of it is processed." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "Now, I understand that you've done a lot of work there on digitization. Tell us what all is involved with that, because, as you're aware, everyone now wants everything online. It creates a lot of work for us, but it also, at least the idea is, the objective is, that we're making materials more accessible that way. Talk a little bit about what you do digitization-wise, what you and your library are doing." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "We're actually really getting ready to do more work on that when we open. Right now, we don't have the staff. The Carter Library does not have a foundation. We are funded by the National Archives. So we don't have as many staff as a lot of other Presidential libraries because of that. When we digitize for reference, we save all the scans of stuff we digitize. So that's more on demand, and we have a process for that. We have the equipment, new equipment, to do digitization of videotapes, which is great. We can't do pneumatic t apes. We still have to ship them out to a vendor. We have a lot of stuff on pneumatic tape. We have a lot of film. We can't do film. We can't do audio tapes either in house. So we can do some audios, like cassette tapes we can do, which they're not going to be a very good quality. But reel-to-reel we can't do in house. It's really a full time job for the archivists to do the digitization of audio all the time, because that's, as I said earlier, that's what people want. We have thousands of images that are digitized high-res TIFFs, for whatever reason, for presentations or projects or reference requests. We get lots of requests from the Carter Center for images. One of the projects I've been working on actually during the pandemic is the White House Descriptive Metadata Project. That's creating spreadsheets to assign the correct metadata to all of those images. I'm working with Sara Mitchell, who's another archivist here. A lot of the descriptions in the catalog aren't correct. There are descriptions that have been written that are in the catalog for individual images, but there's no image attached to the catalog record, the file unit record. We're just finishing up phase one of that project. It'll come out to maybe 8,000 photos that we have that we don't have descriptions for. Then we'll be able to write or improve catalog descriptions that are in there or create new catalog descriptions and add the images. We have a lot of our contact sheets scanned and in the catalog. We have them all scanned. Probably 99.9% of them have catalog descriptions, but they don't all have the file unit attached. So that's part of that project, too, is to get those contact sheets up there because we have them. They are on a shared drive, just for some reason they weren't uploaded when the descriptions were written." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "It's comforting to know and also intimidating to think that at a Presidential Library, even decades after that administration, there is still that much to be done. And I look at what we've got and I think, “This is going to be conceivably centuries in the making,” when you factor in FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] and digitization and moving closed material back into the open file. There's no shortage of work to be done, for sure." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Right before the pandemic in January of last year, our secure classified records were moved to DC at the National Declassification Center. So that's actually another problem. We still got a lot of reference requests for those, and those projects are on hold right now. I have a woman in Russia who I've been dealing with because she wants to use a memo that got sent to Washington that they want to use for an exhibit at a museum. I forget where in Russia. But I told her, \"I'm sorry, you're going to have to wait.\" At least it's an exhibit. It's not something that she needs immediately." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "Right. Right. Talking about COVID and what we've been dealing with in the last 13 or so months, when did you first hear about COVID-19?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "I was reading about it in the newspaper a lot. I remember when the first cases hit and the first announcements of it came. It's funny because I think ICN [NARA’s Internal Communications Network] might have been the first place I ever saw it. Jeffrey Weiss posted something in January, I think. Then I remember when the cases in Kirkland, Washington, happened and then at the nursing home. My mother is in a nursing home. My mother is going to be 96 in July. She's in assisted living in New Jersey, so I was more worried about her. It didn't really start to become a thing to really start worrying about until the end of February, when we were starting to wonder what was going to happen with that." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "Describe what it was like when you heard that we were closing. I don't know if the date for y'all was different, but when we shut down that would have been about, I guess maybe the second week of March of last year." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "I actually looked at this recently and my first day of working at home, of leaving NARA and the library and working at home, was March 20. First of all, they started putting in hand sanitizers, big stands of it. I think we closed the research room about two weeks before and our manager said, “Anybody who's got preexisting health conditions and doesn't feel comfortable coming in, you can start working at home.” So a few people, somebody who's of advanced age and somebody else who has a wife who has some health problems, they didn't come in. I remember the day that we closed. All of a sudden it was like, boom, you're going to close. It was, “Come up with something you can do for the next couple of weeks,” of course. So I remember I cleared off a lot of stuff on my desk. I got all my stuff out of the kitchen. I remember one of my coworkers, Youlanda Logan, looking at me, going, “Wow, I'm coming in tomorrow.” Then my other coworker, Ceri McCarron, she's like, “Oh, yeah, I'm not going to be able to get any work done. I'm staying here.” So I said, \"Well, bye. I'll see you guys.\" The week before, they asked us to start coming up with some kind of project we could do if we were going to be home for a few weeks. I had that one in mind about the descriptive metadata. So they were like, ”Great.” So, I had something to work on right away. Plus we have three people that do social media. We have somebody who does Twitter, which is me, somebody who does Instagram, and somebody who does Facebook. I knew I could always just work on social media as well. I knew I was going to have plenty of work to do at home. But I just remember I'm like, “I'll see you guys when I see you.” Two days later, it was like, “Everybody has to leave.” That was right all around that time. It was like, “Everybody, you have to leave today. That's it.” Of course, we didn't realize we were still going to be here." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "Thirteen months later." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "But another thing, though, is everything fell like dominoes. I was supposed to go to New York that weekend to see two plays. The play _Coal Country_ and a play I can't remember what it was called. It was a new play. My husband, for Christmas, I gave him a Telecharge gift certificate, a gift card. So he got to pick the play we got to see. It was one written by Tracy Letts, because he really likes Tracy Letts as an actor. That was premiering that weekend, and _Coal_ _Country_ had just premiered. That was by Steve Earle and had his music, and he's actually in it as the narrator. All of a sudden, everything got shut down. New York announced they were closing all the theaters. This was March 12. So that's funny that that email was March 20, because this was March 12 when things shut down. Actually, right before that, the NCAA tournament got shut down. I remember talking to one of our guards saying, “I can't believe it,” because I was in Atlanta and the Final Four was going to be Atlanta. I was like “I can't believe they're going to do this.” We were just like, “Oh, darn.” I was looking forward to those games. But on the 12th, I was supposed to go to the taping of _Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me_ with Maureen Hill from the National Archives of Atlanta, with her husband and a friend of mine. That got canceled. They didn't record it. They didn't have it. So, we went out to dinner, and we all sat around at this restaurant and said, “This is probably the last we are going to be able to go out to dinner for a while. We better have a nice time.” So that happened, too. That was Thursday, and then Friday was the 13th. That's when we decided we can't go to New York. Everything is shut down. Of course, you have reservations, and you don't know if you are going to get your money back. We had spent a lot of time on the phone, and everybody was thinking about that. I'm guessing it was the Monday before, probably, when they started to say, “You need to start thinking about what you're going to do when you go home.”" }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "A lot of disruption for a lot of people. You've talked about some of what you've been doing in the last 13 months while we've all been in this holding pattern. You've talked about social media, and you've mentioned the White House Metadata Project. I'm also curious, you serve with the National Archives Assembly and you have done a lot of work, not just now, but prior to all of this happening, on National History Day. Talk a little bit about what you do on National History Day." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "I've actually been involved with National History Day since I was in St. Louis. I used to judge in St. Louis. I was also a board member for about a year in St. Louis on the board. One of the ideas I thought of is, I knew they did the National History Day award in DC, and I thought we should have one for outside of DC. So I created the whole thing on a pilot project for doing this. It was kind of one of those things where it just sounds good, but one of the things you need is you need to have a dedicated number of people who work for NARA or in the Assembly to be judges. I believe we didn't start it until I got to Atlanta because there weren't that many people in St. Louis that worked for NARA that were doing the judging. In Atlanta, there was a man named Joel Walker, I believe that was his last name, who was an education specialist down at the National Archives of Atlanta, and he retired a few years ago. He was really active with the National Archives with National History Day. So when I came to Georgia, it just seemed like, boy, this is a much better opportunity because we have these NARA people in Atlanta and we have people on the Jimmy Carter Library staff that wanted to do it. LaToya Devezin was one of the judges and Joshua, Josh Montanari was one of the judges. Josh and I are still judges. LaToya did it for two years. Last year she volunteered, and they didn't need her. They had too many judges. So she didn't get to do it last year. I don't know if she tried this year because she might have just said, \"Well, you know.\" Because it's virtual, they get judges from all over the country now. So, we did it as a pilot project, and we had to create the whole procedure. I worked with the Georgia Humanities people, and they were really thrilled that we wanted to give kids some money and award them and give them their certificate. They thought that was really cool. Joel Walker at the National Archives of Atlanta, he thought it was a really good idea too. With them, I worked first with Laura McCarty at Georgia Humanities and now just spoke with Jessica Burke at Georgia Humanities to put together the best way to do this, because it's like, how do we do this? The first year it was a little rough. I forget how it was, but we had to look at stuff in every category and we had a lot of entries, and Josh and I had to split it up and run all over the place. It got better by the second year. They kind of streamlined it. I think what we ended up doing, one year, was we just did websites. Maybe that was the first year. We just decided to do websites because those could be looked at in advance. I can't remember. I'm sorry, I can't remember why we ended up doing that. But anyway, we came up with a system where the kids self-nominate themselves. When they apply to be students, and this is the state thing, so they've already won their regionals, and when they apply to submit their entries, there are a variety of awards, and they can kind of check off. There's the “Best Use of Georgia's Resources” and there's “Best Military.” There's a special one for military. There's a special one for somebody who deals with economic history. They can check off which ones they are. So they would check off National Archives. That way we'd have a set number. Last year we had 14. Then it went virtual. So last year, it was like, “Oh my God, are they going to have National History Day?” They canceled the in-person, but they came up with a way to do it virtually. Unfortunately, last year they hadn't figured out how to do the performances virtually. We just got the kids' papers. I think this year they managed to figure it out. So we got to watch the video. So that was really nice. I think it happened so close to when judging was, they just figured they weren't going to be able to get all the kids to figure out how to do this. This year, they have all this time to do it because they had experience from last year with it. This year we had more than 30, so we split them up and it turned out they weren't all National Archives. They might have checked the box off, but some of them were National Archives in other countries, like the National Archives of the Netherlands. So in my report from the National Archives assembly, I'm going to suggest we change the name to \"Best Use of U.S. National Archives.\" Also I thought, in the future, we could have somebody check it off because they've got something from the Theodore Roosevelt Library. Well, that's not a National Archives Library, so we have to fix that too. We never had this problem before, but it happened multiple times this time, that some kids think the Library of Congress is part of the National Archives, which is the other thing. But the judging went really well. We really look for people that really place an emphasis on our records in some way. They don't have to be the majority of the records they use, but they have to have some kind of significance in their work. It's always a lot of fun. It's not as fun as being there in person and actually giving the kids the awards." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "Of course. But the whole idea is that you as a contestant are demonstrating that you've used our materials. That really forms the basis of your project." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Also that you understand what a primary source is, which is really hard for kids. You see that all the time. In their extensive bibliographies, they don't put them in the right category." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "It's been a while since I've been in elementary school or middle school and all that. Every now and then, I hope that they are still teaching, “Here's how you actually do research. Research doesn't mean just go look something up on Wikipedia. Go look at a primary source, go look at secondary sources, have a nice blend of that.” If you've written your paper all within an hour, then you probably didn't do any real research." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Yes, this is actually middle school and high school. They can be pretty impressive. Some of the documentaries are really good. They have to write a process paper and part of that is, “How did you get this idea?” A lot of times the way they come up with these ideas that fit the theme are just really interesting. One I saw this year was about Curtis Mayfield and how he used his music to just inform people about civil rights. His theme was communication and how he communicated, and I was just, “Wow, how did they come up with Curtis Mayfield?” It's really cool." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "Well, what has life been like for you during COVID? We talked a little bit about that, “This is going to be the last time that we're eating at a restaurant, probably for a while.” What has your experience been like this last year or so? Things that you're not able to do that you used to do, that you took for granted, that all of us took for granted, and then this happens. Talk a little bit about that." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Most of my big things were travel related. I was supposed to go to Ireland. I had a couple other big trips. I had conferences. I'm a planner, so I have already bought plane tickets for conferences. My daughter is in DC, and it was a while before we got to go see her. Since my mother turned 95 in July, we went up to see her for her birthday. I did some flying and I was really nervous about it. That was Delta, which had some empty middle seats. What we did is we picked up my daughter and then drove her up. But my daughter's been working out of her house. It's funny how your adult kids are more nervous about your health than you are sometimes. They're so nervous, and same with my sister and her kids and stuff. My sister is in Philadelphia, so what we do is we get my daughter in DC and then drive up to my mother's in New Jersey and then drive down to Philadelphia and see my sister and her family. But we had to meet outside. Her nephew wouldn't let us in the house. I mean, it's great. We're all wearing masks too. It's great that they're so conscientious. You kind of get used to working out of the house. I'm fortunate because I had a lot of work to do. I know a lot of people all over NARA where there was nothing they could really do except do training and watch webinars and read books. I interviewed somebody who's read quite a few books about the President, the administration of the President, for her library. That kind of thing. Getting that kind of background material. So, I mean, it's funny. I work standing up. I had a standup desk at work and so my computer is actually on my high-top breakfast nook table. That was our first day—bring the breakfast table up. My husband always works out of the house and there's no door on his office, so I knew from day one there was no way I could work at the kitchen table or anything because I hear him all the time and he is always on the phone. He's a journalist, so he's always on the phone. So, I'm up on the top floor, and he's down in the basement, so it works out pretty well. We have a weekly staff meeting. I know with some staff it really varies. Some people have daily meetings with their staff. We have a small staff. We have 23 people that come in, total. That's everybody. That's museum staff. That's gift shop. That's archives staff. It's tiny. Actually our supervisor, the supervisory archivist, left in January of 2020 as well. She got another job. So we didn't have a supervisor. Our deputy director had to become acting supervisor. So he was acting supervisor until the fall and then it was actually almost into the winter and then one of our archivists, Brittany Parris, got promoted to a supervisory archivist. That was a little bit of a change, probably a bigger change for her. So he would have regular meetings with us to check in on what was going on, and Brittany does that, too. The one kind of weird thing is when we were in the building and we had staff meetings, we would have round-robins and everybody had to talk a little bit about what they'd been working on because they were monthly meetings. So, “What have you been doing in the past month or stuff that's new and cool.” We stopped doing that when the pandemic happened. That really was one of the worst things, because I really want to know what everybody else was working on, and I only found out after the fact. Our AV staff managed to get our YouTube channel up and running. So we're posting videos up there all the time that we already have digitized. So that's been great. We have great events at the library. That's one of the best perks of working there is working the events. I mean, I got to meet Andrew Young. All kinds of authors, Erik Larson and Steve Inskeep and all fun people and people who worked for Carter. Stuart Eizenstat, who was the head of the domestic policy staff, he was one of the first guys we had. Of course, President Carter did book signings until he fell and broke his hip. That was in 2019. Until then he was pretty active, and he was putting out two books a year. So we got to work a few book events, which are huge things because people come from all over and wait hours in line to see him. Tony Clark, he is our public affairs guy, he managed to start book events up again. So that worked out really well. There have been a couple books published about President Carter specifically since the pandemic happened, including the first really in-depth biography of him by Jonathan Alter called _His Very Best_ . There's been a few films that have come out, too. One about the Peace Corps that featured Miss Lillian Carter. _Jimmy Carter: Rock_ _& Roll President_ , which is really good. We got to have meetings with the directors and producers. That's been great. So to some extent, I know what people have been working on. Our education specialist has been coming up with all kinds of learning stuff. But then I'm not sure what everybody is doing. I feel bad for our gift shop staff. They don't really have a ton of work they can do. We have somebody who had just been hired, too. Think about it. You are starting a new job, and all of a sudden." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "I imagine there were a number of people around the agency who were either just starting at a job or about to leave one and all of this happens. What else do you do other than just the most basic orientation? You're not going to be doing really your regular job for who knows how long, so you make do as best you can. I'm also curious about looking ahead to whenever this ends and we're all back doing our jobs. What do you see, and this is more like a long-term question, what do you see our challenges are either as an agency or as Presidential Libraries? Where do you see us going? What do you think the challenges are going to be for us in the years to come?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "I think some people are really liking teleworking and are going to be reluctant to go in, and they're not going to go in until they have to. I think NARA has realized how much work could be done by a lot of people teleworking, so I think they're going to give people more leeway in that kind of thing. I know of another agency where, before the pandemic, people were allowed to work 50 percent at home. Maybe NARA will come up with something like that. I don't know. I mean, we have to have the research room open at some point. We have researchers from all over the world that come here. They can't get out of their country anyway because our borders weren't even open. I remember right before we closed, this guy posting on Twitter how happy he was because he had just got some kind of fellowship that he was going to be able to come down here. I retweeted it and said, \"Look forward to seeing you\" because I was like, “This is exciting!” We have so many researchers from Asia—China and Korea. I just think there's going to be a big relief when we open, if they are able to travel, which might not be a concurrent thing. It might be a while until they're allowed to come in. I think we'll be swamped with researchers. Honestly, we should just have days where once a week we just close everything down and all everybody does is scan documents. It would just solve a lot of problems. They should just invest in faster scanners, better scanners, and just get that stuff scanned because we can help people so much. Like I said, we have international researchers. I have another case. I'm dealing with a guy from Italy. I told him, “This is all I can really show you now, and you would have to come in and look at the records.” It's one of these not-easy-answer questions where he would really have to dig to find stuff. I think there will be more virtual programming. I don't think Google Meets is the best platform for virtual programming, and I think NARA is looking into changing that and getting something better. I think that probably we will have maybe staggered times in the building as far as not having people together, close together, that often." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "Got just a couple more questions here. You talked about the book signings that you all have done and the programming that's happened. Do you have any great memories, anecdotes, of the time that you've worked at Carter? You've mentioned that President Carter, or at least up until a couple of years ago, does book signings. Did you ever meet President and Mrs. Carter? Any stories like that that you've got?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "I have never met Rosalynn. We had a staff day in 2019 to go down to Plains, Georgia, and get a tour of President Carter's—it is now a National Historical Park, it was a National Historic Site at the time—his boyhood home. But we got to have a personal tour with the ranger, and then President Carter came and met with us personally and talked to us. Mrs. Carter, Rosalynn, was supposed to be there, but she did not come. I was really disappointed because I've still never seen her in person. We were allowed to bring our husbands or your kids and brothers. One of my coworkers brought her brother. So that was really neat. He didn't talk to us for that long, but it was pretty cool to actually be really up close with him. We were all sitting around on tree stumps or something in this little learning area outside at his boyhood home. The book signings are more like assembly, line where everybody has a part and you have to play your part. So I never really got to talk to him there. I did go down to Plains for one of his sermons. He stopped doing that, too. He stopped teaching Sunday school. But because I was an employee, I was able to call and arrange to get a special seat, basically. My daughter came down from Washington, DC, and the three of us, my husband, my daughter, and I, we didn't get there until 8:30, whereas people had camped out all night. But we got there at 8:30 in the morning, and we got to sit in the second row. And then everybody gets their picture taken. The way it worked was everybody could get their picture taken with President Carter. There's so many people. They have the Plains Baptist Church, where he would preach, then they'd have another room. So the main part of the church, and then they'd have another room where there was an overflow crowd, and then they'd have a tent with the rest of the other people. So big, big event. Busloads of people sometimes. If you didn't get there by 8:30, they would just tell you, \"You're not going to be able to get in. So you better know that now.\" But that was really neat. That was really fun. I got to say, \"Hi. I work at the library.\" He was like, \"Thank you for your service,\" and all that. So that was about the most I got to talk to him. As in oral history, one of my projects I forgot about was I've been doing the NARA oral histories for Jessie Kratz at the NARA History Office. I interviewed a couple of my staff members, three of them. One who just retired and one who was the deputy director and worked here for 35 years, worked here before the library was an actual library. I got to hear their stories about working with the Carters. They had lots more time that they worked with them. President Carter's grandson, Jason Carter, he's on the Board of the Carter Center and he works with the director, Meredith Evans, a lot. Jason actually did a program with Nelson Mandela's grandson, and they talked about being the grandsons of these amazingly well-known, important people. That was a really interesting one. Valerie Jarrett, who worked for President Obama, that was a big, big event too. Stacey Abrams, also, when she did her book signing, she was a gubernatorial candidate who lost the governor's election and founded Fair Fight Action, which is a voting rights group. So that was another really big event. We were supposed to have Jon Meacham this year, but because of the pandemic, that one got canceled, and it has not been rescheduled. And lots of really interesting authors and speakers and, like I mentioned, Andrew Young. He's a very talkative man. Billy Glasco, my coworker, and I were just hanging on every word. It was just so cool. It'll be nice to start having those again." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "Research and special events, I think that's what a lot of us really look forward to, and that's really why we're there. I think a lot of people have felt that loss, that however much of your job you were able to do through teleworking, you really can't replicate the experience of being there and having events and meeting with researchers and really carrying out the mission of the agency that way. You can't do that from home. I think a lot of people will be glad to be back and able to resume that whenever that is." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "There's one other one I forgot to mention. It was a film event that happened virtually. A movie came out about the failed Iran hostage rescue mission, and Walter Mondale, Vice President Mondale, was on the call and that was really exciting. I had never got to meet him, but I got to sit in on a call just like a Zoom meeting with somebody." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "When was that?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "That was last year, probably in the fall. So, fall of 2020. That movie was really good. That's another nice thing. Because we worked on these films, they let us get a pre-screen. So that's why we got to see _Rock & Roll President_ for example, because they use so much of our stuff to make those." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "This is a question that I just came up with just on that same topic, contributing to movies. Did the Carter Library have any role in the creation of the film _Argo_ several years ago?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Yes. We have a lot of digitized stuff on that. I wasn't there then. It was very exciting. The actual CIA agent who came out with the book—" }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "Tony Mendez, yeah." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "—I read that book. It's a really good book. He came down to do research, and he actually spoke at the library. We used to have a thing called “The Carter Chronicles,” a blog about the library. I think that's one of the articles that's still out there in the ether somewhere. It is about _Argo_ and how it relates to what really happened. I guess there were some liberties taken. Actually, I think what I heard is that President Carter thought the man who wrote it kind of gave himself more credit. That was sort of his take on it, that there were other people that were also involved. It wasn't all just him. Which I think in the book that's spelled out more than it might have been in the movie." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "I had heard that, too. I guess that's with a lot of movies that are made that there are certain things that are going to be a little bit more dramatized when in reality, yeah, that was pretty anticlimactic. There wasn't that much to it. Lastly, unfortunately, you're going to be leaving the National Archives before too long. You're going to be taking a position as regional records officer with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Unfortunately, we're going to be sorry to lose you but definitely wish you the best of luck. You're going to be in a related field for sure. Anything else that you would like to tell us?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "There's sort of a funny National Archives Assembly angle to that. The reason I was put on the board of the Assembly, or actually asked to join the Assembly and be on the board, is because Chris McGee, who used to be at the National Archives at Kansas City at the time, recruited me. He and I became friends because I was in the Midwest Archives Conference. I am still in the Midwest Archives Conference. One year I decided I wanted to do a debate because I had been to an American Institute for Conservation conference where they had a debate. It was really fun to hear this debate. I can't recall what the topics were. But I wanted to do one for the Midwest Archives Conference, and he volunteered to be one of the debaters. That's how I met Chris, and we became friends. Anyways, we'd meet up. When SAA was in Atlanta in 2016, I got to go down, a lot of my coworkers got to go down to SAA and Chris was here. He and I went out to lunch, and he just was lobbying me to go into records management. \"Go into records management. You're going to love it. Go into records management.\" So Chris left, and he's a records manager, and he lives outside of Denver. The other thing is Marene Baker, who was in the National Archives Assembly for a long time and was the newsletter editor, she is going to be my boss." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "Oh, excellent." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So the first time I met her was when SAA was in Atlanta because they had a special happy hour for NARA employees. That's kind of funny, too. So it all ties into the National Archives Assembly." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "Certain people you just can never escape them. You're going to see them again later in your career. But, there is nothing at all wrong with that. We're all in the same business. Why shouldn't we keep running into each other?" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "That's right." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "Excellent. Well, thank you very much. It's been about an hour and thank you very much for your time and definitely wish you the best of luck in your new role. Enjoy Colorado. I imagine it is going to have a much different feel from Georgia, but it's also a really, really pretty place to live." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Yes, I'm looking forward to it. I will miss NARA. I mean, it's been more than 10 years. I just think this is a really good opportunity." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "Excellent. Congratulations." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Thanks for doing Zoom." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "Best of luck to you." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Okay, take care." }, { "speaker": "Paul", "text": "All right. Bye bye. [STOP RECORDING]" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MS. JENNIFER JOHNSON", "text": "My name is Jennifer Johnson and I am conducting an oral history interview for the National Archives and Records Administration with Barbara Larsen today. Barbara worked as an archivist at the National Archives in Kansas City and retired in 2012. Barbara, can we start with what you were doing before you came to the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BARBARA LARSEN", "text": "I was a stay-at-home mom doing the volunteer work and that sort of stuff. At that point I still had little kids, but it was, like, okay, maybe I need to start thinking about going back to work." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Did that involve any school or you knew about the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "Actually, I knew about it because my husband had done lots of research out here. He was good friends with Alan Perry and Reed Whitaker and Diana Duff. Diana was a student of his. I knew people out here and they said we've got volunteers. We can do preservation. It's not genie work. If you'd like to do it, I think you'd enjoy it. So I started volunteering and then a year and a half later they said would you like to get paid a small pittance for doing what you're doing for free and I said, well, why not. So that started being part-time. Eventually I ended up with a full-time job." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "What year would you say you started volunteering?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "I think it was probably in 1987. My 10-year-old was in fifth grade at that time." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Can you talk a little bit about what your impressions were of the agency when you started your career or when you started coming on-site to volunteer and do work with the records?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "As I said I knew some stuff about it—maybe because my husband did research and stuff like that and was also an archivist besides his other real job. I kind of knew, you know, and I thought, okay, a little chance because I had not gone back to school. I talked about it. I had thought about going back into computer science. I just never did. We had the kids and they were small and they did not have a computer science program at U of KC at that time. And so it just kind of, I had done indexing for books—my husband's books and stuff like that. And I did have a history major besides." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "What was a typical day or week for you?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "I did a lot of processing. The early on reference was done completely different than it is now. There was one person in charge of reference and basically did it or might dole something out. She wanted control. I won’t go into that. It was done differently so I didn't do a lot of reference. It was mostly processing out of the FRC boxes, into the Hollinger's. Some of it, the first project was just strictly out of the brown boxes to Hollingers. I was going through the 135's to make sure everything was there. Most of what I've done has—a lot of it was working with the Indian agencies. We've got a lot of BIA records and I think they have finally finished the last processing." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "And, you were co-editor of the Guide to Records at the National Archives at Kansas City?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "It was an update on the—I got a copy if you would like to see." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I would love to see it." }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "I didn't know whether I still had one because back then there was no internet. So this was the finding aid. It was an update and I don't know if you knew Nancy Malan. She was in Washington." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "She was my first boss when I moved to Maryland." }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "She was the lead out of Washington working, I think, with all of the regions on updating your guides." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "So how long did this take you?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "We were using the old guides. It was basically going through the old guide and checking, you know, do we have additional records? Did we want to change something? Updating the footage. We didn't start from scratch. But if we had new record groups then they had to be added in, and at the time I just helped doing it and Alan ended up sticking my name on it. He didn't ask. I didn't expect it but I thought that was very nice of him. Not everybody would have done that. He said, well, you did most of the work." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Did you have to write finding aids?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "We had paper finding aids." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Did you have to do new descriptions?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "On some, yes. A lot of it was just rechecking the guide, you know, to have the information that's there. Every region had one." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "You mentioned Native American records. Any interesting discoveries that you remember or a particular item?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "The student case files were interesting, out of Haskell, because they went way back. Sometimes you found interesting things. I was trying to think, there was an employee and there were letters back and forth from having been in Russia. There was a Native American who went to work in D.C. and - ­ anyway. At the time I felt maybe, you know, I never did anything with it. But they were kind of interesting and those came out of the Haskell records because I processed Haskell. The original first one I completely processed and wrote descriptions for. We have the Standing Rock records, at the times of the killing. Some significant events. And the telegram to go bring him in. In fact I carried that telegram home from Washington, D.C. in 2009. It had been loaned out. I was going out there. Alan asked would I pick it up and something else and bring them back. I said sure. So they met me and we signed the paperwork and I thought, oh god. This was after 9/11 and I had to let it go through security. I'm thinking, oh no, when is this going to come out on the other side? And I got back and I said I'm dropping it off." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Were you allowed to—did you have to put it under your seat or did you—was it always near you?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "I had to—yeah. It was a folder type thing. I didn't have to stick it above. Nobody knows you got it. They don't know what it is." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Right, right. We're going pretty fast. Please don't let me rush you if you have other things you want to talk about. You were working here during the big move from Bannister?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Do you want to talk at all about that?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "I would have to say not only was it an interesting time but it was stressful because we were all—everybody—going through and finding stuff. Either it was forgotten about, we didn't know it was there, or you didn't know where they belonged. I went through a lot of Corps of Engineers old records because when they closed the Army Records Center they moved all that stuff over when the Archives was brand new here, basically without a lot of paperwork. I would go into Reed’s office and ask him. He was here but even he didn’t know. We tried to tie back into the early paperwork, the accessioning files, and find out what they were because we had to do that. We had to, you know, get it." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Do you remember roughly how long it took?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "I'm trying to think how long it was when we first started. I mean because we had—then we had to move the microfilm. It consumed, basically, months and months of time to get it done from the time that we knew that we were going to move and when they had this building. Then people had to figure out what could come down here, discussions on what did we want down here as opposed to out at Lee's Summit." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "So that was my follow-up question. Before Union Station, it was Bannister? And Lee’s Summit?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "And it was Lee's Summit. And when we moved out of Bannister, the record center moved to Lenexa. And we moved down here. We knew we didn't have the space for all of the records and so, first, it was to try to figure out what we wanted to bring down here. What is the most referenced stuff, to bring down here? We still had to cover everything and check it all off and box it up and Jake was just, like, a man possessed. He was pretty much in charge of a lot of the stuff then and getting, telling, asking, you know, people to do this, that or the other thing. And to go back to and check everything against all the finding aids, checking is everything actually here? Do we have stuff that we don't really know where it belongs, where it came from? All this stuff as far as a lot of old Corps records dating from the closing at the Army Record Center. It was here in town and they just moved them all over here." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "From your memory, do you remember what those conversations were about—was it pretty clear cut on records?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "A lot of it was. We wanted the Native American records down here. We definitely wanted that. And so then figure out the cubic footage on that and of course you're still dealing with a lot of stuff that wasn't out of FRC boxes and when you take out of the FRC boxes the space grows. It takes up more space when you get it all out of the FRC boxes. You can't put what's in an FRC box in Hollingers and put it in the same space on a shelf. It just does not work. You have to allow for that. We knew we were processing Indian agencies one at a time. And stuff was going to grow too. And the most used court records and I think a lot of the smaller agencies that didn't take up that much space and so it was a matter of what was being used and an efficient use of the space, besides what is referenced the most. We wanted the naturalization records, of course. We want them down here because that's court records and they're very family history oriented. Genealogy. Then the Leavenworth prison records. And they were processed slowly. Someone had to figure out how much empty space to leave. So when we processed the stuff it can still fit. Jake was amazing at getting it done. Everybody moving stuff and then finding stuff that, like, why do we have 10 typewriters back here? Because Mark said he felt we could keep them. Too bad, Mark. Originally we thought everything could go to Lee's Summit but stuff ended up going to Lenexa because they filled the space at Lee's Summit. And you knew there would be incoming accessions belonging to a record group you're keeping here. You want to have room to put them on shelves. I was glad I was not in charge of having to figure all that out." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I saw on what you sent me that you have several publications. You and your husband …" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "Yes, with my husband. He insisted. He writes. I don't write. I do not write well at all. I'll be the first one—and you can ask anybody around here that my handwriting is lousy and my writing skills are not terrific. I was not an English major. I avoided English like the plague actually." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Looking at some of the titles I just wondered. Did any of those articles benefit from you working here?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "Yes, there's one. It took me a long time. I convinced Larry we ought to just do a paper on it. And Corps of Engineer records actually. I turned it into the book. He said we can do this and that was really my contribution. It was the steamboat trip. There's a diary in the steamboat records in the Corps of Engineer records, Kansas City records, and it comes from this trip up the Missouri River in 1859. The diary of a passenger. He was a passenger and we managed to finally track down what the heck they were doing in the Corps records. He had a son who worked for the Kansas City Corps district and he had somebody transcribe his dad's diary and dropped them into the Corps records under the correspondent's file. I don't remember exactly which one, under exploration or exploring, or something like that. I happened to be processing that group of correspondence, making the box list and there was this diary just there. I made a photocopy of it, took it out and said this looks like fun. Well, we found two more diaries. We found the Federal records that go with it. There was a doctor who wrote a journal of the trip and it was published in a South Dakota journal a long, long time ago. We combined all that information and got it published as a book and it was fun. We found, with help, the location of both original journals and, we tracked genealogy stuff, information on families, and I got some of the volunteers to help to piece this stuff together, and try to figure out why the original journal of the one from our records is in the Library of Congress, their manuscript section. And the other journal is what used to be the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, which has got a different name now. It's not the state historical society. The doctor was from New Jersey and why the family ended up putting that in the Library of Congress? You know. And he went back to New Jersey. He was young, out of medical school. He took the trip as a job, as a medical officer on this trip. And he went back to New Jersey and apparently had a really good practice but somehow rather his journal ends up in Missouri." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "That stuff was all my husband's favorites—the archives and theaters, which means they're in a little Safeway building in Columbia I think. Those are the records I got out of the house. It was all my husband's stuff. So it was fun and it turned into a book. That was a find in the Corps of Engineer records, which you would not expect. It was in the Kansas City correspondence. And tracking the family and learning it had just been dropped in a correspondence file. The doctor's journal had been known about and because it was published and we asked South Dakota and she said, no, you really don't need our permission to do it. You found the original anyway and the guy in St. Louis said, no, you don't need our permission because you've got the other stuff to publish it. It was fun to work on and it was interesting when we finally got the copies of both the original diaries, going back through the proofs and picking up the stuff we couldn't discern or making changes. It did help much getting the originals." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "The original record is important." }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "It really—both original records were very, very important. You see you don't know what's in there because nobody has ever looked at them and even when you take them out and you folderize it, you can't spend your time going through it. So lots of finds and people who found old wonderful posters and everything folded up. Maybe court cases and whatever, you don't know. They're still there and there's a lot of records that have never … . Again, because you don't have the time unless it's something big and bulky when you're processing, like, okay, what is this? Then you can get it out. Nobody would ever know what that folder was entitled. That was fun and we did a bunch of, a series of conference papers on it before. He was busy doing other things and working on other things. I finally said, okay, did you run out of things to do? I just wanted one paper. I wasn't looking at a book." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "So was there a point where you both sat down and said this is way more than a paper. We should …" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "He just said—yeah. He said after that we did a series of papers we can see if we can find somebody to publish this. Okay. You've got the contacts. Press contacts." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Do you want to speak to any challenges and/or issues that you faced in your career with NARA? I assume the move presented all kinds of challenges, which we talked about a little bit." }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "There was just one time and I basically kind of repressed it. Morrow was doing their thing, the archives are here. The records centers are here. Then they're squashed together and we take them apart again, but then we don't allot the position so that the people who are really doing this get back doing what they were. So I sat for a while in the microfilm lab, which I was not happy. We were prepping some records to be microfilmed. Alan came over. He said, I didn't know you could work that slow because I was so long in getting them done. And that goes back to personnel and people. Anyway I won’t get into that. But that was just one of those things that NARA does occasionally do things that you think are weird, just as an overall agency-thing, when you're out in the field." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "The period that you did microfilm—does that mean you actually made the microfilm for the record or you prepped or identified records?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "I did a lot of prepping. There were people who were paying to have records microfilmed. I also photocopied the Yellowstone records that we have here in the Park Service with another staff person. Yellowstone wanted us to give them the records and we said no, of course. Then they paid to have a photocopy. So we photocopied them all and pulled some. We said, okay we can't obviously photocopy these. Do they want to send them out to have somebody copy them? So we did that and that was during that crazy, nutty time too that went on, just involving getting another position. I kept—so-and-so - - got her promotion. It comes through and then that job opens up and you can—but, you know, things are—and those are things that are agency-wide...and just because of other things, well, it's not good to speak of this, but I almost quit. I really did. They said don't let her win. I said I know. I'm not going to get into the personnel, more of the backstory." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "So you started in 1987 as a volunteer. When would you say you were full-time? I know you retired in 2012." }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "Well, I went part-time I'd say from ‘88. So it would have been, oh, gosh, when did I go full-time? It would have been ninety—do you have a copy of …" }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "You have ‘94 to ‘98 at Grace Cathedral. Do you think ‘94 is when you started here full-time?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "It was probably December 1998 I started full-time. Because then I quit the cathedral it would have been the Fall of ‘98. That would be right. All those health issues started crashing down around him." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I'm sure that was difficult. Is there anything else you want to add? Any anecdotes or words of wisdom?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "Oh, I don't have any words of wisdom. It's kind of fun. Usually, practically all—most people you work with as even on reference and stuff—we're very nice. By phone and then eventually mostly everything came in by email. I can remember when the internet was first starting up and I think the first one of those things was MySpace. We were told in no unequivocal terms, nobody should be on MySpace. Nobody. And now it's, like, yeah, Facebook, Twitter. Get it out there." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "You're right. There's whole, there's whole groups devoted to social media now." }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "Right. No, there was to be absolute no presence at all. Then all of a sudden it's, like, get on. Can you get on Facebook? Can you get on Twitter? Now, you've got everything everywhere. Ones you don't even know about anymore. That was a funny one." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Oh, I love that." }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "And the one researcher, who was an East German and Joyce was the last one to work with him. I gave him to her. Diana had started with him. It was before the wall fell and he would write and ask for records. Everybody would send stuff. He's also been in contact with people in D.C. We sat down and of course we never sent it, but we wrote our tongue-in-cheek letter telling Hans to get himself onto an airplane and get over here. This was right after the wall fell. It never happened. He's never shown up. He doesn't want to pay for anything. The last time I talked to Joyce she had actually got Hans to pay for something. I think I got him to pay something once. Invariably, we would just ship it off and forget about it and D.C. apparently had done the same thing. It was the Native Americans. Germans have a thing for the American West, Indians. We never knew what his project was. Everything was always very important to his project. He's been researching this since probably the 1980s or back. Nobody has ever known what he's doing. Or why? What his focus was, he would never tell anybody whether he thought somebody was going to do something with it. It's just one of those crazy researchers. Decades-long with the same person. He always writes. No email. Personal letters come in English. He's not writing in German. Nobody knows how old he is. Nobody has any idea. But it was in East Germany, or what was East Germany." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "We'd all get foreign researchers. He was unusual. Most of them come to do their thing. And either you get it to them or they come and do research. There was one time when we thought we were going to shut down and they had a researcher coming in from France, I think. I thought, oh my god, she spent all this money to get here. Then the government didn't shut down, fortunately. Thats a reality. Most researchers you deal with, you know, you get occasion ones. The crazy ones, who get snowed in on the side of the highway coming down from Minneapolis. I'd say, by and large most of them correspond ahead of time. They find out. They let you know what they want and point out what you tell them, but be nice to your archivist. You don't know what they know and if you're not, they will never tell you that there is this sitting over here in a different record group someplace. If you're nice somebody will say, oh, well, we've got this other stuff. But if you really are nasty to people, and that's true whether it's Federal archives, state, any kind of genealogy research. Be nice to people. If you go to a courthouse, take them a box of candy or some flowers. Ask them because you're looking for records that are probably buried in the back and ask for the oldest person there because they're going to know where they are. Be nice to them. Otherwise they don't have to tell you. Some of the Native American researchers come down unprepared and some of them are well-prepared. They know exactly what they're doing on their tribal stuff and where everything is. And they're from the tribes. Other times you get tribal members that just...there was one that would come down here and never could remember what he looked at and we had files. I think the last time I left I gave the file to Jennifer. I said maybe he won't show up again, but here's a list of what he really actually looked at that I have compiled from everybody else’s slips. So if he says he hasn't seen this stuff, he has. He tried to drive down from Minneapolis and apparently without paying any attention, apparently got snowed in on the side highway in southern Minnesota or Iowa. Literally got plowed in, I guess. Crazy. They were trying to prove that they could become a separate little entity, a band in the Chippewas. Because there is White Earth and Grand Port, and they've always wanted their own and they don't get it." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "So federal records are often a source that they use …" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "Well, yeah. They were looking back at voting records when things were splitting up and stuff like this. But looking at the ballots. But just constantly not remembering what they had done. And then others were, yeah, just wonderful people. And so nice. But that's true anyplace." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Indeed. Well, is there anything else you want to speak to? It's hard to capture all your years at the archives in just a handful of questions." }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "Oh, I don't know. Let me think what else. Oh, the other one that was interesting was Standing Rock recovery that Tim Reeves was involved in, who is now out of Eisenhower Library. Somebody notified him that there were some Standing Rock items going up on an auction website, and there are always a lot of items. There were letterpress books from Standing Rock and no one had any idea how, I think, or were convinced they did went missing from here. But they filled in the gap around Wounded Knee and with the Standing Rock stuff. Tim notified and we got them back and we have it. We got it. And another one was from—I don't remember where that was. But at that time, I think, the Federal Records Act maybe. Did this Indian agent just keep it? Because there are other records that fill in and match that are North Dakota. Someplace and we know they're there. We know what they have and we've never tried to claim that because we know they're okay. But this—yeah, we got, got this and something else back because somebody noticed it was there. And I know he came up and said to me do we have it? I said no. I said in fact there's a gap of, like, two books that you would think they were, like, two letterpress books missing that fill in this timeframe. I said I don't think we probably ever had them, you know, seriously. I know they didn't disappear from here. But back in that day they just kept them. But somebody notified Tim, someone on the auction side and he got ahold of the IG and they stopped the auction. Because they were. They'd fit just like a perfect slot. That was really important we got it back. So it has been interesting. As I said and I started doing math. My first job out of college." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "That's the reason why I asked you what brought you to the Archives because I did see that you worked for Clark. Right?" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "I worked for Kimberley Clark. I did psychological statistics. I didn't have any psych but I had statistics and my boss was the industrial psychologist." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I would have to think having statistical background would help in an archival background just organizationally or something." }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "So I like puzzles too." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Maybe your—just your brain is wired that way." }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "Yeah. It's wired that way. That's why I didn't do English and stuff and then when I married a history professor who was also an archivist, I just sort of, I guess I had been ordained. When I finally went back to work when the kids got old enough and I wasn't running around with tiny children." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "But archival work requires a very, like, kind of rigid or specific organization." }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "Yeah, I like puzzles and putting things together and that kind of stuff. So I just slid into it by volunteering. Working on large documents and doing some help in various things and I got into it. I stayed around. I finally left—finally decided to retire. You’ll just realize. It’s time. It’s time to go." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "If you don't have anything else we can end the interview. I really appreciate your time today. It's been so nice to have you here and to …" }, { "speaker": "MS. LARSEN", "text": "Well, I guess it's nice to know that somebody thinks you might have something to contribute." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Thank you for talking with me." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. JACK KABREL", "text": "This is Jack Kabrel. Today is June 16, 2016, at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. I am conducting an oral history interview with Mr. Alan C. Lowe, via an audio recording. This interview is part of the National Archives and Record Administration's History Office Oral History Project. Welcome, and thank you for doing this interview, Alan, and we appreciate your time and your history." }, { "speaker": "MR. ALAN C LOWE", "text": "You're very welcome. I've been looking forward to doing this, and I appreciate being part of it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And I just want to say here, before we get into the interview, that reading through your resume, it's indeed an honor to be able to interview you, because you represent every reason why I came into the National Archives; because of the history, and the love of history, and your track rising up from an archivist in the Reagan Library to what you've become now, what you're becoming even further on is truly admirable, and something that I think this interview will show to people. That's kind of what I want to take out of this, is to show how you can come up from that position as an archivist, all the way up to who you've become now. And thank you very much for this opportunity." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Well, thank you. I appreciate those kind words, and it has definitely been a pleasure and honor, so I'm glad to talk about it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Great. Can you just give us a brief, in a few minutes, an overview, the arc of your career with the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Sure. I began as an archivist, as you said, at the Reagan Library in California in 1989. I just finished getting my master's degree in history at the University of Kentucky, and started at Reagan, if I remember correctly, in September of '89. They just moved the materials out there earlier that year, and the temporary facility there in Los Angeles, prior to the completion of the permanent facility up in Simi Valley. So, I was there from '89, up until January of '92, and I, at that point, had the opportunity to come back to be part of the Central Office of Presidential Libraries at the National Archives; first of all, in Washington, D.C., then in my later years, we were at College Park. So, I started there in January of '92 and ended up serving Central Office until, I believe, January of 2003. So, there's almost exactly 11 years there in Washington and College Park. For part of that time, I also served for just under a year as acting director of the FDR Library up in Hyde Park. We were between directors, and they needed someone to help oversee it in that interim, and asked me to go do it, which was a really interesting experience. Now, I left the National Archives in 2003 to become the founding executive director of the Howard Baker Center at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I never thought I'd leave NARA, but that was a great opportunity to start up a center, and to work with Howard Baker, which turned out to be a phenomenal experience. Again, I never thought I'd leave Howard Baker, and then I got the call about the Bush Museum, I think it was about late '08, December of '08—and throughout a two-week period went through a series of interviews and was asked to be the director of the Bush Library, and came back to NARA again in April of '09, and where I am now until just a couple weeks from now, when I go up to be the director of the Abraham Lincoln Library up in Illinois. That's my career, in a nutshell." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "A remarkable career." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Well, I've been very fortunate. I told the historians, too, that when I started at Reagan, I didn't know a whole lot about the National Archives. I certainly knew even less, frankly, about presidential libraries. I had, like I said, just finished my master's degree at Kentucky, and wasn't sure what to do next. I thought about going for my doctorate, but I put a resume out, and one of the places I put it out to was the National Archives. And I got a call back one day and it was a guy interviewing me for an archivist job at Reagan—Rod Soubers, who later would become my supervisor there. We spoke for about a half an hour. At the end of the call, he said, \"Tell me about why you want to work at a presidential library.\" And I said, \"It's been my lifelong dream to work at one of the presidential libraries.\" And he said, \"Fantastic.\" And essentially, at that point, he said, \"Report out here in September.\" It was a little bit of a different process back then. And I said, \"Fantastic.\" And I hung up the phone, and said out loud, \"What the hell is a presidential library?\" I didn't even know what they were at that point. I just agreed to do something. But I knew about the National Archives, obviously, and I knew it sounded like an amazing opportunity. So, about a month and a half later, we were in L.A. and I grew to really, really love the presidential libraries, and the Archives, what they're all about." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "That's really interesting that in some ways, you kind of fell into it, right?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "I did. I absolutely did, yeah. Like I said, I might go and get my doctorate; I might go and do whatever. I just went into our career center there, in Kentucky, and thought, \"Well, let's look at the private sector, and let's look at the public.\" I thought, \"Well, you know, the National Archives might be the place. I have my master's in history. We'll just put one out there.\" And I didn't really think much about what would happen, and then got a call back, I remember, from St. Louis and just in general, and then Rod called me about the Reagan library, in particular, then we were off to the races. So, I never expected to go from Lexington, Kentucky to L.A., but that was an amazing experience going out there. I made a set of friends there, too, that have stayed with me throughout my entire career; just really wonderful people. A lot of us, just out of college, starting there, and a really good experience to start up the presidential library, like I've done here, as well. And to meet Ronald Reagan—I met so many interesting people through the years, thanks to this job, thanks to this agency. So, I've been really, really blessed in that regard." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Very good. Let's take a step back, and maybe if you can kind of work our way up from where and when you were born, and then your educational experiences, and maybe some of how that kind of helped you in your career. And then, we'll work it through the Reagan Library experience, and FDR." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Sure. Sure, sure. Well, I was born in Paris, Kentucky. That's in central Kentucky, not too far from Lexington, in Bourbon County. So, I grew up there on a farm. We raised tobacco and had cattle; for a part of that time, a dairy farm as well there in Bourbon County, with another farm in Nicholas County. So, very much a farm life growing up. I went into the University of Kentucky in 1982 thinking I was going to be a doctor. So, I tell that to new students, and all the students that I speak to now, it's good to have some passion, but also have some flexibility. Because when you get there, you're going to keep growing, and you're going to realize, you know, \"Here's where my passion really is, rather than here.\" After the first semester at Kentucky, I realized that to become a good doctor, I needed to understand chemistry and math, and so forth, and I simply did not. So, I had one of those moments where I stepped back and thought, \"What do I really love?\" I grew up in a family that was very focused on history and politics. I still remember sitting around the kitchen table, and listening to debates about Vietnam, and everything else. That was really what we focused on. I remember, also, as a kid going to Abraham Lincoln's birthplace, and to the hermitage with Andrew Jackson in Nashville. So, we were always kind of history-oriented and sort of politically—my mother was very active in the Democratic party there in Kentucky, and I would go hand out flyers with her, and work at the polls with her, and all that. So, always very focused on that, and I realized that's where my love was. So, I switched to the history department at Kentucky, and I got my undergraduate major in history and minor in political science, and really, for most of that time thought I would go into law. I love studying the law as well, and I thought I'd go and get a law degree. But as I went on, I realized how much I loved history. So, I also applied for graduate school there. And I was very fortunate, between undergraduate and graduate school, to be selected to go to Oxford University for a summer and study British foreign policy, thanks to the English Speaking Union. It was a great program. I went for a couple of months to England, and that really cemented in me the fact that I love political history and science. So, I came back. They offered me a wonderful fellowship in Kentucky my first year, so I went back to Kentucky and started my work on my master's. I also became a teaching assistant at Kentucky, and realized that I loved teaching as well. I really did like organizing lesson plans, and interacting with the students. And so, I did that and got my master's in 1988. And then, that’s when the unknowns began, I didn't know exactly what to do next, and Kentucky was so good to me. I worked at the Margaret I. King library while I was in Kentucky, and got to know the role of libraries in that regard, which was great. And they let me kind of continue on the spring semester there in '89, even though I had no idea what was next. I was technically in their doctoral program, but I pretty much knew, at that point, that I didn't want to get my doctorate right away, but I didn't know what the next thing was. And that's when, as I said earlier, I thank goodness I lucked into the job at the Reagan Library, and that really kind of set my life's course at that point. So, definitely, I grew up in a family where history, politics, were very much a big part of the discussion every day, it seems like, so I think that's what runs underneath all of it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And as well as following your passion, too. It seems to be something that also helped you, too. Not also, necessarily, thinking of monetary gain or something like that, but following something that you really like to do." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "That's something that's not certainly easy to do. And I understand now, as a parent, particularly, my father saying to me, \"Tell me again why you didn't go to law school?\" Because that is a much clearer path to financial independence. But he was very proud, as my mom was too, what I was able to do with that degree. I've got to say, Kentucky as a school really did a great job preparing me for what I've done; in terms of critical thinking, and research capability. In so many different ways, I think it was a great school. I stayed very involved with Kentucky. I'm on the History Department Advisory Committee group there. And another group there that works with small-town issues, and community issues, I'm on their board as well. So, I'm really proud of Kentucky. I think they've even gotten to be a better university since. They were not only good in terms of what they taught me, but they were also—what's the word—supportive. So, this kind of group of professors and other people who I felt like were always watching out for me. The program in Oxford, for example. I was young and stupid. I had no idea that program even existed. And two professors there came and said, \"You need to apply for this. You'd be perfect for it; you need to do it.\" And sure enough, I got it, but I never would have even known about it if not for them. So, I owe Kentucky a lot." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Were there one or two professors that were like mentors to you at Kentucky, or at Oxford? Question one. And question two, do you feel an obligation, in a way, on your part since there are so many wonderful teachers, to be a teacher to other young people growing up?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "I think, yes. The answer to that one is absolutely, yes. And just going back a second, to the mentors, I think I've been so fortunate, throughout my entire life, to have people helping and mentoring me, right? So, I mean, obviously, my family; my mom and dad, truly amazing, always there. When I got to Kentucky, I mean, in high school, great teachers. Mr. Turner, I remember, was a great history teacher. And looking back now, I realize Mr. Turner and Mr. Stuart in high school helped keep that passion for history there. In college, I had an amazing adviser, Girard Silverstein, particularly in graduate school, but also undergraduate, was always there. And I was very fortunate, for part of my time in grad school, to be a teaching assistant for him as well. And he was this, at that point, older guy seen as very tough, but my gosh, he was so good to me. And I remember, one semester I was a teaching assistant along with another young lady and she had to leave midway through the semester, so I inherited all of her sections as well, which was kind of overwhelming. A lot of work, you know, to teach and grade all those papers, and everything. Silverstein was so supportive. I remember, at the end, I went over to his house and he gave me a pair of cuff links, and a note to thank me. I still have that to this day, because it meant so much to me, because I really, really respected him. Also, Jeremy Popkin was a great teacher there in Kentucky, and has stayed in touch with me ever since. George Herring as well. George is a great American historian. So, I only had a couple classes with him, oddly enough, focused on European history when I was in Kentucky. But George was always there as this kind of icon in the department, but also, a really nice guy; always really supportive, and George has stayed in touch as well, over the years. And so many others—Hobson, and Al Passetti—they had this really great core of people who were great researchers, and great professors; but also, just really great people. I was very, very fortunate in that regard. I know I'm leaving out people. I'll feel bad. But those are some of the big ones. And then, certainly, at the National Archives. When I went to Reagan, you had people like Rod Soubers, who taught me a lot and realized that coming in, I didn't know, really, much at all about being an archivist, and kind of taking me under their wing. So, when I got back to Washington, so many people, but right away, Pat Borders. Pat had started the Johnson Library. When I got to the Central Office, he was deputy NL at that point, Deputy of the Office of Presidential Libraries, and became a close friend, and really great mentor. Later, David Peterson was head of the Presidential Libraries, and taught me a ton. And we had a lot of fun together, too. But he was, again, one of those guys that a lot of people thought was extraordinarily gruff. You know, he could be a pretty tough guy, but you see him and you just—brilliant, supportive and so good to me in so many ways, and helped me really develop in my career. In terms of other directors, Richard Norton Smith was always a great mentor to me throughout the years, you know? He had been at so many different libraries. And Richard became a good friend, and offered tremendous advice through the years, and was very helpful. When I decided to strike out and go to the Baker Center, he was extraordinarily helpful in that regard as well. So, I could name—Duke Blackwood at Reagan has been a terrific friend, and someone I learned a lot from over the years, as well. So, they're all over the place. I have been very, very fortunate at the agency to have—Sharon Fawcett is someone in that category as well, who took me under their wing, taught me a lot, and has been such a good friend and mentor to me. So, anyway, a lot of people. And yes, I do feel a responsibility. I love to teach, and I want to try to, in a way, impart whatever lessons I've learned. And God knows, I don't always recognize those lessons, or put them into effect once I have learned them. But particularly, I love working with university students. I did at the University of Tennessee, and certainly here at SMU, to do what I can to help. I just, right before this interview, had a going-away lunch with my mentee at Parrish Episcopal School. They've asked me to be part of their Leadership Institute while I was there, and I mentored a young lady there who was just a phenomenal, phenomenal student. And this being, in some small way, being helpful to her and to other students here has been really, really a great source of happiness for me over these past few years." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I think the term \"paying it forward\" could be used here." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Absolutely. Absolutely. And I just love being able to say I can have some type of positive impact for this person, and pass on something to them that could be useful. And that makes me happier than anything, to see them being successful and kind of following their passion as well. Certainly, I do that every day. I have a beautiful and brilliant 14-year-old daughter. Sometimes kids don't want to listen to you, but she does. She's a great student. Really, really, very dedicated student, and I try my best to say, \"Hey, sweetie, these are things I've learned through the years, and these are things, maybe, you should think about.\" And in multiple ways, I've tried to do that." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Let's see. Maybe if you could describe your first day on the job. We'll take it from there. Your first day on the job at the Reagan Library, and just take us through some of your accomplishments, and then we'll move onto your job at the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Well, I can never forget my first day at the Reagan Library, because it was complete and total insanity. We were moving out from Lexington, Kentucky to Los Angeles. And a person there had helped find an apartment for us, kind of sight unseen, right? So, Kathy and I went this long drive across the country in this old Ford Ltd., or whatever it was; it barely made it there. And we drive in L.A. Very early that day, we first get there, and we had driven in from somewhere in Arizona, so it was a long drive, and we get to the apartment that had been rented for us, and boy, was it a bad apartment; it was not good at all. Kathy, my wife, said, \"I am not staying here even one night.\" So, as soon as the Reagan—it was in the Reagan Project—they were in the temporary facility there in Los Angeles. We drove in. I met Biff Henley, who was then the director of the library; introduced myself, he swore me in. It was great to meet all of them. And I said, \"You know, I have to probably have to go this afternoon, and find a different apartment.\" And he said, \"Hop in the car. We'll go to lunch, and we'll find an apartment.\" So, Biff, thank God—I didn't know anything about Los Angeles—drove us around the neighborhood, and we found a different apartment. So, that day we drove in from Arizona, I got sworn in the job, I broke a lease and signed a lease for another apartment, and told the moving company to go to a new place all within, like, an eight-hour period. It was insanity. But it showed me that the National Archives was a caring place, because Biff understood that I was in a bit of a fix, and helped fix it for me. So, the great day I got sworn in, and then the next day I came back, and only a few of us were there at that point. A couple people had come in from Washington, and my friend Greg Cumming, who has remained my best friend since then, started that day with me. I remember sitting in our cubicles, trying to figure out, \"What do we do next? How does this place work?\" And trying to sit down with Rod, and see, \"This is what an archivist does. This is what presidential library does. This is what we have here.\" And thinking, \"Hey, this is going to be a really good gig.\" So, yeah, a really crazy first day there. And then the first day in Washington, I remember back there in '92, to the Central Office. It's a different deal altogether, in that now I'm dealing with a lot of administrative issues. So, I've got to learn about facilities, and personnel, and contracts, and all these things. So, Pat—who I mentioned earlier, but who became a great mentor—the very first day I'm sitting at my cubicle, and he walks up and drops this huge packet on my desk. And he said, \"That's a contract. Read it and learn it.\" I thought, \"What have I gotten myself into?\" But I did. I read it, and made sure that I tried to be the best prepared person in the agency for all those things. And really, it was the quick course on how the agency, and specifically, how presidential libraries run. What it takes to open the doors every morning. I always say, when they made me director of the Bush Library, when I was acting director of FDR, I had already been to the classroom ever, because Central Office, we dealt with every issue imaginable. And how do you fix those things? How do you serve the libraries? How do you make sure they're accomplishing their mission, and you're helping them out to do that? I dealt with those issues day in and day out. It really was a great learning experience. So, that first day, a little overwhelming trying to figure all that out; but again, I had great teachers like Pat to get me there." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Did anything that you had accomplished in the Reagan era of your career help you with what you were facing now?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, because that Archives—and also, I wasn't in the museum, but seeing the operations of the museum and seeing what they were starting to do in education, I realized, \"That's what it's all about, right? That's what we're supposed to be supporting and helping.\" So, the Reagan Library gave me a really good, excellent knowledge of what our mission is, and really in-depth understanding of the archival part of it, right? And so, when I got back to D.C., I always saw my goal there of helping them do that; helping them accomplish that mission.\" So, I understood it better than I ever did if I had just been plopped down in the Central Office. It, in some ways, it gave me a perfect beginning for it. And you know, every now and then, they pulled me into some archival issue, which I liked; I wasn't in it much, but some specific things. But I remember when the JFK Assassination Review Board was bringing in materials from all the libraries, I did some second review for them, just because I still had my clearances, I still knew how to do archival things, and that was kind of cool to be part of that. So, every now and then they'd throw me a bone as an archivist, to help with something like that. And then also, one of the neatest things I did at the Central Office was help with presidential moves. So, I helped move Bush 41 and Clinton out of the White House. And having that archival background, I think, was really good for that because I understood the importance of the records, and inventories, and all that kind of stuff." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "How involved were you at the Reagan Library in actually getting the Reagan Library up and going?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "So, when we got there, we were in the temporary facility down in L.A., and we helped plan the move, that was one of the big things. I remember I was part of a team there to help plan the move. And we all worked on it, from that temporary facility up to the permanent facility. But also, that was one of the first times that I got kind of pulled into the other side of the operations, because Rod would assign a couple of us to go up and help when they were building the facility to do X, Y, and Z. So, that's the first time I remember I met Steve Hannestad, who was a legend at the National Archives, and facilities, and security. And Steve came out, and I remember I was assigned with Greg to go with Steve and to do different facility things in the building under construction. And again, that gave me taste of, you know, as important as this, there's more to this than processing records, and doing references, and so forth. This is kind of the structure underneath this that makes it all work. So, I was involved in that review with him. I remember helping plan out the move of the staff member and office files, and trying to figure out how best to arrange them in the new facility. So, trying to make sure we had the storage areas right. But that was my main involvement, as I recall. My brain is not as good as it used to be, but that's the main thing I remember, in terms of helping him make the move from L.A. up to Simi Valley. And of course, the really interesting thing about Reagan is that's the first Presidential Records Act library; so the first time that the PRA went into effect was at Reagan. So, being part of that kind of first archival team, trying to figure out, \"How do we implement this new act?\" Working with the Central Office, and particularly with Nancy Smith, another legend at the National Archives, and being a young archivist trying to learn how to do that, looking back on it, it was very interesting. At the time, it could be sometimes perplexing, right, trying to figure out how to do this. And they did a really fascinating thing." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Interesting. Did you ever meet President Reagan and Nancy Reagan, or any other Reagan cabinet?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Oh, yes. Absolutely. President Reagan several times. I remember, the first time was the Christmas party in '89, he always would come down to our little events like that, at the temporary site. Very nice guy. Would love to tell us stories, particularly about Hollywood. He didn't ever talk any current politics, thankfully, but he was really very generous with his time with us. I just loved him dearly. I went to his house once. I remember, we went with Greg. They said that the president had some items to send to the collection—artifacts. And so they sent us up with this van, and I thought, \"Well, I'm going to go up there and stack. Members are just going to hand us the stuff, and we'll drive it back down to the temporary facility.\" Greg and I got out of the van, and started walking towards the front door, and Reagan opened the door and said, \"I've been waiting on you fellas.\" And we spoke to him for a good half hour, I remember, in the living room, just about the library, and just telling different stories. One of the things that—I was probably about 25—that was kind of overwhelming. To think, \"I'm standing here with Ronald Reagan, talking.\" It was really a very, very neat experience. So, you know, a few more times he came down. Mrs. Reagan came down to some of the events as well, at the temporary facility. So, yeah, got to meet them a great deal. And other members of the cabinet—I know Ed Meese was there quite a bit. Who else? I'm drawing blanks now. I know Maureen Reagan was around quite a bit—during the construction, in particular, I remember her being there. Very supportive. I remember, just the other night here, as I'm preparing to leave, President Bush had a little going away dinner for my family. And I said to him, \"You know, looking back on this, I've had so many great experiences thanks to being part of presidential libraries. Who would ever have thought that a young guy putting up tobacco in Kentucky would someday be having a dinner with the president?\" You know? It's just a really awesome experience. And it all started with Reagan." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Wow. That's quite a collection of stories. Do you have anything else before we leave Reagan, and the Reagan Library? Any other stories that you'd like to tell us, or topics you'd like to cover?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "They make fun of me here, because I've told this story a few times, but it's very true. The first time I met President Reagan, at that first Christmas party, after we had had kind of the photos with him and all, he came in and was just talking to all of us in our little breakroom there. We formed this semi-circle around him, I remember, and he was just talking about this and that. And suddenly—I don't remember why—the crowd kind of broke up, everyone doing different things, and I'm standing alone with Ronald Reagan. And again, I'm really overwhelmed; I could not think of anything to say. And finally, I'm looking at him, and he's looking at me, and finally I said, \"Mr. President, would you like a cookie?\" That's all I can think to ask him. And from then on, my mom, and family, and friends made fun of me because all I could think to ask was if he wanted a cookie. But my defense always is, the man did want a cookie. We went and got a cookie together, and he was obviously hungry. So, I think it might have been the right question, but people have made fun of me for years now, that that was the first thing that I could think of to ask him. But very, very good experience there, and again, this kind of core group of people that were a lot of fun to work with, but very dedicated to what we were doing, putting that place together. So, anyway, a great experience." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Wow. What another great story. Thank you, Alan. And we'll move on from there, onto your time as a senior management analyst. And you were talking a little bit about it. Tell us a little bit about the move from L.A. to D.C." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Sure. So, I was very fortunate to be hired for the Central Offices. It's something I knew I wanted, and I was very fortunate that when I started making inquiries, is right when they had a potential opening. So, I did that. I remember, we drove home to Kentucky from L.A. and stopped on the way, and got to see folks, and then arrived there in January in D.C.—in January of '92. We drove into town. I remember, it was a horrible ice storm, but we made it. We lived in Alexandria, Virginia; found a nice townhome there to rent, and eventually purchased a townhome just off of Van Dorn Street. I went in. At first I was there on Mahogany Row, in Archives I. That's before Archives II was built. So, that's where my cubicle was, there, in the Office of the Presidential Libraries suite. Again, my portfolio grew over the years. Back then, the agency was smaller. Certainly, Central Office was a lot smaller than it is now. There were a few folks who worked on the archival side. Nancy Smith was over that. John Fawcett was head of the office when I got there, and Pat Borders was his deputy. On the administrative side, it was me, Jackie Wood—who had been there many, many years—Michelle Cobb, and that was pretty much it. There were three of us. Looking back, what really gave me the opportunity was to get my hands in a lot of everything, and to learn a lot. So, I always say to folks, what Michelle and I did a lot was volunteer for things. So, we'd go into meetings—she'd have been in meetings with the heads of offices, because there were so many things to attend to and only a few of us, right? So, it was kind of a great classroom for me, and a great way, frankly, for me to move up because the management at the agency got to know me, I learned a lot. And so over time, I was very happy to be able to kind of climb up the GS ladder a bit there, and get even more responsibility. I'm trying to remember what year we moved out to AII. I don't remember exactly what year. I know it was after '96, but went on to A2, to the office there. So, I think—I don't remember exactly when we did that, but it was in the late nineties that my office transferred out onto AII. The first year that I was in NL—that was in '92—at the end of that year was when H.W. Bush lost the election. And so, really interesting part about that first year is I was detailed to the White House the day after the election, along with a team of other National Archive employees to help box up the White House and prepare for the move to College Station. Typically, when we helped plan the Clinton move, that was something we planned for over a year. But for Bush 41, we just had November to January to plan and execute it. So, I was one of the busy bees over at the White House, boxing up a lot of stuff, working with other NL employees and with military folks in the Pentagon to box it up, get it out to Andrews and then down to College Station. Really, an experience I still think about a lot. Again, it taught me a lot. It was a little chaotic at times, but really, really neat experience." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So, in some ways, your experience goes from actually packing the boxes, all the way up to high-level administrative work." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "That's right. And they're making the inventory after inventory of our packed up boxes, to later direct one of the places. And one of the funny things is, I remember—hopping back to Reagan for a second—when I was there, Warren Finch came up as an archivist. He had been in Central Office, and wanted to get out in the field, and he came out as an archivist. I guess I'm trying to remember how I first talked with Warren, but I guess I had talked to him in Central Office at the phone. And when he came down, he asked us if he could stay with us a few days, at our apartment, while he found a place. So, he essentially lived in our living room for three or four days while we found an apartment for him. And you know, we'd go out and drink a beer and everything, and we were just amazed that all these days later, that Warren and I are the directors of the two Bush libraries. So, you know, kind of came full circle from that first day having a beer together, trying to figure out what the hell this place is all about, to both being the directors for the Bush libraries. Pretty cool." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "There's some lessons to be learned there, for people that will be listening to this in the future." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Yeah. Right? And you know, the friendships, and networking are all very important too, right? So, just being able to reach out to people, it's been a very cool experience in that regard, too. Again, some of the best friends in the world are the folks that I've met at this agency, for sure." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I think that's the value of working at headquarters as well." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "The regions don't necessarily have that opportunity as much, and I think in the headquarters you had that opportunity, which is definitely something that I recognize." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "I think that's very true. I made great friends at Reagan, but going back to the Central Office, I met so many more people and so many more people in different areas, you know? And I think just the nature of the job, I had to learn a lot about—at Reagan, I hadn't thought anything about procurement. In Central Office, I had to really learn about Federal procurement; not always the most fun thing to learn about, but I had to. And as part of that, I met a lot of people. I met a lot of friends. So, yeah, it's very interesting, for sure, to be a part of that Central Office operation." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So, your time at the FDR Library as Director coincides with your time as a senior management analyst in College Park. How did that come about?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Well, thinking back, I know Verne Newton was the outgoing director at FDR. And Peterson was head of the office. And I remember, they were having discussions about, \"What do we do? It's going to take a bit of time to get a new permanent director in. What do we do?\" And I remember Verne taking me outside AI one day for lunch, and we sat down, and he said, \"What would you think about being an acting director?\" And I thought it sounded like an amazing opportunity. And I think he spoke to David, and David agreed that it would be a good way to go. So, next thing I know, I'm flying up to Hyde Park—a wonderful place. If you haven't been, check it out. It's just a really, very neat place. And a great staff. I was very fortunate; kind of, at that point, a relatively young guy going in to try to make sure that we ran the ship right until we got a good permanent director in. But some of them had been there 20-plus years. So, just to go in to learn from them, to support them where I could. At first I would go up—I think I remember a couple weeks out of every month, and then it got down to maybe a week out of every month, and then by the phone—but just making sure that I was doing whatever I could to help him out. Not only was that a transition period between directors, but also, we were just getting into the somewhat difficult beginnings for the planning for that visiting center that's up there. And so, just trying to get that on track, and to move it towards the finish line, finally, it took many, many years to do. It was an important part of what I wanted to do up there as well. So, that was that. They always joked that I did that work concurrent with my other duties, which meant that they didn't pay me any more to do it, but I do recall getting a nice little bonus at the end, which was appreciated. But really, the biggest payment to me was learning. I learned a lot, and got to know a lot more people, really wonderful people there at FDR. And I also learned—I would go, for example, and visit Marist, which is nearby, and one of their partners. So, I learned a lot more about how you can work with an academic partner. I worked a lot with Bill Baninoval and the folks at the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and I realized even more—I knew it before, but I realized even more how important it is to have a good relationship with your foundation, and the potential that you can unlock when you have a good working relationship with them. So, that was just one of the many lessons that Hyde Park taught me." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And you worked with the National Park Service as well." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Yes, that’s exactly right. And that was part of some of those ongoing discussions—looking back, that was a very long ongoing discussion, I think. When I got back in '92, the first trip I took was to Hyde Park, to go up and begin discussions about a visitor center, and I think we dedicated that visitor's center in '03 or '04. So, it took a little while from that first discussion to figure out, \"What do we want? Where are you going to put it? How are you going to fund it? How is it going to relate to the park service? What does the Institute think?\" et cetera, to get from here to there. But yeah, working with the Park Service, had a couple different Park Service directors while I was in Central Office, and then later as acting director. Again, figuring out, \"How do you interact best with them? What are our strengths? Where should we be working together to serve the customers better?\" that kind of thing. That taught me a little bit about visitor experience, too; thinking about, \"well, let's just not think of it as, \"Well, we're an agency, they're an agency.\" But overall, how are we serving people coming to this site. So, they're coming here, seeing us, seeing the home. How are we going to make sure the visitor center is a really, really good part of that? And also, at that point we just started discussing what became the renovation of the FDR Library. So, I had to learn a lot, and not always the easy way, about how you deal with things like historic preservation issues, right? Because FDR had a hand in designing that facility, so you had to be careful, from a cultural preservation perspective, to do it right. But at the time, we knew operationally that things needed to be changed, and the museum needed to be updated and all that. So, it taught me a good amount about, \"How do you work with the historic people? How do you work with the Park Service? How do you work with different parts of the National Archives to see how you kind of move that kind of stuff forward?\"" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "In June of 1998, when you were offered this position as interim director of the FDR Library, do you feel that it was overwhelming for you, or do you feel that by throwing you into the water it was the only way you were going to learn how to swim?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "I don't mean to sound cocky, but I did not feel overwhelmed. I felt a great sense of responsibility, and I did have to prioritize certain things." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "But you were ready?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "I think I was ready for it. And again, that was some great teachers and mentors, but also, I knew that the staff there was good. And certainly, when I started going up there, that was just confirmed that they were a very good crew. So, I knew I wasn't running the place by myself; that I could rely on people like Lynn Bassanese and others to make sure things were going well. And I didn't feel overwhelmed. I think occasionally I remember coming back to Central Office thinking, \"Now, how exactly am I going to get this budget together now? Because I've got two hours to do it, rather than two weeks.\" But no, I really didn't feel overwhelmed because I thought, at that point— I guess I had been in Central Office six years at that point. I thought I had a good handle on what was going there, and what libraries did overall, so it was a good experience." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes. I feel that the staff being well-trained and being together for a long time gave you really fertile ground for you to learn other things." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Yeah. That's exactly right. And I think, also, knowing that I had been involved with them, in terms of discussion with the visitor center, I knew some of them personally already. And also, I had good connections already with Bill vanden Heuvel, and his folks at the Institute, the private side of the operation. So, I was a known quantity to them. I knew them, so it wasn't like I was going into some mystery situation. I knew some of the folks, and I had been there several times in my capacity at Central Office. I knew the facility. So, that made it easier as well." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Great. Alan, moving on, is there anything else you would like to say about your time as senior management analyst and interim director before we move on?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "There's so much that in eleven years could be done in a few minutes. I think that kind of, over time, more and more, learning about how we can do things better. I know, when I was in Central Office, when we first started talking about the whole idea of management controls, and making sure that we're giving the support we should be giving, and that we're calling out issues where there are issues, and doing it in a supportive way. I think that, again, looking back on those 11 years, the most interesting parts—well, obviously, we were meeting a lot of people—but then doing things. We redid the facility standards for presidential libraries. I mean, you really saw us coming in, starting to get ready to come into the 21st century, because I remember, when I first got back to Central Office, there were maybe five or six pages of standards we would hand to foundations when the libraries starting being built, and saying, \"This is what we need,\" but we realized, and certainly Steve realized that we needed to be doing more in that regard to make sure the building we got at the end was the building we needed. And so, that whole facility standard redo that I know is still an ongoing thing today started when I was in Central Office, and people like Steve Hannestad and our security folks, and all that, had a huge part in putting that together. And it was really interesting for me to be a little part of that, and again, learn a lot, and to see this is the agency that I think is doing a better job of working with our private foundations and saying, \"This is what we expect. You don't have to guess what we want anymore. Here is what we need when you're building these beautiful new facilities for us.\" So, every day was interesting for sure, and again, a great classroom for me." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Two questions before we leave this area. And you just touched on one, I think, that we can ask now. Which is, how did the growth of technology do in the period of the nineties, of computer technology? How has that changed from the earlier days, even before you joined here, and by the time you left this period of your life?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Yeah. I think the biggest response of that is that electronic records has changed everything. So, when I was a young archivist at Reagan—I'm trying to remember the number—somewhere over 40 million pages of paper records. And then, of course, our audiovisual department had a big collection of photos, and so forth. But they're completely dwarfed by what we have here. We have 70 million pages of paper records at the Bush Library, but a billion pages of emails. So, everything has changed for the archival world, and preservation, of course, thankfully. But how do you process that much stuff in a timely way for our researchers? Still the biggest challenge, I think, we have here in the archival part of what we do, of how do you really tackle that challenge going into the future? So, we have a great crew here, great archivists, and they process a good amount of records every year. But even if you would double my archival crew, or triple my archival queue, we'd still have a larger queue because of the size of the electronic record collection. That certainly wasn't anything you had to think about at Reagan. So, this is really the first library—Clinton, I think, has 4 million emails. I'm not sure how many pages that is— I'm not going to guess. But I know here, we have over 200 million email, and that totals, I think, just over a billion pages. So, really, a fundamental difference in the nature of our archives, and the challenges those archives present in providing access to them." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I noticed, and this is an add-on question to that one, an answer as best that you feel capable of doing it, but do you feel that NARA could have done a better job in electronic records?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Yeah, I think NARA did a very good job in setting up the RA. So, I think that when Clinton left, and when Bush left, there was an ERA to ingest all of this information, right? So, I give great credit to NARA and working with Lockheed Martin and others, to have this system put together so we don't have to worry about, \"Where is it going? How is it being preserved?\" Where it could do better is, is thinking about, how do we assist archivists in processing these records now that we've got them? So, we said we can provide them electronically. But I said we're still figuring it out, but I think we'll get there. Where I came from, I'm trying to preach a little bit on this, I come from a spot where I'm not Mr. Technology; I will admit this. But I just know, looking at what my staff is going through and the challenges we face here, my basic view is, National Archives needs to do a better job at figuring out how we provide technological tools to archivists to be able to eliminate the need to view every page, line-by­ line, for some of these requests, at least. So, in other words, if my archivist here has a request, and say, as part of that request, we realize there are 100,000 pages of responsive emails, right? In my dream world, they'd be able to put those 100,000 pages through a filter of some type, and that filter would say, \"You really only need to review, line-by-line, 80,000 pages because these other 20,000, we know, don't have any closers or exemptions in them.\" I don't know how we get from here to there. I understand the concerns about that. You don't want to miss national security or personal privacy. It's also difficult, I think, for archivists sometimes to distinguish the exceptions. So take, particularly for example, the confidential advice closure that we had for the first 12 years at PRA Libraries; very difficult to define and implement. But I really think if we don't take a very aggressive stance, and try to figure that question out, and try to figure out what kind of technology would lend help to archivists, then, I think, we might be in a little trouble. The size of electronic collections are only going to grow monumentally. I'm sure the Obama Library will have five or six times whatever we have here. So, it really gets to the point of absurdity, almost, saying, \"Well, the answer is to give you more human beings,\" because that won't matter at some point. You will never staff them with that many people, to read that many pages, in a year. So, I really think to technology,I don't think the National Archives has gotten to that point of really. I'm not in any way trying to speak poorly of anyone. I know there have been a lot of challenges, and I know this won't be an easy thing to do. But I think, really, we need to do, maybe, a better job of saying, \"Here are a few possibilities. We really need to run them, and test them out, and figure this out before it gets any worse.\" So, what we face here, then, is when the first day—I think the first week or so that we were open to FOIA—you know, there's a five-year period where we're not open, and then after five years, anyone on the planet can submit a Freedom of Information Act request. I think in that first week or so, we had more pages requested here than requested at Reagan in 25 years. And that's because the responses request had all those email pages, right? So, that is only going to get worse, and we've got to figure out a technological aid to help archivists respond in a timely manner to those requests. So, that's what I think. We've got to get there, I think." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Very good. Thank you. And then, the next question can also apply to your kind of position. Politically working, and this, again, answer it the best way you want to, if you want to, but I know it can be very sensitive to work. Political environment can be very sensitive in the libraries, working with the Foundation. Did you find it to be a very sensitive, kind of like a catwalk?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "I really haven't, and I'm being completely honest with you in that. I've found, you know, when I was speaking just to Bush here right now, when I first went up to interview and talk to NARA, and then go over and meet with the President, that was really interesting. I interviewed for about two weeks. You know, I met with the White House Chief of Staff, and Mrs. Bush's Chief of Staff, and a few other really interesting people in the White House. But my last interview was with the President and Mrs. Bush in the Oval Office, which is really interesting, to say the least. I had a great conversation. At the end, he said, \"What do we do next?\" And one of his staffers said, \"Well, if you agree, you just need to say what you think.\" And President Bush said, \"Let's do it,\" and that was kind of it. So, the next thing I know, I'm on the way to Dallas. In those meetings, I met with the then-head of the Bush Foundation, ambassador Mark Langdale, who became a really, really good friend. I said to Mark, \"When you look at presidential libraries, the successful ones…\" think they're all successful, right? But, \"The ones who have had continual success are the ones that establish good working relationships with their foundation. That's the bottom line.” And in the instances where you've seen library management and foundation management fighting, that's when those libraries are not as successful. So, I don't ever want to be in the position where we are fighting. He fully agreed with that. Also, though, one thing that Mark and I—and then later Margaret Spellings and I, when she became head of the Foundation—we all agreed on was that we have some common goals, and we are roommates in this building. So, we have to work together in a multitude of ways, but we also have to understand, we're also different institutions, right? So, they are a private institution. They have a set of goals, some of which are ours, some of which they do on their own. I'm a Federal agency. So, sometimes we overlap. Other times, I have to say to them, \"This is a Federal rule.\" Or, \"This is what the agency needs to do in this regard.\" And as long as we respect each other, and we understand that we are different institutions, but we have to work together, we're in great shape. I've been very fortunate here in that the heads of the Foundation and the people they've hired understand that. We, from day one, have been talking a lot together. I meet constantly with the Foundation, and the result has been a great relationship, a ton of support from them, and no battles. So, that's been a real blessing. When I was at Roosevelt, great relationship with Bill vanden Heuvel, and the Institute, same thing. And I learned, I had a board of directors out there, and a somewhat similar situation of this, keeping those communications up, and understanding that sometimes they're going to have to do what they do, and I'm going to have to do what I do, but most of the time, we can work together. So, I work with a living President and first lady. I do want them to be happy with what we do. I do want to listen to any comments they have about X, Y, and Z; but at the same time, I do represent a Federal agency, and everyone has worked within those parameters and understood it. So, I really haven't had to do a lot of political advancing; just making sure I understand, I keep in mind where they're coming from. You know what I mean? I can't just go into it and say, \"Well, I'm a federal guy, and here's the way it's going to be.\" I try to understand, \"Where is the Foundation coming from on this issue? What, in terms of their priorities and their goals, would be driving them to want to do X?\" And so if I understand that, then I can understand, \"Okay, well, I've got that goal. I know my goal is this. Where can we meet together on this, and accomplish what we're both trying to accomplish without having a fight about it?\" So, putting myself in their shoes has been a big, big key part of how I can try to make this successful here." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Taking us up to January of 2003." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Simple question, and speak at length about this as long as you would like. What did you bring to the Baker Center for Public Policy, and what did you take from it?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Sure. I think, you know, when I went down to talk to the folks in Knoxville about the Baker Center, in large part, what I presented to them, they were trying to figure out what the center was going to be, and I said, \"Here's a possible vision for it.\" And it was based, in part, on what I had learned from presidential libraries. So, I said, \"This can be a wonderful center for history and learning, and for research, right?\" So, I said, \"We can do public programs; we can do educational programs. We can have a museum. We can build tremendous archives, and we can support research projects.\" Right? So, those are the big buckets. And all of them were directly based on what I had learned all those years at Reagan Central Office and FDR. And they liked it. They said, \"That's what we want to do.\" So, I was very fortunate in that regard, that they actually liked the model. So, I think I brought that ability to say, \"Here's the vision for that place.\" I love Senator Baker, and they wanted to honor Senator Baker. And they knew, in general, we want to talk about the history and the making of public policy,\" but beyond that, they really hadn't thought it out a whole bunch. I don't mean to discredit them. I mean, just really, they had gotten a grant from Congress, and I'm glad they made that initiative. But beyond that, the specifics would still be ironed out. So, I was able to come in and say, \"Hey, here's the way you could do this.\" And they said yes. In terms of what I've brought away, it's almost impossible to say that in any quick fashion. I learned so much. Let's see. Number one, the importance of partnerships; being able to work with University of Tennessee, with community partners, with national and international partners, you can't go it alone. So, particularly when you're building a public policy from nothing, which is what we do, being an established institution, being able to find those good partners to help you move forward in your mission—absolutely. I think I brought away a better understanding of the world of research and academia. I worked a lot with professors there; with students at Tennessee. Learned a lot about that. Related to that, I learned a lot about education. We made a separate part of the Baker Center what we called our Center for Civil Engagement, which is all about civil education, and getting particularly younger people—but particularly, everyone—to engage more in their communities. So, in addition to trying to help social studies, and civics, and history teachers, we also did things like workshops on how to run for public office, those types of things, which really had an impact in our area and around the state. On a social studies commission for the state, we did all kinds of really interesting studies about governance. So, we really made education a key part of what we did. We had a Baker Learning Community. We had wonderful Baker scholars. Among students, it became a very competitive program. These wonderful students, I always joked with them that I knew they were going to run the world somehow, so I would be nice to them now, so they would be nice to me later. Really phenomenal young men and women. And that showed me, again, that the power of these institutions to do good, to work with young people, help them think about what they want to do with their lives, and they give them a good base of understanding, in that respect, about how our Government works, and the history of this nation, and how they can be part of moving it forward. So, I learned that. I learned a lot about fundraising at Baker. I hadn't really done that too much before, but we had to raise $18 million for our facility; we had to raise money for ongoing programs, conferences, and so forth. And I learned a lot about development, relationship-making fundraising there, for sure. Gosh. There's so many things. I learned a lot about Howard Baker, that's for sure, who was a great man, and he taught me a ton about the importance of civility, working across the aisle with people, being able to laugh. He thought humor was so important in getting things done and keeping your sanity while you did it. Just a good man, through and through, and a great example to me of how you can be a good person and excel. You know? Just really rock-solid integrity. I often think back to the first time he talked to me about his role in the Watergate Committee. And he went in right as he was appointed Vice Chair of the Committee. He met Nixon at the old executive office building. He went in there thinking that it was Democratic dirty tricks; that he was just kind of being set up in some way. And he said to Nixon, \"Hey, you know, I've always been a supporter. I want to make sure this is fair.\" He said Nixon acted very oddly. And at the end of it, Baker said, \"Well, you know, I hope my friend John Mitchell doesn't have any issues with this.\" PART 1 [END OF RECORDING] PART 2 [START OF RECORDING]" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "For some reason, we have not been recording for the last ten minutes." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Okay. Alright." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So, that's unfortunate. However, I tracked it to when the phone died—one of our phones died—and it was right in the middle of the John Mitchell story. So, if we can just finish that story, and from there, we'll just go right into the Bush Library." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Okay. Sure. Sure. So, again, I was talking to Baker about his meeting with Nixon. Very strange meeting. He said, at the end, all about Baker's appointment to be Vice Chair of the Senate Watergate Committee—at the end, Baker just made kind of a casual comment, \"I hope my friend John Mitchell doesn't have a problem with that issue.\" And Nixon said, \"Well, he might.\" At that point, Baker said something inside of him snap, and Baker thought he should kind of let the chips fall where they may, as he always said, and figure out what, really, was the truth. So, to me, one of the many, many lessons that Howard Baker taught me was kind of the importance of integrity in that regard. And again, I always joked that with the Baker lessons, I don't always follow them; I try to, but he was a good example of someone who was under an extraordinarily stressful situation. I mean, it doesn't get much more difficult than being right in the middle of Watergate, and having a President of your party being under attack for realizing that you've got to do the right thing for the country; you have to do the right thing by yourself, frankly, for your integrity, and follow the facts. And that's what he did, I think, that whole thing. So, I love the man. He was a great man, and I think we could all learn a lot from him." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Very good. Tell us about your experiences with the George W. Bush Presidential Library's director." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Sure. So, I got here in April of '09. We were in a temporary facility in Louisville, just north of here. A great temporary facility; staff of, I think, eight or nine when I got here. We're now around 40, if we have all the positions filled. Really interesting kind of beginning of figuring out, getting our arms around the collections. For me, it was a great learning experience, and as we talked about earlier, the predominance of the electronic collection here. A huge paper collection, but also, much larger electronic collection, and trying to figure out, how do you really deal with that? So, hiring a staff, being part of the design process for the building, for the museum. I still remain very proud of our results from that effort. Working with great contractors, working with our Foundation. Working with the President and Mrs. Bush; I always say, it doesn't get much better for someone who loves history to be sitting in a meeting with the former President, and him saying, as we were designing the museum, he was saying, \"Well, I was thinking this at that time,\" or, \"My priorities were this,\" or, \"This is why I did that.\" So, it doesn't get any better than that, and to be able to be part of that, I think, is very, very cool. Getting the staff together, getting the building built, getting the museum built, and then beginning to see how do we work in this community. So, who are the obvious partners? Who are the partners who aren't as obvious that we need to reach out to and start working with? So, at the top of that list was SMU, and really getting deeply involved with them. They've been great in terms of welcoming us, but also, finding specific ways to work with us. So, for example, they created something called the Center for Presidential History, headed up by Dr. Jeffrey Engel, who's became a really good friend, one of my best friends here, that that center does oral histories as well as public programming. A lot of that public programming is done in partnership with us. So, it's become a great conduit into the academic life of the campus, and also, a great partner for us in reaching out to the broader community. So, its been an amazing kind of whirlwind of an experience here. It doesn't feel like I've been here for seven years, but I think we've accomplished a lot in that time." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "You talked about when you were executive director of the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center of Public Policy." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "In the Bush Library, how much input did you have for that mission?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Well, you know, you come into this, and I've been part of this world for a while, and you know, here's a basic, core mission of this. And it's something that I have a great passion for, so, I know this is what we accomplish, or can accomplish, as a presidential library. What you need to do, then, is say, \"What am I either adding to that, or how am I magnifying that in this specific instance, right?\" So, I know, for example, that we always talk about the importance of education at the presidential libraries. What unique assets do we have to make it great; to really have an educational impact on our community and beyond? So, a good example of that here is, during the Bush administration, they renovated the situation room, and they gave us two rooms; they gave us the old conference room, and the old command room. The paneling, the furniture; all that came to us. So, we realized that would be a great educational resource. So, we reconstructed the conference room here; we reconstructed the Command Room at Reagan. And we got a grant a year and a half or so ago to connect the two rooms by technology, and to put together the first of what I hope are many simulations for kids to command and assume different roles, and have to solve a crisis together. It can be either a standalone exercise here at Bush, or we can connect with the kids at Reagan. And I think, over time, we've talked to the Pentagon, to Mount Vernon, to connecting with them and doing other scenarios there as well. So again, that education thing was part of our core mission. I knew that, I bought into that, I love that, but then how do you really implement that here? What kind of unique way can you do it at Bush? Certainly, education of being connected to a great university, SMU, is another kind of unique asset we have here. So a big part of my thinking has been, how do I maximize that, and really, again, have the broadest and deepest impact, and education? At Baker, I kind of had to, obviously, I had Senator Baker's input, and a great board at the university, but we really kind of had the formulaic vision there. And by the way, I also reached out, when I was with Baker, to the Center for Legislative Archives there at the National Archives—they were a terrific partner. And to the other congressional centers around the country. We all came together as an organization. So, I was able to help learn for them to craft a vision, but I would say it's more from scratch there than it was here. I was able to come into a program I knew, and respected, and wanted to move forward, but then you think, \"How do I do it in this unique situation with George W. Bush?\"" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Can you talk a little about the email controversy, what happened?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "In terms of the emails that they claimed were deleted and lost?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Yeah. That was going on when I got here, and there had been claims that emails have been destroyed by the White House during the Bush administration. And again, I'm not Mr. Technology, but essentially, as it was explained to me was that it pretty much was how those emails were stored, and where they were stored, and what buckets they were in, and so forth. There was a resolution of that with the reconstructing of those lost emails from where they were found, and that was all done, litigation on that was resolved. And so, I think that was kind of symptomatic of coming into this new age of, how best do you preserve these, and how do you store them, how do you access them. I think a learning thing for the White House and for us, but at the end of the day, we have them, and we have a lot of them." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Are there any stories that surround that incident, or other controversies in your ten years, or a little bit less?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Yeah. I'm trying to think. No more around that. I mean, that was pretty straightforward, frankly, of the people who have much more knowledge trying to sort out exactly where those emails had ended up, right? And then, going through with Gary Stern. We worked a lot with NARA's general counsel. I've known Gary for many, many years, and Chris Runkel has been one of my closest friends, and a great adviser. Working with those folks and their staff to try to figure all that out with the technology people. So, no other really big things around that. I'm trying to think of other controversies. Gosh, I hate to act like I'm controversy-free. That's boring. Nothing big, in terms of actual." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Well, the reason why I say that is because Bush's eight years could be considered controversial by many." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Well, yeah, of course." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "A lot has happened. I was just wondering if any of that has transferred over into the library?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "I appreciate your clarifying, but at this point, I'm way too NARA-centric here, so you're right. First of all, I think there was some controversy here when I first arrived that some faculty members at SMU had opposed the library being here. And I think you're going to find that, pretty much anywhere in the country, no matter what the political party there will be opposition to these institutions sometimes. I think that this really comes from a misunderstanding of what we're about, and not understanding, I'll try to say this in a humble way, of what we bring to a community. I think we bring a lot to a community. And luckily here, the vast majority of SMU faculty and supporters and people in this area understood that it's going to be a good thing to have the Bush Library here, no matter if you're a Democrat, Republican, Independent, whatever. I considered it a big part of my job when I got here to reach out and kind of dive into the SMU community, so that whether they were a supporter or not a supporter, that they understood, \"Here's what a presidential library really does, and here's why I think it would be good for us to be here, and how we want to work with you guys, and how I want to be helpful to you guys.\" So, I really immediately started working with the management of SMU, and faculty, and going out and speaking, either in classes—I remember, I went to the home of one of the faculty members, and he brought in a bunch of current and former faculty to hear me talk. And it was constantly going around with that, trying to say, \"This is a good thing.\" Right? And I don't want to overstate the level of opposition. I mean, they were already going to raise the sign, the building; we knew it was going to be here. Almost everyone I talked to there was supportive, but there was still kind of this small set of folks who were upset about it. I think what I did, what I thought other people did, getting out in the community, that pretty much went away. So, in terms of the broader controversial nature of the Bush administration, obviously, huge debates during the administration about a whole range of things: response, the war on terror, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Katrina, the financial crisis. I mean, you think about what this guy had to deal with over those eight years, an amazing number of difficult issues, challenges. And of course, as with any presidency, people disagreeing with what he did, how he did it, and some people very much agreeing with it. Ours were magnified, I think, because the issues were so huge. So, to me, that was a great opportunity to talk about history, and to talk about how presidents, how leaders, operate. And I will give President Bush and his folks a lot of credit. As we put the museum together, he was at the top of the list, saying, \"You need to talk about the controversies, and the different viewpoints.\" Now, of course, sometimes, presidential libraries are treated unfairly, or hit on the head for being temples, and only saying good things about their presidents. I always say, first of all, I liked having a President in the room, and telling me what he was thinking. And I think it is important in these museums to say, \"We are the Bush Library. And here—the President thought these were his priorities, and the big things he accomplished then—that informed us as we put this museum together.\" But at the same time, with something like our Decision Points data, for example, we also show the other sides of those debates. So, in Decision Points--I don't know if you're familiar with that. You go in—it's like a theater—and you have this individual computer screens, and a big screen up front. And you had to go in and choose from one of four scenarios with your compatriots in the room; majority rules. And you choose from either the invasion of Iraq, the surge in Iraq, the response to the financial crisis, or the response to Hurricane Katrina. Four big, controversial topics. And after you choose the scenario, on your individual computer screen, you choose to get advice from different sources. So, it might be the Pentagon, or Congress, or whatever. And in each of those sources, two different actors come up and give you completely conflicting advice. So, if you pick up the surge, one of them will come up, say, from the Pentagon, and say, \"This is why you need to send more troops in, and you need to do it right away, and here's how it will work.\" And then, the other actor will come up and say, \"In no way you should send more troops, and here's why.\" So, that way we’re able to, basically, kind of frame those debates, and people have to disagree or agree. Along, on the way, you get flashing news bulletins trying to sway your opinion. At the end, you make a final decision. You see how the room voted, what option they picked, and then the President comes up and says, \"This is what I did, and why I did it.\" So, you get to see those debates, but also, more fundamentally, you get to see that any leader has to take in a lot of conflicting information. They have to sift through it, they have to apply their principles, and make decisions. You may vehemently disagree with those decisions or you may love them, but at the end of the day, that leader is responsible for doing it. So, it teaches a lot of lessons and takes on those controversies. There was another film we did with Secretary Rice about some of the controversies of the War on Terror rendition, and that kind of stuff as well. So, we wanted to kind of address that straightforwardly. And certainly, in terms of our archives, free access to that, our educational program is always nonpartisan. So, I think we do a really good job of not being political, and talking about those pretty contentious issues that were around during the Bush administration." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So, you feel that in your experience with presidential libraries, that for the most part, they're an honest assessment of history?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Yeah, I think it is. And you know, it's always the balancing act, because you do want to not make it a hatchet-job, right? So, you don't want to go in and say, \"Well, we're going to only show the critics.\" Right? You don't want to do that, but at the same time, you want to show that there were critics, and that there were debates on these certain issues. So, it is kind of a little bit of a balancing act in exactly how you do that. I think we were really very much helped here by having a really terrific museum design firm called PRD. They always brought us, made sure we were at a good space in terms of how a professional museum exhibit should be put together, right? So, we can have discussions, \"Well, how do we do this? How do we approach this issue? Do we approach this issue? What do we do? What's going to make for a good visitor experience? How does it tie into what we do with education?\" All those things. And Dan Murphy and his gang there at PRD would help us kind of move down that road in a very good, professional way. But again, I've got to state, and I'm not just blowing smoke here, that our Foundation friends who ran those meetings wanted a good museum. They didn't want people to come in and say, \"Oh, it's just a glorification thing.\" Obviously, we do talk about the accomplishments of the Bush administration; we do talk about his priorities. But at the same time, I think we do it in a very professionally, I'm trying to think, not in a museum way, but in a professionally-designed way that I think people on both sides of the political aisle can respect." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So, you would feel that in all of your experiences in the presidential libraries—and you don't have to be specific here. That there was no real political pressure to water down or to alter points of view?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "No, and I will stay away from Nixon on that, though. The whole Nixon issue through the years has been difficult from the ongoing litigation that was going on from the seventies to the early two thousands; the difficult relationship that resulted from that, understandably. And I think I always try to put myself in other people's shoes, seeing both sides of those debates during the years, and of course, how you deal with Watergate. So, I will put that aside. I have great respect for our director over at Nixon; I have a great respect for the Nixon Foundation. Aside from that, I think there's always an honest effort to put together a good museum. I remember, at Roosevelt, as we thought about, \"In the future we're going to redo this museum…\" So, they finally did. It took a while to get all that together, but it's great, from what I hear; I haven't seen it yet. But you know, I thought, how do we best approach the issue of, say, FDR and the Holocaust, right? And how do we deal with that now? Because there obviously are different opinions on that. I'm not sure, exactly, how they ended up doing that. But that is a discussion you have to have, and you have to think about among yourselves, with the Foundation, with the families and so forth, \"How do we do this in a way that will be well done, that can kind of talk about that there is a discussion around this topic without being just a hatchet job that some people might want it to be?\" So, I haven't really, in all my time, I think that you do work closely with the foundation. I think that what happens, oftentimes, is it doesn't matter what party you are; if you're a very partisan person and you see, okay, so let's say you're a very staunch Republican, and you see a Democratic presidential library open, it's almost like a reaction nowadays, that you're going to go in and just assume that it's a temple to that Democratic president, and vice versa, the other way. And some people are just going to be that way. I've kind of had to learn in my career just to accept that there's going to be a certain percentage that's going to think that way, when I know that the process behind it is not like that at all, and we just kind of have to stand on the record; stand on the fact that we have people coming in here who are Democrats, who love this museum, and know that we've been successful. And if you have detractors, then you just have detractors, and hope that they will see the light." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "How much does a revisionist history play a role? Like, you were saying about FDR and the Holocaust, or maybe any controversy on?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "I think you have to think about, particularly, with the older libraries, I think it's important when you go into those redesign efforts to see, what is the current state of scholarship, what are the top things that historians are talking about now, what new discoveries have been made in your archives, or others that might inform it. But that doesn't do away entirely with the old. I mean, I think revisionist history is only new until it's revised, right? So, I think you don't want to jump on something that is some new fad or something; you want it to be good, and scholarly, and supported, and so forth. You know? But if it is, I think you have to incorporate it into your thinking, about how do you talk about whatever this topic is? So, I think it's important to that. And I know, any good museum designer is going to do that. They're going to do the research and realize these are things that we need to at least be thinking about." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "As we're wrapping up here, I'd like to just ask you any final thoughts on your current position, and anything else you'd like to state about your position as director of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Sure. Well, I guess I would be amiss if I didn't say that it's been a very special experience to work with George W. Bush and Laura Bush. They're very good people, very supportive of what we do here. It's very interesting to work with a first lady who had been a teacher and a librarian, you know? So, she brings to us a set of skills that are pretty awesome. And getting to know them the way I have, it's one of those great experiences NARA has allowed me to have, to kind of get to know these people that led our nation, and to see that they are people. I think it's very easy in this day and age, in really difficult political times, to almost dehumanize our political leaders in some way, and forget that they're human beings. These guys have shown me they really are, they have a great sense of humor, they have great sympathy and empathy, and are just really rock-solid people. So, I guess that's just the final word, that I've been very, very blessed to be able to get to know them, and their family, and their associates. I won't have that opportunity at Lincoln, obviously, but there, at least, like we have here, they have a really good Foundation. And again, those lessons from Baker and from here about how to work with those foundations are going to be valuable to me up there in Illinois." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Without a doubt. Just to go along the line that you were previously on, are there any stories or anything else you'd like to see on the various presidents, or individually, with them in the cabinet, before we leave this topic?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Well, you know, I've gotten to know some of the folks here who work for George W. Bush. Andy Card is a really great guy; Josh Bolton. Karl Rove has been around here quite a bit. Really funny guy; I think I love his sense of humor. Margaret Spellings, you know, was Secretary of Education for President Bush, and head of the foundation here. And I really grew to like Margaret so much. She was a lot of fun to be around, but so smart, and really did a great job at the Foundation. I could not have asked for a better partner over there; and again, a great sense of humor as well. So, we got along perfectly. I'm trying to think, who else? Secretary Rice. So impressive; has been here a lot, did a good amount of research here, too, has been involved in the Bush Institute, and is such a good and kind person. So, getting to know her a little bit. Let me think. I shouldn't—my brain is starting to get a little fried here. Those are a lot of the people we worked with who are part of the Bush administration. And I'm sure I'm forgetting many, many more. But it's, again, interesting to see the kind of teams these folks put together, and the team that President Bush put together. Mrs. Bush had great people. I mean, Anita McBride, one of the first people I met during the interview process, has been very engaged with us; just a great person, a lot of fun to work with as well. And then you see, some of those guys come down. Brian Cossiboom is the Vice President for Operations here. He had a role in the White House, and brought a lot of knowledge to this position, but it's just been a rock for us. Someone I talk to, pretty much every day. And again, it may be a constant; you may see this interview as, I like to laugh. I do. And I think a sense of humor, Baker helped reinforce this for me, a sense of humor makes the day go by much easier, and resolve issues. And Brian and his compatriots over there know how to laugh, for sure, so it's been a lot of fun working with him." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And seeing forward to your next position, what lessons do you think that you've learned that you could take back?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Gosh. You know, the Lincoln Library is an awesome place already. I think I'm going to go up there with a real commitment, first of all, to education, and seeing what we're doing now, and what more we can do. I've become a real believer here in the role of simulations, you know, and in kind of that interactive-type, immersive experience and education; seeing if they're doing that already, and if they're not, what can we do at Lincoln. Really, a real passion for education. I think I've learned a lot here in museums; especially, the exhibit program here has been very active, and I've been very engaged with that with our curator and our Foundation. I think I've learned more and more each time we've done an exhibit, on what works and what doesn't work, and how to really engage people the best. So, I think I want to go up and take a good look at what we're doing there with special exhibits. They've done some great ones already, but what we can do even better. Programming, same thing, how important it is. Springfield is a pretty small community, but they have a great buy-in from the citizens of Springfield and the county. So, what can we do even better to reach them, and to reach other areas around there and around the state. And then archives, they have a terrific Lincoln collection, but it needs to be grown, and we need to think about, \"How do we do that?\" Then, lastly, I know I'm a broken record, but the partnerships and dealing with the foundation. So, how do we maximize that partnership? How do we work together to raise money and to support the programs that kind of form our core mission together? So, I think I take a lot of what I've learned here and at Baker, and hopefully, we'll put it to good use up there." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Great. Are there any last words or stories you would like to add to your interview before I have one final question?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "No, just that I appreciate NARA. Again, I came into this agency in '89 not knowing a whole heck of a lot about it, and certainly, not knowing anything about presidential libraries. I will say that I believe deeply in what presidential libraries do, and all range of our missions. I'm really proud of what the libraries have been able to accomplish around the country. I think we're a real force for education, for the preservation of history, and I know I'm a bit biased, but I think we're a great part of the federal government. So, I'm very, very proud of what we've done. I'm very appreciative of all the opportunities I've been given." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And then, my final question is, going back to 1990, 1989, when you were standing there in front of Ronald Reagan all by yourself, if you had the opportunity again, what would you ask him?" }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "I think one thing is, I would say, \"Why did you decide to go into public service? What was that final thing that pushed you into that arena?\" And I think that would be a really interesting question to ask him. I've studied his life a lot, and I know that transition from being an actor, very involved in the Screen Actors' Guild, obviously, so very political in that regard. But what made that step to the Rendezvous with Destiny Speech, and the decision to run for governor. I think that would be really fascinating to talk to him about. The other, I think, and I've read more and more, obviously then, but since then, about his views on the Cold War. It's a great debate. Did Reagan win the Cold War? Did he not? My good friend at SMU, Jeff Engel, Center for Presidential History, is a big fan of H.W. Bush and Gorbachev, and he thinks that those two things together really did it in. And I'm very much, the more I study Reagan, you see the consistency of his thoughts on the Soviet Union, and on the Cold War, and how to win that Cold War. Right? So, you can go back and see a progression of thought, and then an implementation of that thought. So, obviously Reagan has detractors; he has supporters. I put myself in the latter. I'm definitely a supporter. And I would love to talk to him about, \"When you were president, how did you, on a day-to-day, or a month-to-month basis move your vision to reality? Because Reagan presumed that this picture of, \"Here's how we do this,\" and then you see it being implemented, but his specific role is still being debated. Was he there day by day, saying this and that? Or was it just setting him a vision and these guys implementing it? Or, some detractors would say that they didn't even implement it; they did what they could, and then, really, Gorbachev was the one who really ended the Cold War. That debate is so hot right now. I think it would be interesting to sit down with him and say, \"Tell me, sir, how exactly did this work?\" So many things like that. I think he's endlessly fascinating, and obviously, one of the most important presidents of the 20th century." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Well, Alan, thank you very much. I really appreciate our time, and you are a living example of somebody who started out with a vision, to reality; from Reagan to Lincoln." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "Thank you so much. I've enjoyed it. Let me know if you need anything else, and come see us in Illinois." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I definitely will, and if there's anything you want to add to the record, by all means, I'll drop everything to get it." }, { "speaker": "MR. LOWE", "text": "You're too good. I appreciate it. Thank you so much, sir. PART 2 [END OF RECORDING]" } ]

[ { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Going back to even before NARA, I did see you have experience from several different jobs before joining NARA. What led you to the National Archives and how did that work help you?" }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Sure. I started actually in archives work at the Maine State Archives in the late 1960s in a program that had just been legislated. And so I was one of the first hires there, and many of our consultants actually worked for the National Archives. And so I, early on in my career, was exposed to people like Frank Evans and Frank Burke and Bert Rhodes." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Later on, I spent about five years doing consultant work, mostly on funding from the NHPRC, including a project that looked at library and archives preservation needs in all the states west of the Mississippi. And from there, I spent about eight years as the state archivist and records administrator in Oklahoma and another 11 years in the state archives and records administrator in Delaware. And that brings me up to roughly my time of starting it at NARA. I think the relevant experience was being a state archivist. That was kind of the key experience I went to. I'm an archivist that's really never processed the collection. All of my experience has been on the administrative side of government archives programs." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "What were your impressions of the agency at the time that you started? You just mentioned some pretty significant names." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "I think I always had a favorable impression of the National Archives. I think it was reinforced once I got there by the really thoughtful quality of the professionals who work there. This was where some of the cutting-edge technology was being discussed. I mean, back as late as the early 1970s in Maine, we were working with Frank Burke on SPINDEX issues, which was an early National Archives initiative in trying to control records using electronic means. And so I always had a pretty positive vision of the National Archives. And after my ten years there, that hasn't changed. The people there are exceptional." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "What part of that job did you enjoy? What was the work? I mean, you mentioned being an archivist who didn't process collections. So what part of your days did you like?" }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Well, I think overall it was the variety of the job and the challenges that we faced on a number of different levels, some of them positive challenges, some of them having to react to negative situations. I think it was kind of going to work and not really knowing what might happen that day. Certainly there were days when the surprises were not very happy. But that was part of the challenge of the job. I really like the challenge of it and being around really smart people who knew a lot more about, especially, the technology part than I did. I spent two years of that first seven years also running the National Records Management Program. In effect, I had two jobs for about two and a half years. I learned more about electronic records in that period because that was what we were trying to deal with. It was also the period of time that the records management program across the country was really separated between people who work for the regions—that was a separate office, the Office of Regional Records at that time—and people who worked in records management with headquarters agencies here in Washington. And that didn't make any sense to me. And so one of the things working with Mike Kurtz and Tom Mills and Lew Bellardo and John Carlin, who was the Archivist at that point, was starting to move towards, what I think is now in place is a team of record analysts across the country who work as a coordinated unit. That's the one of the accomplishments I'm actually proudest of." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Oh, wow. I think that's how it works today." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Yeah. You know, it was the same issue which never made any sense to me, and I wasn't able to move on this one. But all of the records centers were under the regional program except the one in Suitland." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "I guess I did not even ever think about where Suitland fit in." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "And basically we were one of the records centers in the system, except we that records center reported through a different chain of command. And David Weinberg, who still runs that program, I understand, you know, was very accommodating to that. But it didn't make any sense to me. And Suitland was always one of the problem areas. Maybe I would have been happy to give that to Mr. Weinberg." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Sure. Well, I would think it would not help with continuity and things like that." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Yeah. There were physical facility issues at Suitland. Early on, we had a serious fire at Suitland, which damaged a lot of records, which we investigated but were not able to substantiate. But there were indications that it was an inside job. A disgruntled employee." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Hmm." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Right. You mentioned it. One of your questions down here below about the flood in 2006 at Archives I." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Well, about a week after that, we had a water incident at Suitland that damaged 15,000 cubic feet of records." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Oh, my goodness." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "And it seemed like about once every six to eight months there was some kind of water leak. It was an old building then, and it was one of the challenging areas." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "I see. Well, speaking of, I just realized I'm tangentially connected to it because some of the records got loaned for an exhibit that is now in storage. Did you have any role in it? I know there were archival records brought from Iraq in 2003. I mean, they were in a flooded basement. Correct me if I'm wrong, but could you speak a little bit to that?" }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Yes. We were contacted by the Department of Defense, about what ended up being called the Iraqi-Jewish Archives." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Yes. Okay." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "They were in a flooded basement in Saddam Hussein's headquarters. And we detailed three people to go to Iraq. Actually, two of our conservatives went into Iraq, Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler and Doris Hamburg, to oversee the removal of those records from that basement and the shipping of the records back to the United States for conservation, treatment, and preservation. Luckily I found some volunteers. Probably not one of the things I look forward to doing is sending, you know, people who work for me into a war zone. But that's what they did and that's what we did." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Yeah, it's an amazing story, the records being saved and preserved. Are there any other events that you want to speak about before we move on to your duties in your second role as the Senior Advisor for Disaster Preparedness?" }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Well, I think the other role was working with a lot of other people at NARA, but being involved in the development of the Archives Research Catalog, the ARC catalog, being involved in development of ERA [Electronic Records Archives] and really moving NARA into the electronic records age both in how we dealt with our customer agencies and also how we dealt with our internal processes and procedures." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Huge shifts forward. Can you speak at all about your role during the ERA? I mean, what did it look like? Were you part of a huge team or was there only certain staff? Just explain a little bit how it worked." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "NARA put together a staff of mostly senior officials, of which I was one, that spent about a year kind of scoping out what ERA would be, what it needed to do. Working with the contractor to do a concept of operations. It grew to be much more than just the preservation of electronic records. Some would say it had scope creep, a good Washington term, but it's also the way that we started to get a handle on controlling records scheduling as part of the system. If you think about records scheduling, you know, there's in the end, there's two dispositions. The records are either destroyed or transferred to the National Archives. And so it made some sense to build that kind of functionality into ERA as well. And there were a lot of baby steps to that. There's a system called AAD [Access to Archival Databases], I think it is. And that's if you go in, I think still today, if you went in and looked at the Vietnam casualty records, that's what you would be using. We used it initially working with the State Department on State Department cables, which were structured, but not as a database. And so that was one of the challenges as well. So there's lots of steps along the way until you get to ERA. All that was pretty interesting. And again, having some of the best thinkers in the country working on those issues." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "It's amazing. Did ARC kind of coincide or run parallel to that as well then I assume?" }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "You know, they're in parallel. ARC was more of finding aid and collections control system. ERA was more a preservation system. But they were running in parallel silos, but had intersections at points. As we were the office of the National Archives that ran both the archives part of the program and the records management part of the program, we were involved in a lot of those intersections and trying to see where they were and how they relate to each other." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Okay. Would ERA have debuted before you switched to your different role around 2007?" }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Yes, I think early iterations of it." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "At that time, they had moved it to the off-site location out in West Virginia. And they moved ERA staff out there. And I'm unclear about the timing of that." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Can you kind of describe in your mind then, especially being part of such huge shifts in how records management was, how did the mission transform with electronic records being added on to it, or it still remains largely the same?" }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Mission has always been the same: to determine, you know, what records need to be preserved, for how long, to protect rights and obligations, to hold us accountable as public officials, and to document the history of the United States. Mission in the National Archives really hasn't changed, probably at that level from its inception in 1934. So how we accomplished the mission changed." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Oh, okay." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "You know, back in the Carlin administration there was a brief statement of what the mission was that everybody was supposed to know and it was \"access to essential evidence.\"" }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Yes, I remember that." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "It's what the National Archives did. I actually like that because people could you know, you could have that tattooed." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "I thought it was intuitive. And sometimes it's hard to describe what an archive does." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Yeah. And it was something everybody could remember, you know, from the guy who's pulling records out there in the records center to the Archivist. You could say that. But there were some people who didn't like that. So hey, I'm glad I didn't get it tattooed anywhere." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "There was another employee down in Houston who had a tattoo of the NARA seal on his arm." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Oh my gosh." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "I hope he's got his whole career in NARA because it would have been really tough to go to work for another agency." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Yes, maybe a little awkward. Is there anything else you want to add about the years you were the deputy? Or I would like to hear from you about really kind of what your relationship looked like with other agencies while you were advising on disaster preparedness." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Yeah. NARA was always disaster preparedness. I was there during 9/11. Probably one of the worst workdays any of us in the public sector have had. Not to mention the country. As we worried about whether our staff in New York and our staff at the Pentagon were safe. And not knowing what was going to happen potentially in Washington, where we at the National Archives weren't on the A-list of targets, but we were on the B-list of targets. There was a lot of thinking at the National Archives after that about the continuity of our operations, at least. And so as one of the primary offices and the one responsible for all the records from the Declaration of Independence on down, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about issues of disaster response. But it really hit us with Katrina and Rita and I think the other one was Wilma. There were three hurricanes all at once, which, as you well know, devastated New Orleans and especially the Mississippi coast. All of a sudden, we were getting calls from people in Mississippi and New Orleans about whether we could help. And people were calling. My perception was the people in the impacted area down there, anybody they knew at the National Archives, they picked up the phone and called just to see, could we help? And we had no vehicles to do that." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Just to clarify, is this like other local archives or a records center?" }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "The Archivist of the United States got a call from somebody who apparently he knew who was the chief coroner in New Orleans." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Oh, my gosh. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Asking if we could help him recover his records. And in fact, the National Archives got a big mission assignment at the end, and we sent our preservation people to New Orleans to help pack out records from the morgue in New Orleans Parish. I have some photographs of what it looked like down there." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Oh, wow. And do you remember any of the staff who were there or who were sent down there?" }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Again, it was Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler who was the lead on that. And she was also one of the leads on the most interesting project that I was involved with, which was the conservation of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Oh, yes." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "I like to think I'm one of probably less than a hundred people who have ever seen both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence up close and personal outside of their cases." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "That's incredible." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "They had been in for 50 years and the new encasement was supposed to last for another 50 years. And that was as close to a religious experience as one can have, I think." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "I can only imagine. So were you there when NARA started having a conversation that there needed to be some \"TLC\" given to the Declaration and Constitution and better cases? Or had that been a conversation that had been happening for a while?" }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "It's been happening, I think, since kind of the mid-1990s. They started to notice that things were starting to bubble in the glass, and so there were some concerns that there was changes being made in the encasements themselves. And so that suggested at some point that the documents needed to be taken out of their 1953 encasements and at least get re-encased. And while they were out of the encasements to have the conservators actually evaluate the documents and do what needed to be done from a preservation point of view and a conservation point of view. And if you haven't talked to Mary Lynn about these things, I think that would be a fascinating oral history. She was one of the few people to touch those documents in the past 50 years." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Yes, I agree. I just made a note to check. We have a master list of people who participated in the interviews, and so I made a note to check that because I think she would be someone, if we have not yet, that we should talk to." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "And the other person who was kind of the early point person besides Mary Lynn was Hilary Kaplan, who is also on Doris Hamburg's preservation staff. We sent a number of the people to New Orleans, both from Washington and also from the Fort Worth Records Management Program." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Oh." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Since New Orleans was in the Fort Worth region. And we also sent our staff from Atlanta to Mississippi since Mississippi was in the Atlanta region. And so we had NARA staff on the ground including the Archivist of the United States, who was Allen Weinstein by that time. And he really wanted to go and look. And I talked to my colleague down in Mississippi, who was the head of the Mississippi program. Finally, we had to convince the Archivist that we don't want you to come to Mississippi right now. We can't accommodate you. We're in the middle of a disaster response. Please don't come." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "So Allen did defer for about a month, but he did go to Mississippi and he went to New Orleans. Let me tell the story at least a little bit here, because I think it's a relatively important story for the National Archives and it kind of change. My colleague Barbara Voss, who was the regional director of Denver, came to Washington and spent about two weeks trying to figure out how to respond to all the requests we were getting from people in Mississippi and Louisiana. When we sat down with FEMA, we found out that, in terms of the national response plan, which is the thing that drives FEMA response to any kind of disaster, both historical and governmental records were not in the plan." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "No kidding." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "And therefore if it's not in the plan, we don't have to respond to it. And so part of what I did in the last three years at the National Archives was to work with FEMA. But in particular to work with the Department of Interior, which was responsible for that part of the national response plan that dealt with historical sites to incorporate records as a critical asset that would be subject to response and recovery in case of disasters." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Well, so you're saying that it wasn't until Katrina that there was a conversation about including records." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "In the National Infrastructure Protection Program and the National Response Plan, records were not considered. And if people talk about them at all, they talk about vital records, which they thought were births, deaths, and marriages. Because for a lot of people, that's what a vital record is, as opposed to an essential record that you need for the continuity of your operations. And so a lot of it was working within the bureaucracy to try to figure out how we raise the issue of records as an asset that needed to be recovered for the purposes of government continuity following a disaster. And the last time I checked, those are still all in the plans." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Well, we just did a COOP [Continuity of Operations Planning] exercise maybe a week or two ago. Were there COOP exercises before this?" }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Yeah, there were COOP exercises. There was an office in FEMA that was concerned with continuity of government, and that was our entrée. And a lot of it was also working with the Council of State Archivists, because the way disaster response is set up in the country, it's primarily the states who are who are initially responsible. And so the Council of State Archivists, which are the state archivists of all the 50 states plus some of the territories. We went together to FEMA, and they were able to write a grant to meet one of the Archivist’s requirements. Allen Weinstein apparently was on Air Force One with President Bush soon after Katrina. And Bush asked him, \"well, what's the status of records recovery programs in the states?\" And Allen said, \"I don't know, but in three months, I'll have a report to you that provides that information.\" I'm sitting in my office in College Park. And the phone rings, and the Archivist says, \"I just told the President in three months I'll have a report to him about the status of records disaster preparedness in each of the states. Make sure it happens.\" Okay. Lesson number one, never let the Archivist on Air Force One." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "So I went to the Council of State Archivists, which had a small staff. And we started talking to FEMA, and the result was that the Council got a small grant from FEMA, in the $20,000 range, to produce this report, which they did. And they came back and got about a $3 million grant from FEMA to provide disaster preparedness training for each of each of the 50 states. That's a partnership that the National Archives has really always had with state archives. But that's a very good example of it." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Well, yes, it is." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "So early 2007 I told my boss I was going to retire. As we worked through that, the Archivist came back to me with a counterproposal that if I was to look at the position, would I be interested in working in disaster preparedness, trying to get this into the national plan. And I could work in Maine instead of retiring. That sounded like a pretty good deal. The second part of that assignment was to still try to coordinate coalescing the records management staffs across the country and into one unit. I spent the last three years working basically only on two issues: disaster response and the Integrated Records Management Program. And that was probably the most rewarding part of the whole National Archives 10 years." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "There's the old saying, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And I think in this business, that really is true. It's making the relationships. There's a disaster preparedness thing that says you don't want to be exchanging business cards as the fire department comes to put out your fire." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Yes. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "And FEMA and a lot of this thing is all about building relationships across the government. So when there is a disaster, you can pick up the phone and call somebody and they have some idea who you are. And I think the National Archives did that fairly well." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "That's really great." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Parts of the National Archives that were fun? I think working with our colleagues up in Ottawa at Library Archives Canada. I enjoyed that immensely. Having a chance early on to look at the script for _National_ _Treasure_ , because at that time they wanted to film part of that movie inside the National Archives. So we had to try and figure out where they could film and where they couldn’t film. And interestingly enough, once they did all of that and they looked at all the requirements to film in the building itself, they found it cheaper to rebuild the Rotunda of the National Archives on the soundstage in California. And if you look at the movie real carefully, it looks like the National Archives, the Rotunda, but there are some things that are different. You know, the whole premise of the movie: there was something on the back of the Declaration of Independence." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "And there actually is." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Oh, right. Yes, I knew that. But what was it?" }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "July Fourth. So in a sense it’s a file header. So when the document was rolled up, there was an indication about what the document was, July 4th, 1776." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Okay. I see. Well, I will definitely look very closely next time. I had heard about the movie. They did end up doing some street shots, correct? Or do you know." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "They did three shots outside and the opening sequence outside, but they ended up doing nothing inside the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "But Nicolas Cage did come, and I was not there that day. My boss, Mike Kurtz, took him through the National Archives and said he was really just kind of a down-to-earth guy. And he went into the Rotunda and he spent a couple of hours just signing autographs for anybody who was there, who said, \"oh, that's Nicolas Cage!\"" }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Oh, that's so neat." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Yeah, I thought so too." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "I'm sure that becomes quite onerous after a while." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "I would think so. Although I suppose if you're a movie star, if you were someplace that nobody recognized you, that would be even worse." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "And I never thought about it like that." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "So that was one of the fun things that happened at the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Yeah. There's so much you were a part of and you were involved in, I'm not even barely hitting the tip of the iceberg. I was going to shift focus to your time serving as commissioner for the NHPRC, but I don't want to move on if you still have other things to speak to." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "I actually don't have a lot to recall about that, and I didn't have any notes for that that I could go back and look at. I was on the Commission from the late nineties while I was still a state archivist in Delaware. And obviously had to resign from the Commission when I started working for NARA." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Sure, of course. Got it. I think that's why you were recommended to me to ask about the archivist who did some work in the USVI [U.S. Virgin Islands], maybe because the NHPRC provided a grant for a year for that. But it was a little bit before your time." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Yeah. And maybe now that you said that, maybe the person to talk with would be Larry Hackman." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Larry Hackman." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Yup." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Longtime state archivist in New York, longtime director of the Truman Library, out in your neck of the woods. But probably in that time, he was on the staff with Frank Burke at the NHPRC when that grant was done." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Okay. Well, thank you." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "I don't have contact information for him, but I know he's now living in Massachusetts, and I could get that to you if that would be useful." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Yes, that would be. Thank you. Well before. Real quick, did you, did you spend a lot of time while you were at NARA being involved with other professional organizations? Or did it help your role at NARA to have those organizations to look to?" }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Yeah. I mean, the work with the Council of State Archivists was critical to reacting both to the Katrina situation itself and then incorporating disaster preparedness into the NARA portfolio. After Katrina, we did two or three disaster response work with the state archives. Especially in the Midwest with the river flooding, which in Missouri, at least on the other side, happens quite frequently. There was some serious flooding probably in 2008, 2009, somewhere around there that we did some work with. We worked a little bit with the Hawaii State Archives and some people on the west coast when there was a typhoon in American Samoa. And actually the last kind of disaster response thing, which has nothing to do with the United States, that I worked on, was trying to support the archives recovery efforts in Haiti after the earthquake." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "So. And that was working primarily through what is known as the Blue Shield and the International Council of Archives out of Paris. But overall trying to support the archives in Haiti. The Foundation of the National Archives actually provided some money to them to be able to buy supplies. It's always interesting to work with a foreign government. It made the job at NARA interesting." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Sounds very interesting." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "Absolutely." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Well, and so you have mentioned a couple, but are there any other challenges or issues that you've faced? I can't imagine that for disaster preparedness, that things were easy on many days, but anything that you want to speak to?" }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "We were responding to all these disasters, like 9/11 and stuff, but all the regular business was still going on. That kind of surprised me going back because these issues are so in your mind about your experience. But the day-to-day stuff continued." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Yeah. We're kind of wrapping up. Is there anything you want to add? Anecdotes? Words of wisdom? Any memories? I mean, like the Nicholas Cage one is kind of along the lines. I was thinking of anything like that that you want to share." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "I'll tell you another kind of fun story, if you like. The Archivist was supposed to go to meet with the National Archivists of the European countries and Canada. And for some reason, Allen couldn't do that. So he said to Mike Kurtz, Mike, you go in my place. And about a week before this happened, Mike came to me and said, I got a problem. I don't have a passport that's current." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Oh, no." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "I looked at him and said, I do. And so my last trip to Paris was to that meeting, and it was a very interesting meeting. One of the social things that we did there was that all the archivists from the European Union countries and the Commonwealth countries went to the ballet at the opera house in Paris." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "An amazing experience. One of our staff members on the records management staff had a sister in the State Department who was in Paris at that time. So I also got a tour of the American Embassy in Paris." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Oh, what a trip." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "So for every 15,000 boxes of records that we had to deal with on the not-too-good days, there were always a lot of good days at the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Oh, well, that's really nice. If you don't have anything else to add, I think I'll conclude our interview. I do appreciate your time very much. Thank you for speaking with me today." }, { "speaker": "Howard", "text": "It was fun to kind of go back and revisit 10 years." }, { "speaker": "Jennifer", "text": "Good to hear. Let me just stop the recording." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MS. JENNIFER JOHNSON", "text": "My name is Jennifer Johnson. I am conducting an oral history interview for the National Archives and Records Administration with Nancy Malan who retired in 2006. Today's date is February 19th, 2020. Nancy, could you start off by telling some background about your education and/or how you got to NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MS. NANCY MALAN", "text": "Yes, sure. I have a Master's degree from Georgetown University. I finished two semesters there. I still had a thesis to write, but I decided that I ought to get a job. My primary professor, Dorothy Brown, suggested I go over to the Archives and talk to Claudine Weir who had some major role. I'm not sure what it was at that time and I went over. I didn't talk to Claudine Weir but I guess I went to personnel and right off the bat they sent me to Still Pictures where I was interviewed by Jim Moore. It's odd that happened then but it wouldn't happen these days. I was a little annoyed because he kept me there all day and I was having exams and I felt like I needed to go study. Nowadays, if you got an all-day interview, you'd be thrilled. At any rate a couple days later I was hired. I had no civil service status. It didn't matter. I started as a technician. I took the civil service exam and I'm not sure when but shortly thereafter I was converted from temporary to civil service and then got into the (Career Intern Development System) CIDs program." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Can you speak a little about the CIDs program?" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "It was a program where a large number—I'd say probably 15 people—were hired to get into a career ladder. I think it was a GS-7-9-11 position as an archivist. We were assigned to one particular unit. I was assigned to Still Pictures but periodically we were assigned to a different unit where we were to learn the work of that unit. We also took a course on Archives Administration—I think it was called—given by Frank Evans who was just terrific. That program lasted, oh, I'd say somewhere between five and seven years and it was wonderful for history students because it gave us all jobs. Now, I think it's one or two people a year who are hired but that was quite a lot. At that time the idea was to get ready to replace staff who were going to retire and to train them properly. That was the CIDs program." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "You mentioned having a professor recommend you go to the National Archives. What were your impressions of the National Archives as you were beginning your career? Were you aware of the National Archives much when you were doing your school—your classwork at Georgetown?" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "No. Ashamedly, I have to say no. I didn't know a thing about the National Archives. I learned pretty quickly when I got there. But the organization had never come up. I'd never done research there. I just didn't know a thing about it." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "You said you started as an archivist in Still Pictures. Can you describe what a typical day or week looked like for you?" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "Yes. Actually I started as an archives technician. When I finished my degree, I was automatically put into the archivist series and the first thing that I did was reference, responding to letters from the public. The vast majority had to do with citing or providing information to researchers about Navy ships they had served on. Well, this was in writing. Just before I came, we got a huge accession of World War II Navy records, Navy photographic files. The word got out that we had them and veterans all wanted a picture of the ship they served on. There were port side, starboard sides, fore and aft, probably five or six images of every ship in the Navy. So we would go look at them. At that time, we just did a form—a written form, sent it to the person who had written in, and then filled those orders when they came in. I very quickly moved from that, which was a pretty easy research task to answering inquiries about Civil War photographs, about the Farm Security Administration, which of course we didn't have but people thought we did, World War I and World War II photographs generally. And so I with everybody else expanded my experience from the Navy photo files, record group 80, to a broad range." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Were you involved, or did part of your duties include processing photographs or writing finding aids or did that fall on different staff?" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "No, it did. I worked for a long time on reference both in the research room and then answering written inquiries. Then I did a number of projects. We acquired the Harmon Foundation collection, which was from a private source, of African artists and African American artists and I worked on those. I worked—it's just hard to remember. I processed a lot of different—oh, Forest Service. We got a huge accession of Forest Service photos and those needed to be - - ." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I'm sorry to interrupt. What kind of service?" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "The Forest Service. 1995. And that was also popular—a lot of requests for Forest Service photos. Then I became a supervisor. I supervised both the reference and project staff. At that time, I guess we were a branch. I don't really remember. I got up to supervising both archivists and technicians." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I discovered across a book that had a chapter authored by you that was described as coming from a National Archives conference. Can you talk a little bit about—I think it was 1976—your presentation “American Women Through the Camera's Eye.”" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "Yes. The conference was announced probably a year before it took place. The Archives at that time had an annual scholarly conference and this one was going to be on women. I'm not sure why I was asked, but I was asked to give a pictorial presentation. A year or two earlier, I had the good fortune of going to a training program run by the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) on creating slideshows. It was out in Harper's Ferry, run by the Park Service, and it was fantastic. It was—I learned a lot about production, about adding music, about narration, and so I decided to use those skills to create a slideshow rather than an illustrated lecture. I got Renee Cheney, who was well-known and one of the few female radio broadcasters, to do the narration. I added music to it and came up with the presentation. The book—the photos and the book are based on that presentation. I was let's say—what's the word?...nervous, because when the program came out, I was the last person on the program and I followed Joseph Lash, the well-known author of _Eleanor_ _and_ _Franklin_ and several other books. I just thought, oh wow, what an act to follow. But I was absolutely pleased when after the conference was over, Mable Dietrich,who was the head of the Office of the National Archives said to me that she thought that my presentation was one of the highlights of the conference. I was just thrilled. I also was asked to give it to the office heads who had—I guess it was monthly meetings. I did that and people were impressed and there was some applause after. One of the managers said later that it was the best meeting that they had had. So it was very well-received and I was thrilled to do it, and glad that it came out of the publication. It was kind of a highlight. I—the idea of a slideshow just came to me. I did remember staying at this meeting of the high level management that—I think Jim Moore for allowing me the time to work on it and I remember saying that if he had known how much time I had spent on it, he would not be too happy, and I thought that was pretty funny." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I'm sure. Are there any other interesting photos or reference requests or discoveries that you made white you worked in Still Pictures?" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "I'll tell you what. I opened the drawer one time and there were artworks and I went through them and there was one signed by Ben Shahn who I recognized as a relatively prominent American artist. I took it out and drew it to people's attention and I thought that was all very cool. I also—I'm the person who found in the Abbey Row—I believe—that RG 79, also Park Service. There's a pretty well-known photo now of Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley. Nixon invited Presley to the White House for a conference on anti-drug—" }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Yes. You found that?" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "Yeah, I'm the person who, who found it. The two of them look like vampires really. They're facing the camera and Presley has a cape on and it's just priceless. I unearthed it from the Abbey Row collection." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "That's amazing. Is there anything else about Still Pictures because I understand you then moved to Public Programs." }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "That opportunity arose because the head of the office had seen my slideshow and made me an offer. I had applied for a promotion in Still Pictures and someone else was selected. I was unhappy there. And so I just moved down to Public Programs. What I did there was I supported the Exhibit staff basically. I did slide shows that were part of Exhibits. I did sales items like a selection of postcards. I did an audiotape on World War II. Those are the ones that I remember. It was all using my Still Picture knowledge, my ability to do research in other records based on my experience as an archivist. And it worked out very nicely." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "So, just to make sure I get the dates, you were in Still Pictures. I don't even think I asked you at the beginning. What year were you hired to be an archives technician for Still—" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "Sixty eight. 1968. Same year as the riots." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Oh, wow. So you were downtown." }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "It was quite a time. It was quite a time. Then I stayed in Still Pictures—let me think—after 1980—I'd say ‘81, ‘82 and then I went down to Public Programs. I was very happy about that. So that was the sequence." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Okay. In my understanding of NARA history, in the middle of your career at NARA, two big events happened in the eighties, RIFs and our transition to independence. Can you talk a little bit about the RIFs?" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "I had been down in Public Programs—I'm not sure—several years at least. I was wholly independent. Everybody else there was part of a staff. There was an Education staff. There was an Exhibit staff. And I was sort of solo. When they had to downsize, I was standing out like a sore thumb. They eliminated my job. It was a devastating thing. It was right at Christmas-time I remember. I didn't want to tell anybody. It was just terrible. I got through Christmas. I discovered or was told that I was going to bump—should I explain what bumping means?" }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I think so. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "The way it works is since I had considerable years of public service, I would bump or take a position of someone with less service and that person would be out of a job or would bump somebody else. It just depended on how many years that person—how many years of service that person had. It turned out that I was going to bump a very good friend of mine, John Vernon, who was working at Suitland as an archivist but in the Records Center. By a stroke of good fortune, Jim Moore, who had not selected me for the promotion in Still Pictures saved me from being sent to Suitland. I somehow finagled an opening in Central Reference. I moved into that. Part of the reason was that at the time I was working on a genealogy slideshow, a way to introduce new genealogists to how you went about research, via a slideshow rather than having the staff explain it a hundred times over. That, of course, was a Central Reference function. So it made sense that I would go to Central Reference and finish that project, which I did." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Do you remember what year it was? You said it was right before Christmas." }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "Eighty five, eighty six. Eighty four. Something like that. Certainly before ‘89. I know it was well before ‘89." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Okay. And I do have to ask. Is this when you had what is still the envy of folks who were around? The office above—was it above the old theater?" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "[Laughs]" }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I have heard a lot about this office." }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "Yeah. It was a gem. No. I didn't get into that office until I went from Central Reference to the Regional Archives program with John Scroggins and Roseanne Butler. They had an office up on 13N. There wasn't a lot of room in it. I just looked around and I found this space above the theater, behind the stage. You got up to it by climbing a ladder that was the sort that you would have on a Navy ship. It was this steep metal ladder and it was a mess. I told them could they make an office out of it for me? They said sure. Are you sure you want to be up there? Because it was pretty isolated and I thought it was fantastic. I said yes. In short order they put up drywall. They put in some ducts for heating and air conditioning and painted everything and I moved furniture up that ladder. Well, I mean, I didn't but people helped me. It was big. It allowed me to do audio/visual programs. I could do audio work without disturbing people. I had enough room to project. I had a screen that I could pull down and put the projector some distance away and I could put the lights out and project slides. It really worked given the job I was doing. Yeah, it was isolating but I really—rarely did I mind—and people would come up. Frank Burke who was the Acting Archivist would show it to people and, you know, this is Nancy's office and she outfitted it all by herself and everybody would get a laugh out of that. Volunteers would come up. At some point Trudy Peterson called me or came up and said are you comfortable here? Jim Moore was long gone and Trudy was the head of the Office of the National Archives. And are you comfortable here? I said, oh yeah, I'm very comfortable. She said, well, okay, because there's been some discussion about you being vulnerable here. I said, no, I certainly didn't feel that way and the whole thing went away. They let me stay and I stayed there until we were moved to Archives Two." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Okay. Well, but to back up just a little bit before we go into Regional Archives more, do you have any memories or any thoughts about being in the agency when NARA gained independence?" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "To be honest, it was happening at a level that was beyond me. It was not sort of common knowledge, constantly discussed, at least not among my peers. It was great when it happened, but the thing I remember most was that I was asked to work on a letterhead design. We were no longer GSA and we needed our own letterhead. The other thing I remember was that there was a ceremony or some commemoration in which Dick Jacobs sang—who was a very accomplished tenor, I think—sang “The Impossible Dream,” which I frankly thought was a little over the top. But that took place in the Rotunda. Of course from that, you know, life just went on. It obviously was significant but it didn't have a lot of effect on the things that I was doing or my peers were doing other than budget, but we weren't involved in the budget. It was a nice feeling that we were an independent agency. We didn't have to deal with GSA anymore. That didn't have much effect." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Can you talk a little bit or describe your time when you worked for the Regional Archives, maybe more even once you got to A2 how your office at A2 functioned for the Regional Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "We were basically support staff. We were a presence for the regents in D.C., which they of course needed because they were out in the field and out of sight out of mind. There were five of us and my job was to support the public programs aspect of the regions. At that time, John Scroggins and Roseanne Butler worked extremely hard to try to get more attention both by the agency and by the public given to each of the Regional Archives, which primarily were used by microfilm researchers. But there were a lot of important records there. The idea was to let the public be aware that those records were there and to encourage research. And also to encourage the agency management to recognize that a nationwide network of facilities was a very positive aspect of the National Archives and that not very many people knew about it. The management in D.C. never saw it that way. I remember in particular Adrienne Thomas and—what was his name? Steve Hasdat—were very anti-the regional archives and were constantly talking about shutting them down, altering—cutting the budget and John and Roseanne were very, very strong in preventing that from happening. It was a time when part of this idea of getting the Regional Archives better known—part of that was to move them from Record Centers where they were located to more prominent locations. That was both a blessing and a curse. I can't remember—I think Philadelphia was the first one to move from the Record Center to downtown Philadelphia and there was an exhibit space and it was much more convenient for researchers and so forth. The problem was that the agency never really supported those moves. I mean we got away with one or two. Then the house of cards started to fall and that made a very unbalanced program. You couldn't say that the Regional Archives were housed in the Record Centers because some were and some weren't. You couldn't say that they had exhibit space because a few did, but most didn't. It's hard for me to remember. I have a feeling that by now they'd have been eviscerated and the whole idea of really promoting public programs in the regions has gone by the by. That part—the public programs was part of the—what do you call the evaluation of the Regional Director?" }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I'm not sure." }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "Some kind of plan. In other words, when you were evaluated, one of the elements of your evaluation—one of the major ones was how you were doing in public programs." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Oh, the performance review." }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "Performance review. Thank you. Some people like that and some people said, hey, look, I'm an archivist. I'm not a salesperson. Most of them came around and it was terrific for me because that's what I did. They would call me up and they'd say we'd like to do an exhibit and there was a commemoration. I think it was the 50th anniversary of the first controlled, sustained nuclear reaction in Chicago and all the records were there. The San Francisco earthquake, 1906." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I think I remember mention of a Brown v. Board as well." }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "Oh, yeah. Board of Education in Kansas City. We had the records for that. There were a lot of commemorations and some regions took the lead and I just helped. Others—I basically did the project for them and it was terrific. I always felt well-received by the staff in the regions. There was no—it was rare—one particular region wasn't too open. But everybody else welcomed me, thanked me for my advice, and I felt very needed and appreciated." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I do know, it was shortly before you retired, but you had a big role in the exhibit that was put on display in the new building that they built in Morrow, Georgia for the Atlanta region." }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "Right. That was, that was my last big project and you worked on it with me. And that, that was, that was just wonderful. The thing I remember most is that we did a section on prison records. Some federal penitentiary there in Georgia somewhere and we selected individual cases trying to come up with a variety of crimes from petty larceny to murder and everything in between including perpetrators of various races and backgrounds and ages. It came out really nicely and one morning I went in after the exhibit was up and the cleaning staff was looking at those panels saying things like, no, that, that boy was too young to be sent to prison. And really, really responding and I thought if you could get the cleaning staff interesting in the records that was top notch. That made me very, very happy." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Indeed. It's what the exhibit is meant to do. Isn't it?" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "Right, exactly, yeah. It's not all intellectual stuff and we—another thing in that exhibit, I can't remember in what capacity, but I selected records using the names of staff members. Maybe they weren't relatives to staff members and the names were common. But they did turn up and that was also a big hit. People just loved to see their names and it was, you know, history is not about famous people necessarily. It's about, you know, the common person and that selection drove that point home. So that was a terrific project. That was the last major project I did. Another part of it you probably remember was the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Now, that was something that—I mean those records are important and there was some question about whether that subject would be approved. I often wonder whether it would have been approved if it was in D.C. At any rate, there was no problem. I think Jim McSweeney was the Director and he said, oh, absolutely. I found another discovery that I'm proud of. I went to the files and there are all these black and white prints of the people who were part of the study (Tuskegee syphilis study). Then I go to another folder and there are color slides of the same people. We introduced color and I guess nobody had seen them or—I just don't know. All I know is that they were never used and it really added a lot to have the color images." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I remember that now that you say that because I remember there was one woman who was the nurse for the whole study and you see all these characters that are repeated but they're in color. It just gives the image one more—just a push into more lifelike in some way." }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "Absolutely. It was very neat." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "I know I asked you about the independence, which was big for the agency and then RIFs, which was very high level, but you were personally affected. Are there any other significant turning points in your mind in your career that you'd want to talk about? Significant, either meaning a memorable moment or not so memorable moment?" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "You mean a positive or a negative." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Yes, thank you." }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "Let me think. I'll tell you what. I think being associated with the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH), which was a natural fit. It wasn't the Society of American Archivists (SAA) but a professional organization and the Archives allowed me to, A) present programs at their workshops about photos and care of photos and so forth. They also allowed me to take some of the classes and one of those classes was the one in Harper's Ferry about making slideshows. That was a major change. I learned a lot. I didn't know anything about it before. I became wildly enthusiastic about making slideshows. They were very well-received. Then I did an independent study for AASLH on—I forget what it was called. It was basically a course in how to manage a historical photo collection. I used the experience that I had in Still Pictures and I also—I'm sure that I was given some time to work on that. That, too, was well received. I was asked to turn it into a book, which I did not do, which was kind of a mistake, but so it goes. I would say that flexibility at the Archives to allow people to get some additional training was very important to me. I said the downside, I don't think I'd particularly want to talk about except to say that it was always frustrating to be so invested in the records and in the archival program and to have the management deemphasize that and the role of the archivist in helping researchers in favor of some other priority. It always seemed to me that the management didn't appreciate the importance of having an experienced staff who knew the records and could work with researchers. Furthermore, I have talked to numerous people who did or have done research at the Archives and every last one of them has said how valuable it was to have an archivist who knew the records, work with them, and lead them to specific series or boxes. I rest my case." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Understood. Well, thank you for sharing that. One last thing. It's impossible to capture—I did the math. From 1968 until you retired in 2006, that would have been 38 years with NARA. Is there anything else you would like to add? Is there something I didn't ask you about or any anecdotes or words of wisdom that you want to share?" }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "Well, yeah. One is that when I came there in 1968 the preservation lab was staffed by people who were not trained in conservation largely because there weren't any programs. They were very competent but not like it is now. During the course of my 38 years there I think that was the single most important change in the overall program that people who were trained—conservators, photo conservators, paper conservators— were hired and a great deal of work was done on some very important records that were languishing in the stacks because nobody had the expertise. The lab was staffed both with what I call bench people as well as managers and the Regional Archives were brought in, asked about records that they thought needed work and those records were brought to D.C. and worked on. That was a huge, huge plus in the time I was there. Another issue I think is that I was always distressed that the Office of Public Programs was dissolved and its functions separated into I don't know what. It does seem to me that the Office of Public Programs was, like, marketing is in the business world and that you need to market because a lot of people just don't know what an archive is or they have a misconception of what it is and that's what Public Programs does. What I'm most proud of is that I was an educator. I mean I was an archivist but I was an educator and I educated people about what an archive is, how to use it, what interesting records there are, why it's important to have an archive and I think that—I always say that we did a lot of people some good and nobody any harm. And the only anecdote—can I give you two?" }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Absolutely." }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "The first one was when I was in the Office of Public Programs, I was asked to do an audiotape of excerpts of audio recordings from World War II. It was a fun, fun project. I listened to tons and tons of reports of battles and those jingles about war bonds and all kinds of stuff. The word got out that the tape was available, but it wasn't. Somebody—somehow or another got my name—some gentleman in Annapolis. I said, you know, it just isn't ready yet, but let me have your name and address and when it's ready I'll send you a copy. It was a while. It was probably six months till it was ready. I kept that note. I sent it to him and I think the guy was astounded that some Federal bureaucrat remembered. I sent it to him gratis. I said, you know, it's comped. This guy sent me a dozen roses to the office. [Laughter] And everybody was looking like, oh, where did those come from and I was too. And I opened the card and it was from this guy who said I appreciate your kindness or your attention to details or something like that. It just drove home that people really do appreciate that somebody, particularly a Federal employee, pays attention to them. I thought it was terrific. A little over the top. The other thing that I thought was very funny was the anniversary—the 50th anniversary of the National Archives. I did a slideshow for that. It ran continuously, oh boy, it tried to run continuously in the—one of the alcoves in the Exhibit hall. The people who designed the exhibit designed a projection booth that was about 20 feet off the ground because then, you know, it didn't interfere and you project from high and people could sit in front and see it. The problem of course was that when there was maintenance, you had to get a ladder out, open up the trap door, climb up the ladder, and work on the projectors or whatever wasn't working. It was a busy—probably a holiday weekend when I got a call that it wasn't working. I went down, opened the trap door, climbed up on the ladder. It was summer and I had shorts on and I hear a visitor say the—that's what legs looked like 50 years ago. [Laughter] I thought it was terrific. Other than that I'm proud to have worked there. Like a marriage of 38 years, it had its highs and its lows but on balance it was a wonderful opportunity to provide service to the public. When people ask me, you know, what did you do? I say, well, I had some really important records. For example, I had the Nixon resignation in my hands. I had the George Washington annotated copy of the Constitution. I had the Emancipation Proclamation (EP). I had the instrument of surrender for World War II. They're looking at me, like, wow. It makes me smile and it makes me realize that it was a privilege and a wonderful opportunity to work with those records." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "To me it strikes that argument—I mean it just reinforces what we were saying earlier. You had things like the EP in your hands, but then you also got to witness the cleaning staff appreciate and react to records that don't even register on that level of historic significance." }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "Just exactly. Yeah. So a very neat experience. I never looked back. I left on a Friday. I woke up on Monday morning thinking, oh, this is great. I don't have to go to work. But I certainly don't regret the experience." }, { "speaker": "MS. JOHNSON", "text": "Well, I am deeply appreciative and thank you for taking time to do this oral history interview. I think it's great to add to the collection that NARA is trying to gather. I appreciate your time today." }, { "speaker": "MS. MALAN", "text": "My pleasure. #### NAT ##### I ONAL ### ARCH l VE ational rchivc 11 ist ry m ## e 700 Pe nn s I uni I A ' . W" }, { "speaker": "Tel ", "text": "(20_) 7- 24" }, { "speaker": "Em ai l", "text": ":1rchh ~:;,historinn,{l nam.gov **DEE** **D** **OF** **GI** **FT** **TO** **THE P BU** **DO** **MA** **I** I. t-\\a11 c. ✓ # t\\ _\\f\\Y\\ ,_ do hereby give to th ~atio nal Arc hi ves Hi story Office tJ 1e recordings and tmn cfi pt s ofmy interview co ndu cted on C- ##### f;J:,, 1 ###### 0 2-.07-0 _I_ _J_ ###### I autJiorize Ulc ationaJ Arc hi ves Hi story O ffice to use the record in gs a nd transcripts in such a manner as may best serve tJ 1e hi stori ca l o bj ec ti ves of th eir oral hi story program. 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[ { "speaker": "MR. BRIAN KNOWLES", "text": "I am Brian Knowles. I am acting as an oral historian for the National Archives and Records Administration History Office. Today’s date is 11 April 2014. I am conducting an Oral History Interview with Mr. Edward J. McCarter, Chief of the Still Picture Branch, Special Media Archives Division at Archives II, College Park, Maryland. Good morning, sir. Would you please provide a brief overview of your career timeframe at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. EDWARD J. MCCARTER", "text": "Sure. I began in 1975, I think it was. I think my career date is stated at ‘76 but I’m not sure that’s quite correct. In any event, I started in ‘75 as a student temp. I was in graduate school at the University of Maryland working on my Ph.D. and, and I saw this job posted over on the history board about working at the Archives. And then, and I said, oh, that sounds like an interesting job. So, I decided to go ahead and apply. And somehow, I can’t even remember about, sort of Byzantine process of getting into the Federal Government as an outsider. Somehow I winded my way through the process and ended up working at the old General Archives Division out in Suitland, Maryland. And that, that’s sort of the beginning of it. And I plan on retiring on May 31 of this year, 2014." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Excellent. How did your education influence your decision to work at the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Didn’t really. As I was saying before you turned on the recording, a lot of people who are my age who came to the Archives in the early seventies, mid-to-early seventies, probably backed into it. They were all basically history graduates, had little or no knowledge of what the National Archives did or was. And they were graduating, looking for a position, and then they found a position at the Archives. And, obviously it relates to history. So it’s sort of a decent fit in terms of your graduate work or your undergraduate work and the kind of work you would do here at the Archives. My undergraduate degree was actually in American Studies at Maryland, with my major concentration was actually film, not photography. So, it’s an interesting story how I ended up in the photo unit rather than the film unit. I guess you could say there is a relationship between the two. You know, you love history. I’ve always loved it from the time I was in grammar school. I used to read all these books on historical topics and subjects. And it continued through high school and college and graduate school." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. So, it was just school you were doing before you came to the National Archives or did you have other work experience?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "No. Right before I came, I started graduate school, after I graduated from college in ‘67, ‘66, ‘67, I think. I taught for two years in an elementary school, seventh and eighth grade. And because I had a minor in theology, I also prepared the second graders for their first communion. I had more theology than the nuns on the staff at the school. So that was a very interesting experience. But teaching and seventh and eighth, I taught history. And after two years of teaching I realized I really wanted more of a challenge in terms of working with students. I wanted kids who were more interested in what I was interested in. I always felt like teaching in elementary school was half acting and half teaching. You know, because you need to figure out ways to keep the kids interested, but yet at the same time provide information about whatever topic you’re teaching. So you sort of kind of juggle those two roles when you’re teaching in, at an elementary school level. So I decided to go back to graduate school and applied to a whole bunch of places. And I decided to go to Maryland because I was interested in a program of American Studies. And at that time, the University of Maryland, every faculty member on the staff had a degree in American Studies which is far different from all the other places I applied to. Most of the places, it was a kind of cooperative program where somebody from the history department and the English department and film or whatever, would come together and sort of cobble together a program on American Studies. But everybody at Maryland had a degree in it. So I thought well, that makes sense, you know. Go someplace where the people who’ve had their graduate work in the same field I was interested in. So, after that two years of teaching, then I went to graduate school. And from there, probably about two years into it, that’s when I hit on the job at the Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Alright. So did you finish the Master’s degree before—" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "I finished the Master’s degree. I was in a straight-through program so I didn’t have to do a Master’s thesis. But I didn’t actually finish my Ph.D. I got to the point where I had a dissertation topic and I had an advisor. And, and then a position opened up, a more permanent position opened up at the Archives, other than the student temporary position that I was in. And I talked it over with my advisor. And probably the best advice I’ve ever gotten from an advisor was you’re stupid if you don’t take the job. So, I took it. I never actually went back and finished the dissertation. I had, you know, I was getting kind of old at that point. So it was time to actually start working for a living." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "So in that temporary student trainee position, what were your typical duties, responsibilities?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "It was pretty wide ranging. At first accessions would come in and you’d just throw the new accessions up on the shelves. You know, this is again, at the General Archives Division. Huge stacks out in Suitland, as you’re probably familiar with. We would climb all the way up to the top and move things up onto the shelves. So we did that for a while and then a few months into it, and I clearly remember this, the Division Director, at the time was Dan Goggin, at the General Archives Division. And he called me into his office and he said, you know I was looking over your resume. He said, I can see you’ve got a Master’s degree here. He said, maybe we can find something more fitting for you to do. So he put me into the reference section. And I responded to a lot of reference letters from the general public. Mostly I was working with the Bureau of Land Management Records and the Patent Records at the time. Then I would work also in the research room. Sometimes I’d help researchers with various subjects that they were working on. Again, related pretty much to BLM and Patent Records. And I continued to put boxes on shelves and whatever else they had to do. I didn’t do any project work at all. It was, it was completely reference oriented when I was out at Suitland." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Great. Now at this time did you do any preparation for microfilming or reproduction? Did you do any of that work out there?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "We did a little bit of that, and I got more involved in the microfilming when I moved from the student temp position to the archivist position on the OMGUS Project. There was a lot of, you know, microfilm and microform related work involved in that." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Now did you seek out that project, or was that something assigned to you?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "No. I was there. And, again, Dan Goggin—that project was a cooperative project between the Bundesarchiv in Germany and the National Archives, actually funded by Volkswagen. That’s who paid the salary. I was in an excepted service position. And, you know, they needed somebody to fill the position. I was there. Because it was excepted service, you could pick a person without going through the whole civil service process. You know, posting a job and all that sort of thing. Because it was a temporary position. It was going to be lasting for about three to four years. So, you know, they had liked the work I had done in the reference section. And they thought with my background I could probably fit into this. And I happened to be there. That was the other part of it. I needed a job. So they hired me to work on that project, which is extremely interesting. I don’t know if you know anything about OMGUS records? These are the occupation records in Germany after World War II. And my job was basically to work with historians and archivists who came from various different parts of Germany, to the States, to review all of the records. And there was roughly, I think, 17-18,000 cubic feet total of all the OMGUS records. I might be a little shy on that. They came over in shipments. And there were 17 separate shipments. You know, each shipment dealt with a specific body of records. There were both the headquarters records that were in Berlin, as well as all of what they called the land records, sort of the regional records that were in the various different locations in the U.S. Zone of Occupation in World War II. So they would come over and they would review the records. And I had to go through the records, kind of screen them for privacy, get them ready, all sorts of things that you do to prepare things for researchers. And I’d work with them. I knew something about that post-World War II period. I took a couple of classes in graduate school. And I did a lot of reading on my own about the occupation, which is a very interesting period of time. But that was a whole area of historiography that the Germans had nothing, which is unusual for Germans. Because if nothing else, they document their history. But during that period, the U.S. Army was running the whole shebang. So, and all the records relating to that were here. So they would come over at, in various barrages, sometimes two or three at a time from Munich or Wardenburg Baden or Kassel from Berlin, you know, and they’d work here. And they would identify the records that they thought were of historical value for Germany. We would get the records prepared and take them to the microfilm office at NARA at WNRC. And they would microform, it was all done on microfiche. They would microfiche the records and then we would package it up and ship it to the Bundesarchiv who then would distribute it. You know, multiple copies were made for the Bundesarchiv and the other archival units that in different parts of Germany that were involved on the project. And it was very interesting because I got to meet some very interesting people, some very knowledgeable people. Their archival program is worlds away from our archival program. I went through a nine or ten month training program at the Archives. These guys don’t get into the archival program until they have their Ph.D. in hand. And then it’s about a two or three year process. So it’s a much different thing. So I learned quite a bit about what it was to be an archivist and what you do and what you don’t do, just talking to them. Fortunately, they all spoke English. You know, I didn’t have to learn German because, of course, the records were all in English. So I, they all had a very good command of English. It was very easy to talk to them. They were a very interesting group of people to work with, very nice. I have one funny story. I probably worked with 40 different people. There was one person, Klaus Oldenhage, who was the second in command at the Bundesarchiv, who was sort of shepherding this project from the German end. And he would come over for longer periods of time. And we got to be pretty good friends. But I remember all the people who came over, they were all pretty young. You know, most of them, obviously, post-World War II, born about the same time I was. But I remember one time, it was very funny. One of the guys who came over, and I can’t remember his last name, but his first name of Adolph. And every one of the other Germans who was there, at the time when he came, apologized to me that his name was Adolph. They just couldn’t understand how anyone after World War II would name their child Adolph. So, I thought it was kind of humorous. They were very funny people. You know, they were very formal in certain situations and then very familiar in other situations. We did a lot of things socially. I took them to baseball games which was hilarious. Because trying to explain baseball, even to some of them who had learned baseball during the occupation. Because some of these guys remembered the U.S. troops there during the occupation, the ones who were a little bit older. But taking them to a baseball game and trying to explain the rules of baseball. Say, well, this is the case here, but if this happens, then that’s the case. And, and they would scratch their head because, for them, the game that they knew was soccer and that’s pretty straight forward. Here’s a rule. That’s the rule. There’s no certain exceptions in certain cases. Whereas, baseball, you know, there are different exceptions depending on what’s going on. So, that was a lot of fun, in addition to being a real learning experience for me. And that went on for about two and a half years. And then, actually went over there and spent two weeks traveling around Germany. And went to a conference in, I’m not going to remember, Hamburg. There was a conference on the OMGUS project in Hamburg. And a lot of historians from Germany were there. And all of the guys who worked on the project were there. And so, that was kind of interesting. But the other part was when we would travel someplace, when we would go to a particular location, there was always somebody there that I knew. So we’d get off the train and we didn’t have to worry about where you were going to stay, what you were going see, what you were going to eat, anything like that. It was all laid out. That’s the way they are. You know, boom, boom, boom, boom. They had everything organized. And Klaus traveled with me the whole time I was there, the whole two weeks. So we travelled all over Germany. It was just interesting. The most interesting part was traveling through East Germany and into East Berlin. Because he said, you’ve got to take this trip, just to understand what’s going on. So we took a train, a West German train. And when we hit the border between East Germany and West Germany, everybody gets off. You got to get onto an East German train. So, it’s like going from a first class train into a cattle car. I mean, wooden seats, wooden cars. I mean, it was, I was worried the whole thing was going to fall apart. But anyway, so we get in the train. You know, we’re going through East Germany. And that was very interesting. There was barbed wire all along the thing. I asked Klaus, what’s all this barbed wire for? He said, oh, there’s mines there. So that people won’t try to jump over the barbed wire and get on the train. And so when we hit, just before we go into West Berlin, you stop on a siding and the East German police come on the train. And they’re looking at your passports. And they send the dogs underneath the train because they want to make sure there’s nobody hanging on underneath who’s going to sneak in from East Germany to West Berlin. And then we stayed in West Berlin. And went into East Berlin, saw what it was like there. And the difference, and this is back now, ‘77, ‘78, the difference between these two parts of the city was just unbelievable. I mean West Berlin was like going to New York City. East Berlin looked like the San Francisco earthquake. I mean, there was still a lot of damage left over from the war and we’re talking in the 1970s. Because they didn’t bother to repair things. You know, after the unification things changed. Then East Berlin became part of the whole German country. And I think things, I haven’t been there since then. But that was a very stark reality going into, into East Berlin and seeing what it was like over there as opposed to what, and just watching people walking around carrying submachine guns was sort of an experience. I mean, you don’t normally see that in American cities. At least you didn’t then. I’m not sure about now. But, at that point in time that was, that was, that was pretty, pretty strange." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Did you conduct any archival work in East Berlin or…?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "No. It was, it was just basically went over for the conference and then, then we just kind of travelled around to kind—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "[Interposing] Mm." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "—of see Germany. See a lot of the places that I, you know, were in the records that I had worked with. So it was very interesting. I’m sorry if I’ve wandered off the topic here." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "No. No. This is perfect." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "But it was kind of an interesting thing. And then that, that project was coming to an end so, you know, I was back to Dan Goggin. Said, hey Dan, you got any full-time positions available? And he was able to bring me in for very short period of time as an archives technician. And then almost immediately I got switched into the CIDS program which back then was much more organized and structured and, and useful, a very useful program which unfortunately, I think, that was discontinued a number of years ago. And I think it was a huge mistake. Because what’s happened is, you don’t have, for lack of a better term, classes of new young archivists coming in who learn from the people who are already there. So there’s this huge gap in time frame between people like my generation who came in and the people who follow. And, you know, I think it’s really affected the way we get work done. Because I’m going to walk out the door on May 31st. There’s a lot of stuff that the two of the archivists who worked for me were extremely good. They just don’t know, you know. And that’s, kind of institutional knowledge too. I mean, that’s pretty important. But it, there’s huge gap there and you can’t impart that, you know. Because you’re working day-to-day and you’re trying to get things done. So, anyway, that’s quite an editorial comment about the CIDS program." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Yeah. It’s tough to transfer that knowledge. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Well it, and as I said, you’re losing new blood coming into the building working in a professional capacity, which is what you need. And now it’s being done helter-skelter. You know, oh, well we got one position here. And we got one position there. And blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, and it’s, it’s just, to me, it’s pretty chaotic and I just don’t think it works very well. But anyway, so I was able to get in and I was in the CIDS project for a year when I was out in Suitland at the General Archives Division. I worked in a processing branch so I did a lot of arrangement, description projects, and worked with researchers. Everybody had to do a microfilm project at that point. That was part of the mandatory training. You know, we did rotations to other units, which was, it was very useful. You know, going into the appraisal unit. I actually, one of mine was the Motion Picture Unit, which was what I was pretty interested in. I did one to the Exhibits Office and a couple of other offices. I tried to stay away from Admin Offices. And just go to custodial and program unit offices. So that was very helpful in learning about all the different parts of the Archives. And how they all, all sort of fit together to deal with then entire life cycle of the records. I don’t know whether that same thing is happening today. I’m just, I’m not sure. It’s been a long time since we had an archivist trainee. So, they may very well be still going through rotations. If they’re not, they really should be. Because it’s an extremely valuable experience to see what other people do. And plus, you make a lot of good contacts that become very useful in your work." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Did you have a mentor when you first came in or somebody who you looked up to as a mentor?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Not really. You know, the people who supervised me, and this goes back a way, John Mendelsohn, John was German and a very good archivist. He was sort of the Assistant Projects Chief. And Ed Hill, who was Projects Chief out at Suitland, a really, extremely talented and knowledgeable archivist. For a long time, the only two supervisors that I ever had at the Archives were Ed Hill and Betty Hill. Betty was his wife. When I moved to Still Pictures, she was my supervisor for many years. So, I mean, I kind of looked to them for direction in, you know, in how to do things. And how to handle archival projects if I ran into an issue that I really wasn’t familiar with I could go to them. And then, at the time I was there, when I was a student, there were a lot of new archivists being hired at the time. So people like Bob Coran, Henry Mayer, who now works at the Holocaust Museum, Jack Saunders, John Vernon, all these, Patrice Brown, all these new archivists who came in. There was a period when they just hired a whole bunch of new people. So they were all going through the program and getting trained ahead of me because I was still a student. And then when I got into the General Archives Division, I kind of, you know, gravitated, Greg Bradsher is another one, kind of gravitated toward them, you know, for help. But having a specific mentor, that, that didn’t really happen until I got to Still Pictures. So…" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "So did that trainee position give you a good foundation for a career at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Yeah. I think it did. I mean, as I said, I think the rotations were among the most useful things. You know, learning about archival work. You know, basic things like, how do you identify a series? And, you know, how do you write a series description that makes sense and is useful to a researcher? Ed Hill actually wrote the NARA bulletin on preparation of preliminary inventories, I think it was. And in that, he also discussed series descriptions and how to create series titles. All the kinds of things that are really critically important when you’re writing a series description, so that when a researcher looks at something, particularly now online, they can say, yeah, I need to look at that. You know, there’s enough information there. And sometimes, my experience is it’s in the title. You know, the most important thing, the thing that hooks people and gets them to realize, ah, I need to take a look at that, is how you frame that title. Because sometimes that’s all they ever see. They look at that. And if it doesn’t seem interesting, they go onto the next thing, you know. You know, they delete that and go on to the next hit. So I’ve always felt and when I trained archivists that worked for me, I’ve always felt, particularly with photography, you really need to focus on that title. And, because it’s going to really tell a researcher right off the bat, whether that’s something they want to look at. You know, you don’t want to have titles like photographs relating to the Bureau of Land Management or something innocuous like that that nobody can really know what it’s about. You want to get some subject content if you can in that title. So they, oh, yeah. You know, that’s really going to be interesting. I really need to look at that. And then, of course, in the series descriptions." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Mm-hmm." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "In Stills, we write much, much longer series descriptions, packed with a lot more information because that’s what researchers want. They want to be able to look at a series description and read through it and have it kind of identify the sort of general character of the records. But also some real specific examples of imagery that’s in there that they might be interested in. Things that are, you know, you wouldn’t think are there. You kind of pick them out and throw them in the description and say, you know, these kinds of images are located here. And, you know, research are based on the title or even the organization that created the records, the creating organization, you might not expect those kinds of subjects or topics to be located there. And so you can capture that in the series description. And now we’ve always done that. I mean that’s one of the things that we’ve done in the Special Media Division as whole that is pretty different from how textual works. You know, textual doesn’t work in the same way, very different groups. So, yeah. I’m sorry. I’m kind of rambling." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "No, no, no. It’s perfect." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "But, yeah. I think that was a really good foundation, even though it was only a year, working with Ed and John. You know, I learned a tremendous amount about how to be an archivist, what to do. You know, what’s important, what isn’t important. How to write things." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well with that, the position from ‘77 to ‘80, as an archivist, the Freedom of Information Act was passed. Did that affect you at all or how do you feel about the Freedom of Information Act?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Well, I mean, I think it’s good in a lot of instances. I think it gets abused because a lot of researchers don’t understand that what the act was designed for was records that are restricted from use. Everything we have in Still Pictures is available. Yet we get a hundred FOIAs a year asking for photographs that are already available. So there’s no real need to use the FOIA. So it’s just a matter of education—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "[Interposing] Mm." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "—that between researchers not understanding what the intent of what the law was. And I believe it’s a very good one. As opposed to records that are already open. You know, we don’t have anything that’s restricted. You know, everything we have we make available. And that’s our goal. I mean, that’s what we do, is try to make the records available as much as possible. When we talk to agencies and I just got finished talking to DIA a couple of weeks ago. We’ve got like 1,100 paintings from the early eighties. And some of them are classified. I said you really need to get these things declassified before you transfer them. Because, first of all, the information should no longer be classified. I mean they’re photographs of jets and ships and bases and, okay, you know, maybe, maybe, you know, 25 years ago that was important and needed to be classified, but it doesn’t any more. So we try to get them, as much as possible, if they have any classified records of, to get them declassified so that when we brings things in we can make everything available." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "What’s DIA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Oh, I’m sorry. Defense Intelligent Agency." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Thank you." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "They have a storage location over in Landover, which isn’t too far from here. So…" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "So how did you wind up in Stills?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Stills. Well that’s a winding, I knew from my graduate work at Maryland, I was a teaching assistant for the education, the head of the education office at the American Film Institute. So, through him, I met Bill Murphy who was the head of the Motion Picture Branch at the time. This is in the ‘77, ‘80, period. And, through meeting Bill and him knowing me and the work I did in graduate school, my interest in film. He came to me at one point and said there’s going to be a position available in Motion Pictures. Somebody’s going to be moving to a different unit. So I want you to make sure that you know it’s available and you make application. So, I thought, wow, I’m only here for two or three years and already I’m going to, you know, to pig heaven. This is where I really wanted to be, was in Motion Pictures. So that happened. The fellow moved. And they started the process of filling the position. And that’s when Ronald Reagan came into office. And good old Ron put the skids on a lot of things. And he kind of stopped government positions moving around, cut the budget dramatically." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Mm." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "The fellow who was supposed to go to this other position had to move back to Motion, which means that position was no longer available for me. And on top of it, about a year later and after I got to, to Stills, I was there for about six or eight months, the RIFs came, the Reduction in Force came. And it came hard. Mostly, everyone who had been recently hired, archivists, were all going to be RIFed. They were going to lose their jobs." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Mm." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "That’s the way it worked. Fortunately, I had a connection with somebody at the Air Force in the Photography Unit and I could get over and move into that position. But I would be going from like a GS-11 to a GS-5. So that agony went on for a number of months. You know, we were all prepared for what it was going to be like to get RIFed. We were given help in writing resumes, and things to find new positions in agencies that still had money. And that went on, I think, that was like four or five months. It was really an agonizing situation ‘cause I was just starting into the career. And I said, oh my God, this is the greatest place in the world after I realized what it was all about, you know. Like I said, when I came in as a student, I had no clue what the Archives was. But the longer I was here, the more I realized this is the neatest place in the world to work if you like history. I mean it’s just unbelievable. So, you know, I thought, oh my gosh. After all this, I’m going to be out on the street in like two or three months. So that whole agony went on. I don’t mean to prolong it, but I think this is an important thing to know. There were a lot of people who were caught up in that. You know, a lot of good people, Cindy Fox, for example, who was head of Reference, downtown, she got RIFed. She eventually came back." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Mm." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "What, what, what ended up happening is, this is the honest to God truth, the Friday before I was going to be terminated, I get a notice from OPM that somehow I was not going to be terminated. Because of all the experience I had in my accepted service position and my student temporary position and the little bit of time I had on as a full-time regular federal employee, it pushed me to the very top of the list of all the people who were going to be RIFed. And only a couple of those people got saved." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "I happened to be one of them. So that weekend was just amazing. I thought, I just can’t believe this, you know. I’d been, for months, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to be doing. And then all of a sudden, like that, you’re told, oh, we’re switching gears. So anyways, that was great. So, then I continued on my career in Stills. And, you know, I worked at various positions there, just a basic archivist when I started there. And I started to develop a knowledge of photography. I still had interest in Motion Pictures. And I probably, early on, I would have jumped if I had the opportunity. But the more I worked in the Stills unit, and I took courses at the Corcoran in art history. I went to RIT for that, for that training class where I met Connie McCabe. First time I met Connie and Jim Reilly, Debbie Hess Norris. I started to really develop a real interest in this stuff. So I started to do a lot of heavy duty reading on photography. And as I said, I took, I two classes in the Corcoran, on two different, two classes on history of photography up through modern photography, very interesting, very useful." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "And just, just to get a clear—so by the 11th hour saving of your employment, they placed you within Stills?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "No. I had gotten to Stills at that point." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "There had been a position in Stills that I was able to get to." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "I guess I’m a little murky here on, on the sequence. But I remember specifically, that I was at Stills when the RIF came in. Bill Leary, who for many years was an archivist in Still Pictures, and if you go back through the records you’ll see his name scattered all over the place. And he went to various other positions at NARA and then went on, the last time I knew anything about Bill, he was working in the White House someplace, in records management. Anyway, he moved from the position he was in. And it opened up a position in Stills. And I was able to get into that position. By that time I had developed a relationship with some of the people who were at Stills and they knew of my work. And, yeah, you still had to go through the competition, you know. Names had to be forwarded, your resume to be forwarded, they interviewed you, and all that sort of stuff. And then I was fortunate to get selected. But I had a lot of background. So it helped quite a bit. You know, when I was applying, more background probably than anybody else did, who was applying for it. So at that point, shortly after that was when that all, the whole RIF thing came in. Because I started in Still Pictures in August of 1980. I remember that date, that month clearly, because that was the month I bought my first car, and I met my future wife, all in the same month. I think she decided to marry me because I had a new car. And a full-time position. Anyway, so Reagan came in ‘81. And then it was later in that year. So, probably we’re talking about ‘82 when I, all the stuff was behind me and then I could kind of focus on my work. And, and I started to develop a knowledge and a real interest in photography. And I did develop a little knowledge of photographic processes. Sara knows all about that. The classes I took at RIT, and I took several of these classes where you would spend, particularly at RIT, you spent a lot of time looking at images, trying to identify what they were. Is this an albumen print? Is it a salt paper print? Is it a platinum print? You know, is it a carbon print? Is it a modern gelatin print? You know, is it developing out as opposed to printing out, that sort of thing. And, and then I continued to work on that on my own after I came back. Just looking at everything in the holdings, trying to figure out, what is this? What is this? I became obsessed with, for about two years, I think. I was obsessed with trying to figure out everything I saw. I said- What is it? What is it, you know? Same thing with printing processes. But they were a little more difficult to identify. So I began to develop a knowledge of that and preservation. So I kind of got involved in the preservation of photography. And one of the things I did early on, was I went through the whole damn stack. And I looked at every series we had. And noted some of the issues that needed to be dealt with, preservation problems, you know. Were the prints curling? Were they stuck together? Were there too many in the box? Did the whole box need to be re-boxed, rehoused, new folders? Were the negatives acetate and deteriorating? Were they nitrate? You know, were they polyester? What were there? You know, kind of looking at each one. And kind of setting up a plan of what we would do about trying to attack these different problems. And then coupled with that, we were very fortunate at the time, there was this confluence of things that came together of a real interest at NARA in preservation, which might sound funny, but, you know, up to that time, the conservation lab was pretty skimpy. There was nobody on staff who was a photographic conservator. We had nobody to go to, if we any real issues or concerns. There were some chemists on the staff. Mr. Shahani, who eventually went over to the Library of Congress, he was there for a number of years. But I don’t remember, there were no contacts to really get help in terms of real problems with the holdings. But at the time then, it was kind of interesting, because around that time, Jim Moore, who had been my immediate, not my immediate, but my ultimate boss when I came to Stills, he was the head of what at that time was called the Audio Visual Archives Division. Jim Moore and his deputy was, Dick Meyer. Dick recently passed away about six or eight months ago. And, and then, and then Jim went from that position to, at the time was called NN, which was, I don’t even know how to describe it. Were you here when Michael Kurtz was here?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "No. It was basically, I guess the equivalent might be, Ann Cummings, our DDC." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Mm." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "You know, in charge of all the Washington area custodial units, Jim Moore. Well Jim had a real interest coming from the AV world in preservation, in film preservation, and also in other non- textual record preservation. So there, as I said, there was this kind of confluence of things coming together that all of a sudden they became really interested in, hey, we need to preserve this stuff. Because we’ve got some really interesting things and really valuable things that are not in the greatest condition. And we need to do something about it. So there was this big push. And, at the time, we didn’t have a photo conservator. And I knew Jim from when I was in the Audio Visual Archives Division. And he asked me at one point, do you know anybody? We’re looking for somebody to do some conservation work here. One of the first people I identified was Kitty Nicholson. Because I knew her from her work at the Library of Congress and Connie McCabe. I knew her from her work at RIT with Jim Reilly, with the Image Permanence Institute. And Jim and Connie wrote a book together on 19th Century photography, _The Care and Identification of_ _19th Century Photography_ , which was really instrumental and extremely helpful for custodial types. I mean, Sara knows this stuff backward and forward. But for those custodial types it was extremely useful book for helping us to identify the different kinds of photos we had in our holdings. So we were very lucky to, to, Kitty I think did come on board about that time. And not long after that, Connie came on board. And one of the first things we did was we wrote a contract to get an outside conservator. Because it always seemed like, if we generated this thing internally, upper management would say, “oh, yeah, okay.” But if you had somebody from the outside who had a rep and they generated it, then, oh, all of a sudden everybody sits up and they begin to allocate money to do things. So we wrote this contract. We wrote two contracts. One was for Jim Reilly to come in and look at our negatives, because Jim was very interested in preservation of original negatives at the time. And then the second contract for Debbie Hess Norris, she teaches at Winterthur, doesn’t she? You know, she’s the head of the photography program at Winterthur." }, { "speaker": "FEMALE VOICE", "text": "She’s actually, the Head of Conservation right now, I think, from the student’s perspective." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Mm-hmm. And, also was a private conservator. She worked on the side. And, yeah, one of the most well-known, as far as I knew at the time, people who knew about photography and preservation. So we were able to get Debbie to come in and spend a week with us. And we just walked around the stack and she looked at stuff. And then she wrote a report telling us what we needed to address. And interestingly enough, it was pretty much what we had done. But, with that report, we were able to start doing things. And one of the biggest things we did and accomplished at that point was to focus on the Mathew Brady original negatives, the Western Survey Negatives, probably the most valuable things we have in this building. And some of the corresponding albumen prints from the period. So we were able to get a project to, because when I first came here, believe this or not, they were still printing off the original plates. They went down to the lab. I almost freaked when I heard that. We had copy negatives. But, you know, they’re not that good. So, the researchers are looking for good quality images. So we were able to cobble together enough money, because preservation again, all of a sudden became an important thing, to really address what to do about the Brady negatives. They were sitting up in the 19th tier of Archives I, you know, near the top of the building. They were all in wooden cases. And I can show you an example of the wooden cases. We have one in the stack that when we moved from Archives I to Archives II, we used those somewhat, in moving things from Archives I to Archives II. Because the design was great. They were little boxes with little slats because the plates should be stored horizontally, not flat. Unfortunately, they were completely made of wood, which was probably among the worst things I guess they could have been in. The room itself had literally no temperature control or humidity control at all. And, like I said, it was pretty much top of the building. And it was impossible to work, because the ceilings, I had to bend over when I walked in there because the ceilings were so low and these damned pipes were all over the place. It was just crazy. So we were able to start addressing this problem. What to do with the most valuable things that we have? And, you know, Connie, through her knowledge, we were able to put together a, a duplication contract. And were able to get a guy named Doug Munson, who was head of the Chicago Albumen Works, which is located in Housatonic, Massachusetts. I think at one time, Doug was in Chicago. But he was at Chicago for a period of time and then moved. So Doug had developed this process of creating what they call, and you, Sara can address this better than I can. To make a duplicate negative from the original Brady plate, he would create an inner positive and what he called the shadow mask. Because the density range of those negatives was so long that modern film, if you just, you know, try to do a direct contact print, contact negative, you couldn’t get the full range of the image." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Mm." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "So he created and I think it was based on an old idea. It wasn’t something that was, you know, he read through the literature and found that. You know, there were some hints about some of these things. And so he comes up with this idea. And so he would make the inner positive and the shadow mask. Those were made direct contact with the original negative. And then from that he would create a duplicate negative from that sandwich. And that duplicate negative then, we could use for printing. And it would provide pretty much the highest quality you’re going to get unless you’re printing off the original plate, which of course we wanted to stop doing. Because we didn’t want them to break, particularly when they would contact print them. That would drive me crazy. So, once we had those original negatives then, not only did we have a negative to print on modern paper but if somebody did want a print made on albumen paper and Doug made albumen prints, he could take the shadow mask and create another negative that was designed to print on albumen paper. So this thing was like really cool. So once we got all those negatives printed and that was all, there was about 6,000 Brady plates. And another, I don’t know, 2,600 Western Survey negatives, from the Four Great Western Surveys of the American West from about the late 1860s through the late 1870s. You got photographers like Jackson and O’Sullivan and Dell and the guy I always forget, the Powell survey. I don’t know why I always forget his name, but I always do. Anyway, some of the great photographers from the 19th Century. And, so, and those plates, so we got all those things copied and now we had something we could really provide to researchers that was just great. I mean, they loved it. So what’s the next step? We got to do something about the negatives. We can’t just leave them sit in these wooden boxes. So, am I rambling too much?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "No. Perfect. Keeping going." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "So we sat down and we looked the wooden cabinets and we said it’s a great design. It just sucks in terms of the physical materials that were used to make it. So we started drawing designs of what we wanted to do. And we got in touch with Interior Steel, which if you’ve ever played a sport or had gym class, they make every damn locker in the United States, I’m pretty sure. Because their name is on it, Interior Steel. Well it was very funny because at the time Interior Steel was starting to move into a different line of work. And they started thinking about making cabinets for other reasons. And so we contacted them and we got one of their reps down. And we told them what we wanted and they went back scratching their heads. Connie had all sorts of information about the gasketing and the paint and this and that, you know, that had to be done for preservation purposes. But also if we had a disastrous flood, to protect the plates because the cases would be pretty much tight, solid. And they scratched their heads and they put together something. And they made a demo and they sent the design and yeah, looks pretty good. You know, so just make sure they are to spec. So, they worked on that for some period of time and then they sent all the cabinets to us. And unfortunately there was a lot of off gassing. There was a lot of smell. First, they were in a warehouse, a GSA warehouse, that’s where they went originally. Connie walked in there, [sniff] she went like that and she said “Uh-oh. We got a problem.” So she contacted the people and they came back. They took all the cases back to Ohio, I think that’s where Interior Steel was. And they had to re-bake them. And that solved the problem. And then we had these wonderful cases which we have in our stack now, which you can go down and look at. And one of the cool things about it is we put windows in it. And why did we put windows in it? So we didn’t have to pull the negatives out when people wanted to look at them. We could just point at them say, that’s a Brady negative. You know, because we have all kinds of people contacting us and saying, gee, can we see the original negatives? Why, of course, now it’s very hard to get in the stack but when we were downtown it was a little different. So, even upper management would say—“oh, can we see those, you know?” And they’d bring their friends along. Plus there were a lot of important visitors that I dealt with—a lot of statusy people. Anyway, that’s why Connie put the windows in because normally you wouldn’t put windows in a cabinet like this. The other cases we have that we bought subsequent to it for storage of photographic materials have no windows at all. They’re just solid cases to protect the records. And they’re made of top quality material so there’s no interaction with the photography. But that’s why we put the windows in, so that we could just point to it. We didn’t have to open the door and pull one out. Because we live in deathly fear of dropping one when you’re handling them. Because they’re just irreplaceable. There are occasions where—I remember when the Archivist first, the new Archivist and practically every Archivist that I’ve dealt with. When he first came on board—he has a real interest in photography. And he was interested in Timothy O’Sullivan so I showed him some original prints that we have of O’Sullivan, some of the original negatives. And, I pulled out a Brady plate of Lincoln. Because that’s just, I mean that’s just, I mean, my God, it’s just unbelievable, you know. And you put it on a light table and you’re looking at Lincoln. And you feel like if I touch that it’s like touching a great man. I mean it’s just unbelievable to have these things. So anyway, we ended up being able to preserve those, those plates. And I think we did a pretty good job. And, you know, we rehoused every single plate too. That was the other thing Connie did. She wrote a contract for four flap enclosures so there was no glue anywhere. Went through every single plate, identified the plate, we made a grid of what it was, what the color is. Some of the plates in those periods, the collodion plates, are darker. Some of them are more gray and I’m not exactly sure why; I think it’s just in the processing that was used." }, { "speaker": "FEMALE VOICE", "text": "[Interposing] - - processing." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Yeah. That would change the color. So she was identifying the colors. If there were broken plates, they created these marvelous things, and Sara’s done this too, called sink mats. So we’d have a plate with maybe five or six pieces. They would create a matte that was sunk. It would have edges that were built up. And they’d put the plate in there. And then they’d cut out all these little pieces of archival board and place them in there so that the stuff wouldn’t jiggle around. And it was all stored flat. And we’ve got all of the broken plates, and there were a lot of broken plates, unfortunately. There were a lot of broken plates before they came to the Archives because they were used heavily by the War Department. They were printed a number of different times. And a lot of things get broken. So we, we were able to preserve those. The interesting thing is, Doug had to take everything out of the out of the sink matte, and put it on his printing table. And put it back together so he could make an image out of it. I mean the ones that were broken really badly, there wasn’t much you could do. Sometimes you’d only have two-thirds of a plate, you know, he was able to put back together. Because the rest of it, there were so many little pieces, it would be a nightmare to try to do them. But that was really an important thing. I think of all the things that I’ve been involved in at the Archives, to me that was the absolute most important thing was to do something about those plates. And without Connie and Jim Moore and support from the upper manager to get the money. One more thing—they also created a special room in Archives I. It was in 3E4. And it had very good environmental controls, temperature, and relative humidity. It was, I think, the only room in the whole building where they could control temperature and relative humidity. And, the conservation folks set all the parameters and then they got somebody in to build the air conditioning and heating or whatever equipment that would manage the room was actually sitting in, out in one of the stack areas just outside of the room itself. Because they sealed this part of the room off. And all of the plates were moved from that cruddy old room up there down to 3E4, in the cabinets, in the great environmental conditions. And there were a lot of other records, some of the treasures, that the Archives had were moved into that room because it had those tight controls. And then once we moved to Archives II, the lab again, working with the conservators that were on staff, they said, this is what the shelving has to be like. This is what the temperature and relative humidity has to be like. So those conditions that they developed when we moved from Archives I, it was like coming to heaven, you know. Everything was the way it was supposed to be. But that really was the coolest thing I was ever involved in. It was a lot of fun. It was very interesting. I learned a tremendous amount about the plates. Connie has gone on to become pretty well-known in terms of collodion wet plate photography. And she’s a conservator at the National Gallery of Art now. She left. So that, you know, that’s, that’s kind of where I was. And then, because of that, because of the knowledge I had developed, Betty, the old branch chief who was Joe Doan Thomas. Joe was here for many, many years. We often joked that they built the building around him. Joe was a great old guy and he knew a lot of stuff. And he retired. And then my immediate supervisor who was the Chief of Projects, she went over, she became the Branch Chief. And then I kind of took over the role of the project head. We had a Project Chief and a Reference Chief at the time. And Barbara Burger who retired, mm, six, seven years ago was the Reference Chief for many years. And, and so I worked in that capacity at Stills, pretty long, probably ‘82 or ‘84, like that, through the time of moving. Oh, I got a great story about moving too. When we moved to Archives II. This is hilarious." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Sure. Go ahead. Go ahead." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "We had to design the shelving, how it had to be. Because we didn’t, everything wasn’t standard for us. You know, we have a lot of different sized boxes. So we didn’t want to waste a lot of room. So in some compartments we had 10 or 12 shelves. Because we had four by five shoe boxes like that so we wanted to maximize the space. Another series we had over-sized legal boxes so we needed enough space. So we had to kind of look at the stack, look at it series by series and where it was going to go. And what I did, was I’d draw these, I drew these goofy designs by hand. And what was going to go there, you know. In row one, compartments one through ten or one through three had to be ten shelves each. Because we got three compartments of shoe boxes we want to put in there. Well we did that for the whole stupid stack, this whole thing by hand. I mean today you would probably, there must be some computer program that does that sort of stuff. But, anyway, you know, it’s, it’s like this high, the stack of paper. It took me about nine months to a year to finish it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "You know, I wasn’t working on it all the time because there was obviously other stuff going on. And we were trying to prepare the stuff to move. That was a massive role. Because the rule was nothing moved that was not in a container. So, and we had an awful lot of things that weren’t in roller drawers or in folders but sitting on a shelf. But, the folders were flip floppy, you know, who knows what would happen. So working with the conservation lab and I think, I’m trying to remember who, Sarah was down there, Sarah Wagner. And I, was Sarah involved? I guess Sarah was pretty much involved in the move. Connie and Sarah, I don’t know. Anyway—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "[Interposing] Did you have to wait for the building to be fully completed before you started moving or as the various sections of the building were completed you were able to start—" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "[Interposing] Well, I think the building was pretty much done. I mean it was still a little rough. But we were among the first units to move out there, the special media." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Mm-hmm." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "I think cartographic may have actually been one of the first or second. And, well, we had, there’s all sorts of messes about the move. But anyway, back to this little design that I created. You know, I thought it was a masterpiece. Anyway, so, I had it sitting on my desk. And I needed to do something. So I took it off and I set it on top of my garbage can. And, I went on working and then, you know, you are tugged away doing 20 different things. So, somebody had me and dragged me away. Come back to my desk. It’s gone. Where is it? Oh my God. It’s missing. You know, this was our plan for moving. It was also a plan of what was going at what point. Because we were trying to bring things together in the old building, we had part of series over here and the other part of it over there. So we wanted to make sure they all came together so everything was nice and neat. Plus, because we knew we had the moveable shelving and how active our records were, we didn’t want to put things in necessarily record group order. Because some record groups that were close together in number like 111 and 127, the Marine Corps and the Signal Corps, people are in and out of those things all the time. So we were trying to figure out a way to put the major groups at the beginning of each of the rows in the building here, the black, I forget what they call them. They have a term for them. So we wanted to put the Signal Corps in this one. We wanted to put the Navy over here. And then we wanted put USI over here. And then the Air Force over here because they were among the most active. And we didn’t want them all in the same range, that’s what they are. We didn’t want them all in the same range because then it makes it very difficult for people to go in and pull things as well as doing reference letters or whatever. So that was part of this whole thing that I had written. Anyway, so I’m looking in the garbage can saying, what the hell happened to this? I sat there for a few minutes and I think, oh my God. You know, the garbage person came by. It was sitting there, picked it up, and took it down in the trash. So, I immediately ran down to the loading dock at Archives I. And there’s this big huge bin of junk, trash that everything was fed into. But unfortunately the one I was looking at was empty. So I asked the guys on the loading dock. Say, did somebody come and just pick this thing up? Oh, yeah, came in about a half an hour ago and they took it off to the Navy, down in Southwest. I said “Where the hell in Southwest? Tell me.” So they gave the address of the place where it all went to. I grabbed a couple of people, got in my car, and we drove down to Southwest to this garbage pit basically trying to find this thing. We got in and we talked to some people and we said, we’re from the Archives and I think one of our big bins was just delivered by one of your semis. And, you know, went in the trash. And the guy said, oh, he said, “Gee whiz, it’s, it’s probably over here.” And he took us over to this bin. And there’s this massive bin full of garbage. And, believe it or not, when we were kind of far away. When we got up close, I said, there it is. It was sitting, it must have been the last damn thing that was thrown out. Because it was bound together and I had this cover on it that made it kind of distinctive. It was sitting right there. So I just walked up and I took it, got back in the car, and went back to the building. Otherwise, a year’s worth of work was just down the tubes, and we’d have to start all over again. And the move was coming, like a freight train. So that was kind of a funny story. I can’t even imagine what would have happened if I wouldn’t have got the thing back. Because it really was very useful in terms of getting the records moved in the right sequence. So we got out to Archives II and everything worked out fine. The move actually went very well. We had to kind of control the contractors, because they wanted to just pull things off of the shelf and get it out here. That’s all they were interested in. We were interested in making sure we didn’t have a God damned mess when we actually got out here and things weren’t just totally chaotic. So we had to control them pretty closely. And we, we talked back and forth from somebody supervising downtown. And I was out here making sure, okay, it’s time for 111-SC to come. Okay, it’s time for 19-NN to come or whatever. So that worked really well and it went very quickly. All of the Brady plates and all the survey plates made it out here and not any damage to any of the plates, because we went through every damn one of them to make sure. They actually hired a special mover, an art mover to do the plates. And they created specific kinds of cases with all sorts of padding in it to make sure that the plates were protected. The little cases they were on had pneumatic wheels instead of the hard wheels because you wanted the pneumatic wheels to reduce any of the shock. The trucks were specially designed so that they would eliminate hitting a rut and five plates gone forever. So it was amazing that everything got out here. It really was. I remember we started on March 17, it was St. Patrick’s Day in 1994. And within about two and a half to three months, I think we got everything out and here. And, it was just unbelievable. I was thinking- God, there’s going to be all kinds of a mess and damage. And it really wasn’t. We worked pretty hard in making sure that things were moved properly, so that we could keep integrity of the records together. And we had a cold vault. That was the really great thing. Now we had something to put our color materials, our camera original color materials in. So we had stored everything in a cold vault. That was designed again, by the conservation folks. And, so we moved all of camera originals over there. And then shortly after that, all of the flap about acetate and what to do with acetate. And, oh my God, acetate has to go in cold storage. Well we hadn’t really designed it to go there. We had about 2 1/2 million negatives that were acetate based. So that was the decision and it had to go down there. So we moved all our black and white acetate negatives that we had in the regular stack down into the cold vault so they’re going to be preserved. And we did another contract to kind of look at them and to see which of the groups of acetate negatives were deteriorating, even though they were in cold storage. Again, we had IPI, the Image Permanence Institute, Jim Reilly’s group, came out. And they did a survey through our cold vault using these things they called their little AD strips that give you information about what’s the acetate content in this group of negatives. So they went through the entire negative collection and they kind of identified for us that, even though these are in cold storage, we still think they need to be duplicated for preservation reasons. Because they have gone fairly long and away in terms of deterioration. So that’s been our Bible in terms of what we’re trying to duplicate. And for years we were duplicating on 70 millimeter film, roll film. And then the lab stopped doing analog duplication and we had to move to digitization. So that’s been a bit of a change for us. I guess I’m not really following your schedule." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Don’t, this, this is all good. It’s all good." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "I’ll take a break here." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Going back to the ‘80, ‘85 time range, what other agencies or donors did you work with at that time?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Probably the biggest group, the organization that we worked with the most, turned out to be DOD. In ‘82 DOD decided to centralize its photography. And, well, their AV materials too, motion picture, sound, and video things. The idea was they wanted to get better control over all of the imagery that was created within the Defense Department. So it could be used by other components of DOD. And so, at that point, the Marine Corps had its photography in Quantico, the Army in the Pentagon, the Navy at the Navy Yard, the Air Force over on Fern Street in Alexandria. The stuff was all over the place. So they brought it all together in one place. Still kept it separately by the organizations, the Marine Corps records. And not long after they brought it together, we started discussions about the transfer of the World War II era material. Because we, at that point when we moved out here, all we had was World War I, while we were still downtown, all the we had was basically the World War I photography from the Army. We had bits and pieces of Marine Corps. We did have a good portion of Navy photography. And we had zippo for the Air Force, nothing. So we, once they brought it all together then it made it much easier for us to identify what was permanent and what needed to be moved. And at the time, DOD seemed very interested in cooperating with NARA in terms of transferring photography. So one of the things we did is we went over to the old Navy Yard, which is on Bolling Air Force Base down on Anacostia. You can see it when you’re going down 295." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Mm-hmm." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "They created this organization called the Defense Audio Visual Agency where everything was centralized from these main groups. Now, keep in mind, there’s a boat load of photography that’s in a lot of other components throughout the Navy, ship yards, bases, ships at sea. So, the theory was, all of the organizations, components of DOD were supposed to transfer everything to this centralized repository. Some of them did, some of them didn’t. But by and large they had the right idea about what they needed to do. Particularly, an agency like DOD that is so huge and sprawling. NASA’s another one. It’s sometimes almost impossible to be able to identify the permanent records they have. So by bringing, centralizing it like that, that was a huge help. So all of the World War II Marine Corps photography, Army, Navy, Air Force, in that time period of ‘82 through ‘85, it’s probably ‘83 or ‘84, we brought in all of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps photography that related to the World War II period and Korea. I don’t even know how many we’re talking about, at least, close to a million and a half images. But the thing is we had to go there and we had to do it ourselves. All the stuff was in Lektrievers. The prints were at one place, the negatives were in another place. We had to kind of determine, “Where’s the cutoff?” Because most of these things were kept numerically. The negatives were all in numerical order. The prints were all in numerical order. Some of the prints were in albums by subject. So we had to try to find a numerical cutoff like, 1,260,000 was the number, whatever. That was kind of the end point for the Korean War, as best as we could, and we had to work with the services to identify that. So what we did is we just went into the Lektrievers and we pulled all the negatives. And then the prints that were in numerical order we’d just pull all the negatives up to that point. The albums that were arranged by subject, that was a little dicier. We had to make our best guess. Sometimes we took things that went a little bit longer. But, substantially the albums covered the World War II and Korea period. The real problem was the index. Because, of course, the index is in order by subject, not by number. So we had to go through every subject and look at the numbers. And pull out the ones that were below the numbers was the cutoff point. And then recreate that index when we brought it downtown. So it just related to what we pulled out. And then, of course, about five or six years later they said, “Oh, let’s transfer another chunk of it.” So we brought that in. So I’d say in that period in particular, the DOD was really the organization that we worked with quite a bit. We worked a lot with NASA too. But we never really got anywhere with NASA. A lot of talking, but not much was actually transferred. But in terms of really bulking up our holdings the DOD and the other organization that was really important was USIA, RG 306. We were able to bring in a lot of the more recent USIA photography. And that is just a gold mine of imagery on politics, art, culture, every aspect of American life. Because basically what USIA is, was a PR wing of the U.S. government overseas, you know. They would create exhibits in countries, Voice of America, be mean to the Communists to undercut the Soviet Union and the whole conglomerate of countries that were under Communist rule. And they would do exhibits there. So they would either create the photographs themselves or they would acquire them from commercial sources for a one-time use and create an exhibit, for example. Or they might make a publication. USIA did a lot of publications. So, those are probably two of the really important agencies that transferred material to us in that time frame that really sort of put kind of put us on the map in terms of research. Because prior to that, we had researchers when we were downtown. But once we got the Army, once we got the military photography through World War II and Korea, and once we got the USIA stuff, man, it just exploded. Because people were writing us asking for photographs of their ships, of the places they served at in, in Germany or England or wherever, you know. This is the tank I was on. I flew a B24 with the name of, you know, Misty Girl. Do you have a picture of that aircraft, you know? We did the best we could to go through and see if we could find these things, but it literally exploded. And the same thing with the USIA material. That became extremely active because of the content. And, of course, we had to tell the researchers, “Remember, some of these things are credited to commercial organizations.” So when that’s the case, and it says it right on the photo, you have to go back to the source to get clearance to make sure you’re not violating copyright. We’ll make a copy for you, but it’s up to you to go back and check with the organization, like _Sports Illustrated_ or _Life_ , or _Time_ or _UPI, AP_ , you know. All those things were in this file, in addition to agency creative photography. So, it’s very important to get the researcher to understand. And really important to getting NARA staff, particularly the exhibits people to understand there are some things that they really like to tap into because it’s great. But there’s a lot of stuff in there that was created commercially. So, you can’t just throw it up online or publish it or hang it up on a wall without talking to somebody about the rights situations. So, those two groups in that time period really built up our holdings and also really increased the number of requests we were getting, which just seemed to escalate every year, more reference requests, more people showing up in the research room. And then we moved out here, it just continued. We got additional accretions to the USIA and some additional accretions to the military. We now have the military photography up to 2007. A good portion of that is born digital photography, which all of its online. You know, we brought it in. That’s one of the things that we have done and been in the forefront of is, accessioning born digital photography from federal agencies, developed a way to process it using computers. We had to really work hard to get the IT people to understand what we wanted to do and what we needed to do it with. So we had to get special computers with more storage, more RAM, and all that sort of stuff to process, double screens to work with images and captions simultaneously. You know, programs that are not normally available in the NARAnet, to work with the images. And then the folks who work in the processing, Billy Wade and Nick Natanson, have really developed the procedures for processing born digital photography or scanned photography and getting it then, and putting it up online. We’ve got, oh, geez, I don’t know, 8, 900,000 images up online right now that are all from federal agencies. And some really interesting things. You know, the Mercury and the Gemini, onboard photography from early programs. We’re in the middle of bringing in a lot of NASA stuff from Apollo shuttle and post programs. So, we’re working real hard with the Apollo stuff. Because we’ve got the Apollo 11 photography. We also have the 13, the one that had the problem. And there’s lots of interior shots of them working on the little device that they needed to create so that they could get back to earth safely. So it, and again, I’m kind of wandering all over the place." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "No. It’s quite all right. Well just, focusing back to the 1980 to ‘85 section. I’m to do this chronologically." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "I’m sorry." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Keep it a little bit organized. What were some of the technological developments during that ‘80 to ‘85 time range?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Well I think it was probably around that time that we started looking at computers and how they could help us in our work. And one of the things that the Branch Chief at the time, Betty Hill, was very interested in trying to figure out how to use these things to our advantage. It was in that time frame that, we had all of our descriptive material on cards, indexed, you know, like five by seven index cards. You can go in our research room now and you can see the whole batch of them. But, of course, they were only available on the cards. We worked, I’m trying to remember what the organization was. Charles Dollar ran the organization. This was downtown. It was one of the first computer support offices. Actually, Charles Dollar, I’m sorry, he ran what we refer to as NUMI, the electronic records office, 25-30 years ago, downtown. But there was also an IT office downtown that would help us. And, two of the things that we were able to do is, one had to do with the move to Archives II. They gave us these little TRS-80, I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen them. They’re little like, they were like little laptops, basically, very, very, early. And one of the guys who was working in the IT shop, his name was Mike Getzy and Mike’s still around someplace. He might be in St. Louis, I don’t know. Anyway, he developed a program for us that was basically an electronic location register. And with these very, very early and very limited TRS computers, we could take them in the stack, they were battery operated. We’d take them in the stack and we could, you know, 111-SC is on this location or this location. So we were compiling all that information. This was also going to help us with the move. And then, when we got it all compiled we were able to print it out on, and I can show you the printouts. We’ve got them upstairs. We still have them. We used them for our move, on dot matrix printers. I don’t know all the technology that was involved. It was really early stuff now. These TRS-80 things are really hilarious if you look at them today in, you know, in comparison to what we have now. It’s like, but, you know, it was the first step. So that, the use of those laptops to create this automated location register was a huge, huge thing for us. And then, related to that, Betty, again, was very interested in looking at how we can use computers to help us in our work. So, she worked with that organization again and they found a program called Text Bank. It was a, a full text retrieval system. And it was very early. And this is got to be in the ‘80 to ‘85, maybe a little bit after ‘85, but kind of in that ball park. Text Bank was just a commercial piece of software that they were able to purchase and give to us. And it was stand alone. You couldn’t, it wasn’t a net, well, of course, we didn’t have a network downtown. All you already had was standalones. Anyway, to get the data into Text Bank, what we had to do was, we had to type in, what we did is we tried to scan, this is really early scanning too, all of the inventory cards. You know, and there’s some of these things that go back to like ‘45 and the fifties so the type is really strange. And we scanned as much as we could. But it ended up we only had about a 60% capture rate. So one of the technicians on the staff, happened to also be a super-duper typist, Sheila Mayo. She works down at the Carter Library now. She went through and corrected everything and added the rest of the text in electronic form. So then we had all of our cards in electronic form. We were able to put them into the Text Bank system. And we could type in, obviously whatever was in the card came out. If it wasn’t there it didn’t come out on the search. You could go in and type in, World War II. And you would get all of the series that we had that related to World War II. Well that was a huge thing. Because that’s what we had to do mentally when a researcher walked in the room. They’d say, I’m interested in this topic. And you got to kind of scan through your head and okay 111-SC, 19-NN, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know. And you’d come up with a list of series. And then we would take them over to the cards and they would read through the cards. And, there might be 15 or 20, or 50 or 60 for the Signal Corps, ‘cause there were so many separate series. That they would look at all of these cards and say, “Okay, I want to see that series, I want to see that series.” And then from the cards, they’d go to the finding aids that we created. Because generally we would create a box list for pretty much everything we had, when we could. Big files, like the Signal Corps and USIA, they had subject index cards. So, you didn’t have to create anything. You just pointed to there, and say, it’s over there. Just say, “Go look at the subjects.” But that was kind of the way it worked. You identify the series, then you get down to looking at the actual descriptions. Then you look at the finding aids, and then you put in a slip to get the boxes. That was kind of that process. But now having that computer, that could do that calculation, not calculation, but compilation for us, it made everything that much easier. And the researcher could do it by his or herself, which is a big deal. Because, if you work with researchers, they have a real skepticism about whether they’re getting to see everything we have—“Are you sure that’s all you have?” This way, they can do it themselves. They can go through the Text Bank system, do the search, and find out what series we have that might relate to their topic. And then sometimes we’d have to fill in the blanks because not every piece of information was on the card. There might be information that we knew in our heads from working with the records for 20 years. And by the way, you cannot replace people who’ve been working with the records for 20 years. That’s not possible. You know, we’d fill it in and by now we had kind of an automated way to help the researcher get closer to what they really wanted to look at. So we had that system of Text Bank and it was downtown. We had a couple of copies of it. It was on stand-alone computers and they were pretty early things. And then when we moved out here, all of the sudden, ta dah, we have a network. I mean downtown we were writing our descriptions, and this goes beyond the ‘82 through ‘85 up through probably, you know, the early nineties. We moved in ‘94. We only had one computer. So every time somebody wanted to write a series description, you had to vie for space on the one computer to type in the series description. And we were using the old format. And then, once we got it in electronic form though, then we could just insert it into Text Bank. We’d have to rebuild the Text Bank system. Every two or three months we’d take all of the new descriptions that were done electronically, and we’d rebuild Text Bank and, and incorporate the new, new series in there, so the researchers would have them. But when we got here, my God, you know, we had this network. And we had, I’m trying to remember what it was called. But basically, what it was, is the audio and visual archives locator. Because most everything that was in there was either from Motion Pictures, Sound, and Video or Still Pictures. Because we had stuff in electronic form. So they were able to take what we had created in Text Bank and import it into the system, it was the system before ARC actually. And the Archival Research Catalog goes way back. But right before that there was sort of this period where the rules, regulations, and stipulations that you have in ARC [Archival Research Catalog] were not quite in force. So they had incorporated all of our previous materials into the new system and then when that was switched to ARC, it went to ARC. And when it was switched to OPA [Online Public Access], it went to OPA. So, we have older descriptions in there that don’t meet the ARC standards. But, I mean you got to use them because they’ve got the information. So that once we were able to put that in there, that even made things even greater. And then the Internet, my God. People could tap into us from California. And they could look at the series descriptions. And they could send us letters based on that or they could start organizing their research so when they got here they could optimize it. Because, it’s expensive to come here and, and stay here and work here for a week. It’s not inexpensive. So that was a huge help I think for researchers. And, of course, they wanted more of that. You know, okay, now, are all your images online? Well we got 15 1/2 million, you know. We’re working on it. But the first projects we did was the EAP. Again, I think I’m, I’m moving around here." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well, that’s fine. Go ahead, keep going." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Yeah. Okay. I’m sorry. The Electronic Access Project which the Archives got a special appropriation from Congress to put images online. Well, who do you think they came to first to populate it? Still Pictures. So we identified a bunch of different records that we thought would be useful to go up online. There ended up being about 160,000 photos. And they had a contractor who came into the building who scanned the material. And, of course, scanning the images is only, is the easy part of the job. The hard part of the job is all the caption information. So we had a bunch of students and staff and that’s what they did." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "What was the time frame for that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "That was after we moved out here. So that was probably ‘95, ‘96, ‘97, some, somewhere in there. It wasn’t long after we got out here that, and we had the network and people started thinking, “Okay, now we got to really do something with this network.” And the upper management got additional funds from Congress to hire the contractor to do the work. And so, over a course of probably two and a half years, I think it was, it, it took us to get all the caption information. So we got all of this 165,000 up. Well, of course, that just feeds the beast. You know, oh my God, 165,000, but, what about this? What about that? So, you know, ever since it’s been a continuing push by the researchers to get more and more things online. You know, getting things scanned is one thing. It’s the caption information that takes such a long time and marrying those two things together so that when you pull up an image, you’ve also got all the metadata so you understand what you’re looking at. Or you can search it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well, in your estimation, how many images do you think are available online today?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Well if I add in the EAP and all of the things that we’ve accessioned from federal agencies, over a million." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Which I think is pretty good for an organization that basically only has two people on the processing team. We have a lot of students and they’re very good. And they help us tremendously. We’ve used the students in much more of an archivist capacity than what I did when I was there pushing boxes around. I mean, they’re doing archival work." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Was there any technological flops that you’ve had?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Mm. Well we have, but I don’t know that I can say what it is, ERA. I don’t know that I would, well, I will be honest with you. The ERA is a total failure. The problem with that, and we kept trying to get them to pay attention to us, is that when ERA was designed, they really did not talk to us about what we knew was out at federal agencies. And what the volume was. And what the file sizes were. You know, they worked mostly with NUMI, which is RDE now. And they’re dealing with databases and things of that nature. So most of what they had was megabyte sizes, okay. We’re talking about agency images that are 75 megabytes a piece. And we’re accessioning 50,000 of them. And how are we going to send those through the pipeline to Rocket Center? It doesn’t work. The file sizes are too big and the numbers are too big. You can’t just push it. Every time we would push something of any size, it would get stuck. It just didn’t get there. So basically what we’ve had to do is, for very large bodies of images, we put them on a hard drive and we send them up to Rocket Center and they kick them in through the back door. I have no clue how they do it. But, the big problem is trying to move it from Archives II to there, because you’re FTPing it. And the pipe this stuff has to go through is like that, instead of being like that. Because it was designed that way. And, I always felt there was never enough discussion with the non-texts about what was out there. I mean, we had big file sizes. Ours are dwarfed by what motion picture will receive, dwarfed. I mean they have individual, electronic films that are two terabytes, one film. So, it’s like holy mackerel, you need to know that when you design this thing, so that it can manage and handle the movement of the records from here to there. So that really kind of backfired I think on everyone. And, they’ve understood that and I think they’re really working toward developing something new. How long that’s going to take, I don’t know. I mean, one of the things that is going to affect it is Mike Wash left. And Mike Wash, got it. He understood it. He really knew what we were talking about. He came from a Kodak background. So he understood photography. He understood what happens when you digitize an image or you create an image in a digital camera. And, it’s not 2 megabytes, but it’s 40 megabytes, because it’s a high resolution to file. So he was very instrumental in kind of rethinking how we were going to deal with the accession, not just digital photography, but all electronic records that come in whether it comes in to NUMI or in the regions or at the presidential libraries, wherever. So he was sort of helping us move in a different direction. And I worry about what’s going to happen now that he’s gone. Because he was pretty much a driving force, I felt, behind it. But we didn’t have any real major flops. I mean, you knew that, you use new technology and you make mistakes and you learn. But, like the old TRS-80’s. That’s all that was available. But they worked. They did what we had to do. They were cumbersome and you had to download information on it very frequently because they didn’t have much storage capacity. And then we would move on to the next technology and the next technology and so on. When we moved out to Archives II, one of the first things we wanted to do was to get access to NARAnet in the stack, because that was not available. And we proposed getting a big desktop, plopping it in there and running wires through the walls into the computer. Very early on, one of the guys who was in charge of the network. I’m trying to remember his name now, damn. Anyway, he said, “Oh, that’s, that’s a crappy idea.” He said, what you want to do, is you want to put a wireless connection in your stack so you can bring a laptop in there and connect directly to the NARA net through the wireless connection. So, he helped us get these little stations that were placed in strategic places in the stack. So we could take a laptop in and set it down, open it up, and we’d have a connection to the wireless connection, which would get us to the NARAnet. Then we could get to our location register. We could get to the series descriptions. All the stuff we needed to do, like when the staff is in the stack and they’re trying to find something. Oh, God, you can’t find it. Where the heck did it go? Go back to the location register, type it in—boom, it’s here. Oh, it’s not here. It got moved, t’s over there. So that’s an extremely useful tool in the stack. Unfortunately, they took it out. When they started redoing the wireless things in the building, I don’t know. Maybe it was old technology, so they thought they could do something better. But I hope they will put wireless access to NARAnet back into the stacks. Because it’s incredibly useful. Sorry. Wandering again. Will this thing ever make any sense to anybody?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "It’s really good. It’s actually going really well. Now with, in ‘85 with NARA’s re- independence—" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "[Interposing] ‘84." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "—was there, was there anything that affected your outlook for the agency or your day­ to-day [crosstalk]?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Well, I mean, I think everybody who was on board and who was in the picture on front of the building downtown on Independence Day, was really looking forward to being independent of GSA and being able to do its work the way we thought it had to be done. Instead of having control from an organization—we just didn’t fit in with GSA. I mean you got Federal Supply Service and the Public Building Service, and had National Archives and Records Service. It’s like, what do we have to do with toilet paper and pencils and paper, you know? But, that’s where it was put. So once we got independence, I think everybody was really optimistic that, okay, our guys up on top here, they can develop the budget that we need to do the work we need to do, to get the people on board we need to get on board, to move in the direction of technology’s going so that we can use technology to do our jobs better. So I think there was a lot of optimism about what was going to happen, and where we were going to go. And, I think, by and large, it was a very good thing. But I can remember, thinking that, “Wow, this is going to be great.” And, of course, there’s always restrictions. Budgets are budgets, you know. They put together a budget which looks like it’s good and Congress looks at it or OMB looks at it and says, mm, no. Next thing, you got two-thirds of what you had. But, at least you have control over it yourself." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "We had control. We could set the budget. We didn’t have to send something to GSA and have somebody up there who had no clue what we were doing saying, well, you can’t do this and you can’t do that. You didn’t have to argue with them or try to convince them that it was important to do this or to do that, that preservation was important and you needed money to do that. You needed new technology. I mean they were probably on board with the new technology thing because that’s the kind of thing that GSA does. But, with us, it’s just that you have control over your destiny, so to speak. And the people at the top of the organization, if they’re good, they can move you along. If they’re not so good, you kind of flounder until the next one shows up. It is what it is." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Now in ‘85 to ‘89, you were a senior archivist and preservation supervisor. How, how did you feel being a supervisor when you had to direct your staff? How was your leadership?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Well, that’s really interesting because, I think so many, I shouldn’t generalize. But I think so many people who gravitate toward working in a place like this, I won’t, I don’t want to call them introverts, but they’d rather work alone, if you know what I mean. Give me my project and go away and let me finish it. And I think that’s the way a lot of us are. Because we come from history backgrounds and that’s kind of the way history is in a way. Unless you’re a teacher, you’re interacting with students. But if you’re doing research all the time, it’s very solitary and you become very kind of comfortable with that. So moving into a supervisor, and at that time I wasn’t doing evaluations, I was just asking people to do this and to do that. It wasn’t too, too much of a switch for me. Because I kind of likened it, I hate to use sports analogies, but I can’t help it, because most of my life’s revolved around it. It’s kind of like a team. It is a team. You got a group of people who work together. It’s either a formalized thing or it’s informal. And they all have to pull their weight. And, somebody has to kind of do the coaching. And say this is what we’re going to do. To take it up to a more recent period, I wanted to get involved in electronic and digital photography. I could have not. I could have just let it go and default and maybe NUMI would have ended up with it, but I know they didn’t want any part of it. But more importantly, I wanted to get involved in it because I knew that the digital photographs that agencies were creating were simply extensions of the analog things they’d been creating for the past 50 years. So who’s better to work with those records than the people who know the past and can deal with the more recent ones? So that’s where I want to go. And then, you’ve got people around you who are really good. And you just kind of let them go. I mean, you have to kind of pay attention to what’s going on. But, you know, if you’ve got really good people, and in Stills on both reference and the processing side, we’ve always had very good people. They’ve stayed because they like the work. They like the records and the stuff they do. And, like in the processing end, working with digital photography, I mean, I don’t know that much about it. I would try to learn as much as I can. But Billy and Nick, you know, they just grabbed that thing and they ran like hell with it. And they created operating procedures and processes and designs and all this stuff on how we were going to bring the stuff in. How we were going to process it. And how we were going to make it available to the public by working with Gary Stern and the OPA staff. So that’s kind of what I did. And then even back in ‘84 and ‘85, I just said, “You know, well, here’s what we want to do.” We want to know what we have and we want to make sure that we can preserve it. So let’s go out and do that. And then we figured out how we were going to go about it and go out and do it. But, none of that works unless you’ve got good people. I mean, I don’t care if you’re Pat Riley or greatest coach in the world, if you’ve got a bunch of guys who can’t walk and chew gum, you’re not going anywhere. But, you know, I had been very fortunate, the whole time I’ve been in Still Pictures, there have always been very good people working there. Very dedicated, very interested in what they did. They liked what they were doing. And they were creative. And certainly more creative than I am. But I knew I could trust them. They weren’t going to go out and do something bizarro. When you’re working with people, some people, you know instinctually that this person I can trust because he’s really smart and he’s going to figure it out. And this person may have to keep a little bit tighter, reign on them. When you’ve always been working kind of in a solitary thing to all of a sudden, the next minute, you got all these people looking at you, like, “Well, what do we do now?” So, for reference, it’s not that big a deal because you’re getting letters and requests day in and day out. So it’s pretty straight forward. Processing’s a different thing altogether. You’ve got to think about what it is you want to do. Which records really are important? Which ones are we going to focus on first? Which ones are we going to set aside, we’ll get to them when we can? We’re going to get to them, but these records really need to be addressed first. So like, what we’re done now. We recognized that the digital stuff that’s coming in now has to be worked on pretty quick. You can’t leave it sit around. It’s not like 20 cubic feet of prints that you can basically put on a shelf and three years later go back there. And that 20 cubic feet is still going to be 20. And it’s still probably going to be pretty much in the same shape as it was the day you brought it in. Because you got environmental conditions in the stack. That’s not the case with the digital stuff. You’ve got to address it. Because there are problems that you get when you transfer things from agencies. You get different file formats, connecting the metadata with the, with the images. All that sort of stuff that really that has to be addressed. So, we’ve kind of pushed our analog to the side because we don’t have very many people. And the folks we have are focusing on the digital. We’ve got two million backlog images of digital photography." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Over 70 terabytes of data. And it’s just going to get worse. And unless they do something about it, like get us some more people, it’s just going to grow, because the agencies, there is no agency out there that’s using a film-based camera, I can tell you that. They haven’t been using film- based cameras since probably 2005 or maybe even earlier. Everything is being shot in digital form. And the thing about it is, they are more than willing to transfer it. Because they can copy 5,000 images, 20 minutes or an hour, overnight. And so they’ll send you another copy of it. And you can accession it. So the accessioning time has gone from sometimes 10 or 15 years to one or two or three years. Right now, what we’re suggesting to agencies, if you’re creating digital photography, you should not hang on to it for any more than three years. And they’re okay with that because they can just copy the whole damn thing. And then send it to us. So, it’s going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. There’s a tidal wave out there that’s coming. And if the agency’s focus is on electronic records then, okay, folks, let’s put your money where your mouth is. And let’s build up the areas that are working directly with it. We don’t forget about the records we have. Because we’re still going to be accessioning analog records for a long time. But, you have to start thinking a little differently. You have to start thinking right now about how the allocation of resources is based on, pretty much, how many cubic feet of physical records you have sitting on the shelf. You’ve got to stop thinking that way. I mean it’s still a reality. But you’ve got to think about the other side of it too. You can’t just look at what’s right in front of you sitting on a shelf. You got to think about the electronic world, the digital photographs, my God, the AV material. It’s just, there is no possible way that NARA can accession AV material right now. There’s no place to put it. You can keep it on hard drives and on LTO tape and all that stuff. But that’s not managing it, that’s just putting it someplace and crossing your fingers and hoping something doesn’t go haywire. Our stuff that we’re getting in, we can still download it. We’ve got souped-up computers with eight terabytes of storage space. And faster processors and all that sort of stuff. We had to get that from the IT people so that we could do our job. So we can still do that now. We can still accession big files from agencies. But where are we going to put them? That’s the key. And that’s where the problem is. So we’re still using ERA, like I said, we’re still putting stuff on hard drives and literally mailing it. Have you heard of Bob Spangler?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Uh-uh." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Bob Spangler, he’s kind of the IT guru for RDDC. Bob will throw in the back of his car and drive up to Rocket Center and deliver it. So that’s how it’s getting there. And then they are literally putting it in. Because we can’t send it. As I said before, we can’t FTP it, because it just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t go. It gets stuck all the time. So that’s the key is, where are we going to put this stuff? Motion Pictures, they can’t even bring stuff in and begin to work with it, because they’ve got no place to put these massive files that they would be getting. You know, I think I wandered away again." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "No. You’re all right. You’re all right. Well with that supervisory position, did you still have time for reference? Or how did you manage, how did you manage that transition to more of the administrator and less of the reference, I guess?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "You know, when I first came in and worked with the organization, we had a reference chief and we had a processing chief. So, you know, even though I did a lot of reference work early on so I would know what the records were and I worked in the room, the research room for two years downtown, day in, day out. I got to learn the records. Where they were. What they were. When I went over to processing, I didn’t do so much reference any more. It was mostly just doing the processing work. But, inevitably you would get dragged back in to the reference situation, because you just got finished processing something and you knew more about it than anybody else did. So, because of this the reference team didn’t have the opportunity to get up to speed on it. So you’d get dragged back into it, which was fine. Because I liked working with researchers. They’re, by and large, most of them are pretty interesting people. And have got some interesting ideas and stories. So, I kind of strayed away from, from, from the reference part of it. But then when we moved out here, first the branch chief retired. And then the processing chief retired. So, the only person left holding the bag was yours truly. So, I had to get involved in everything. I was involved in processing. And I had to deal with reference. Because I was the only supervisor there. So, I get calls all the time. I got a call yesterday from Al Jazeera’s, we want to use these ten photographs that we found online. Are they copyrighted or are they in the public domain? You know, I get that stuff all the time. Then, of course, we get questions from federal agencies about transferring records. So I’m not sure I answered your question, but…" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Oh, you are. You are." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "But I, I’ve always liked to do reference. I think it is fun. And like I said, you do meet some incredibly interesting people. And I’ve been very fortunate to meet some pretty interesting people. You know, some relatively well-known people. I gave a tour to Barbra Streisand when she was here years ago. More importantly, I got to meet some really famous photographers like Yousuf Karsh, who’s a famous Canadian portrait photographer. He came to see the photographs that we had. We spent some time talking to him. And I got my story confirmed—have you ever seen the picture Karsh took of Churchill? He’s like that, with the cigar in his mouth. He didn’t have the cigar in his mouth, that’s the key to this story. He’s just sort of like that. I mean he looks like he’s about ready to bite your nose off. Well, the story that I’d always heard was that what Karsh did—what Karsh was able to do was to capture the essence of somebody in their face. I mean he was amazing in the way he could do that. Well he was working with Churchill trying, you know, this is during World War II, trying to get that bulldog tenacity type expression on his face. And he couldn’t get it. So the story I heard is, what he did is, he had an extension cord so he could press the shutter from walking around. And he walked up close to Churchill and he yanked the cigar out of his mouth. And that’s the expression that Churchill had. And he snapped the shutter right then. I’d always heard that story and I didn’t know whether it was true. So when he was here, I said, “Hey, I heard this story and can you confirm it?” And he said, “Yeah, that’s exactly what happened.” He said, “That’s how I got that picture.” I thought that was just incredible. Other photographers, I had this guy call me up on the phone one time, this is bizarre. Morris Engel calls me on the phone and said I was watching this movie. This is about seven or eight years ago, maybe longer. And he said, “I’m watching this movie,” what the hell was the name of it, oh, yeah, Saving Private Ryan. And he said, “You know what, I was on that beach. And I was a cameraman. And I worked for the Navy. Do you think you have any of my photographs there?” So we went back. And he told me the unit that he worked on, the Navy units had special designations and he was the person who worked in this one unit. Sure enough, I found a whole bunch of photographs by Morris Engel. And I got to talking to him on the phone, I mean just incredible stories. This guy is a very well-known photographer. He’s in that International Center for Photography book, he’s got a piece in there because he goes back to the thirties where he worked with a lot of the New York photographers that were very prominent at the time. And he was also movie camera guy. And so we got to talking and I said, “Well, geez, what was it like?” He said, well, you know, it was kind of interesting. He said the story was, the Private Ryan thing, was pretty close to the way it was. And he said, but I didn’t have a gun, all I had was a four by five speed graphic, which is this big clunky camera, plus he carried an Emo motion picture camera on his back. And that’s all he had. And he’s jumping out of one of these things and running into the beach well where the Germans are just going nuts, killing all these people. And he survived the whole thing. And it was just amazing to talk to him and hear his stories. And then we’ve had Vietnam photographers in and we’ve talked to them. We actually had a group in a couple years, I’m sorry, I’m, I, I do this all the time." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "No. No. No. Keep going." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "I’m wandering all over the place. We had this group of guys who came in. And I had worked with a guy who was in DC who was kind of organizing the group. And they were all photographers in the Army during Vietnam. So, he gave me information about them. And, we were able to find photographs for a lot of the guys. But what I did is, we just pulled out the whole series. It’s like 35,000 photos. And there were about 10 or 12 of these guys who were going to come in and look through them. And, and we just spent the day working with them so that they could go through this stuff. And, their names were on the back of all these photos. But what the cool thing was, one of the guys walks in the door. He’s walking over, and up on the wall we have this picture of a cameraman coming out of the swamp in Vietnam, with two cameras hanging around his neck. You’ve probably seen that. Anyway, he walks in and he turns and he looks at it and he said, “That’s me.” Sure enough. So, you know, we had the—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "[Interposing] Wow." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "His name was on the caption. And, he told us who he was. And to talk to them and to hear their stories and to hear the dedication these guys had. And some of the harrowing experiences some of them went through to capture this stuff and document what was going on. It’s just amazing to really talk to them. And then that goes on, you meet all kinds of other people. But, you know, I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s just…" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "No, that’s great. Well that, that’s actually one of my questions I have for you—" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "[Interposing] I start thinking back about it and I said, why the hell am I leaving? I can tell you why I’m leaving, I don’t like the supervisor. No, I’ve had enough of that, believe me." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. Let’s see here." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Good God." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "This, this is a good stopping point if we can continue the interview another time. Are you okay with that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Up to you." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Okay. Alright. We’ll go ahead and stop. [START RECORDING; April 24, 2014]" }, { "speaker": "MR. BRIAN KNOWLES", "text": "I am Brian Knowles. I’m acting as an oral historian for the National Archives and Records Administration. Today’s date is 24 April 2014. I am conducting an oral history interview with Mr. Edward J. McCarter, Chief of the Still Picture Branch, Special Media Archives Division at Archives II, College Park, Maryland. Good morning, sir. If you could, where we left off was beginning with you being made Assistant Chief, Archival Projects, Supervisory Archivist, Still Picture Branch, Non-Textual Archives Division." }, { "speaker": "MR. EDWARD J. MCCARTER", "text": "That was it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "That was 1989-1998. There is a lot of ground to cover with this one, so I’ll just kick off with my first question. What’s involved with being the Assistant Chief? What does that mean for when you took over that position?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Well, essentially, you’re responsible for all of archival project work that’s accessioning. For non-text, we pretty much handle the entire lifecycle of the record, so, unlike textual, and similar to electronic records. We go all the way, beginning with the appraisal process all the way through providing access to the public. So my responsibility was to be able to deal with all those different archival functions from the appraisal scheduling process through the accessioning process, through processing the records, getting them prepared, all the holdings maintenance preservation work that had to be done, to the descriptive work. And then, eventually, turning it over to the reference staff to handle. And there was a Reference Chief at that time. That person would be responsible for answering the letters, telephone calls, the in-person researchers, basically, you know, all the work that dealt with facing with the public. Whereas my work was really more focused behind scenes and literally my customer was the federal agencies. That’s the way we looked at it. Our responsibility was to work effectively with the agencies so that we could get the records transferred and preserved and made available. And that was difficult to do because we had a lot of hurdles to get over with, a lot of agencies had this view that NARA was kind of like a black hole. You sent the records here and they were gone forever and nobody ever knew what happened to them. And, God forbid, they were thrown out by mistake. I mean, all sorts of horror stories. And I remember during that time period with the people we had on staff, as well, working very hard to try to turn that opinion down or around. And you could only do it really agency-by-agency. There’s no other way to do it. So we would focus on an agency that we were interested in getting the records transferred and work very hard to get them here. One of the big successes we had was with DOD. We had the military records up through the end of the World War I period, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps things. Maybe a little bit later than that. Practically nothing from the Marine Corps after the turn of the century. That is the 20th century. And the Air Force, zip. We had nothing from the actual Air Force. So we worked very hard with the DOD to get the records transferred. And we were pretty successful. We got all of the World War II records through Korea. And probably through that period all the way through 1998, which includes moving from Archives I to Archives II, which was a whole other feat, if you want to put it, getting all of the Army records up through the Vietnam War and getting the Navy records through that period and getting the Marine Corps records through that period. And then eventually, after much tugging and pulling with the Air Force, because the Air Force had literally turned their photo collection over to the Smithsonian Institution to create a video disk. We were never alerted to what they were doing. But literally the entire body of records was at Smithsonian. So we worked very hard for a number of years convincing the Air Force that this was the place the records needed to go. And we had to jump through a lot of hoops for them. Well, if we need a copy of a photo, can you get us a copy of a photo? Yeah, sure. You know, it’s not a problem. We’ll do it. So we did what we had to do. And, eventually, we convinced them. And they directed the Smithsonian Institution, which was not very pleased, to turn over the photo collection, because it really was, you know, for the Air and Space, it was literally at the Air and Space Museum. For the Air and Space Museum, this was like a gem, because it had Army, Air Force and Air Force photography, you know, up, basically, up through the Vietnam War. So, we literally had to go, whenever we got these records, these big chunks like this, we physically went in vans over to the facilities, packed up all the records ourselves, put them in boxes and brought them back to the archives. That’s just what we had to do. And the Army, that was a real complicated one, because there were prints and there were negatives but the real issue was the index. The index was by subject. So while you could determine approximately where a cut-off was for the negatives because they were arranged in numerical order, same with the prints. You couldn’t do that with the index. Or in the case of the Army they had the photographs and they had about 6,000 albums by subject." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "So, what we literally did is kind of go in and pick and choose the albums that fit the timeframe and go to the index and literally take it apart by subject and recreate it at the Archives, put it back together, but missing what was there. And then, eventually, after some more tugging and pulling and convincing, and some help from some of the people at DOD, we were able to get the rest of it so we could put the entire index back together. We had all of the albums. We literally had everything, because in about ‘82, what happens is DOD decides to centralize its photo collection instead of having the Marines in Quantico and the Army at the Pentagon and the Air Force at Fern Street, and the Navy at Anacostia, they decided to create a central photo file. So all the Marine Corps photography, all the service photography, including the Coast Guard, was glumped together into this huge series. So that was a great cut point in terms of getting everything else they had up to 1982 transferred to NARA. So we were able to do that during that timeframe. And that was a big; that was a big deal getting all of that. And it dramatically increased our reference requests because we had all this World War II stuff that people had been dying to get at, and the Korea material. And then eventually Vietnam has become very active, too, for all the Services. So that’s kind of an idea of how we worked with the agencies. And the only way to convince them to transfer it was to literally bring them to the archives and show them what we did and how we kept things and that this was not a black hole and that the public had access. And what really helped, particularly for the Air Force, was when we moved out here to Archives II, because this building was designed exactly for storage of special media records, motion picture records, cartographic records, and photography and posters. So they were literally blown away when they came out and saw the facility and the fact that we had a huge cold storage vault at 30-34 degrees. And we could store the color material better than they could. And I mean at that point we could say, “We can store the records better than anybody else in the federal government,” except for the NASA photography, the moon photography, which was at a zero- degree vault in Johnson. And we’re still in a tug of war with them over that. We’ve gotten all the digital material from the Apollo missions and the Mercury and Gemini and the Shuttle, but we’re still working with them to get the original photography transferred. But that was a big thing to be able to show them the facility and what we did and how we made it available. It just literally took away any reason for them to be hanging on to the things, particularly the preservation aspect of it. When you can tell somebody that we can keep your records for a lot longer than you can and we’re going to make sure that these records last as long as possible, they’re pretty much up against the wall with that sort of an argument, because there’s nothing they can. So that’s a good example of how we’ve kind of big agency by agency at the outset. And then, we’ve also worked with smaller agencies. We try to go and kind of turn that opinion around about the archives, what we are. and what we do. And then, of course, once it’s here, there’s the processing work. I was responsible for making sure the stuff got processed, it was done correctly. When new people came in I basically did the training, teaching them how we went about processing records, the photographic and graphic records. And the preservation work, I got very involved in preservation. I learned a lot about photographic processes, the different photographic processes that had been in effect from basically the daguerreotype to digital photography. So that helped me a lot in terms of making decisions when you get a body of records in. What kind of records do you have? What needs to be done? What kinds of holdings, main and actions? What kind of boxes do we buy? What kinds of folders do we buy? Because we didn’t necessarily buy the same boxes that you would use for textual records. Sometimes you would buy boxes that were specially designed for photographic records, if they were particularly valuable, had a lot of intrinsic value. So you have to kind of learn all that stuff. What undergirds everything we do in special media is this media-specific knowledge. You can’t do the appraisal work, you can’t do the accession, you can’t do the preservation, the description or anything, unless you really have a solid grounding in that specific media. So that’s really kind of what’s important. We would send people to classes to take classes. RIT was the one that we sent people to most. It was a great, great place for learning about the history of photography, different kinds of photo processes and what kinds of actions you should take to help preserve the records you have. So every new member who came in, annually we would, it’s a week-long training class. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist anymore. But so, you know, all those sorts of things. I kind of hope I’ve kind of described what it is. But you really have responsibility for basically the entire lifecycle of the records. We worked a lot with appraisal, because most appraisal archivists don’t have any idea what photographs are. And they don’t exactly know what to look for. You know, they’ll go into an agency and they’ll see this huge print file, and they’ll say, wow, this is great. This is all we need to schedule. Uh-uh. Where’s the negatives? Where’s the finding aids, things like that? You know, they don’t have the tendency to think about that. So that’s the kind of input that we would be able to provide. And helping them write the schedules, the transfer periods. Sure, textual records, they don’t want them for 30 years. That’s not the case with non-textual records. You know, with us, ten years from the point of creation and you start looking at deterioration. So we try to push the agencies and the appraisal people to write the schedules that will directly reflect that. And now with digital, it’s even shorter, two to three years after the point of creation now. And that’s not so hard to get the agencies to agree to, because digital photos, you just make a copy and you transfer it. With the analog it’s a lot different because, making copies of 50,000 or 60,000 prints, that’s a big deal. And it’s also very expensive and very time consuming. So, you’d never get anywhere telling them to make a copy of that. You have to try to work with them in a different way to get things transferred. But so those kind of issues, those kinds of things that we would deal with the appraisal folks. And like I said, oftentimes in big accessions we just go out and pack it up ourselves. Because we know what we want. We know what’s there. Usually with these big agencies, we’ve had a fairly long relationship with them. Over the years there have been, there were several, what they call, “gaps projects” that were done. And there was at least one done during this time period, to try to identify the gaps in the records that we had. You know, we had, for RG 57, we had records up to 1910. Well, where’s the rest of it? So we’d have to try to get in touch with the agency to try to figure out where was the rest of the photography that fills in the gaps for what we have. So, that was a real good tool for us to get a good handle on some of the agencies that we traditionally wanted to get more records from. But it gave us a vehicle to actually do that. In addition, the other thing they used a lot during this time period were the agency evaluations where they would pick an agency like, and we always picked some goodies, like the Park Service or NASA, and a whole staff of NARA employees would go in and evaluate the records management program. How things are being stored, what things needed to be transferred. You know, at the end of these evaluations, we’d always prepare a list of the bodies that should have been transferred based on their schedule. Not that we were just making this up. I mean, they had a records schedule. They just weren’t paying any attention to it. So, that was a really good tool. The gaps projects are a good tool for identifying some of the big agencies we needed to really work with to get the records transferred. So I’m sorry, I think I’m —" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "[Interposing] No, that’s perfect." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "—just going on and on, but, it’s a pretty wide-ranging set of responsibilities. And of course you have your standard personnel stuff that you have got to learn. You’ve got to learn all the stupid personnel rules and performance evaluations and all that sort of stuff." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well, before we move on to that section, I wanted to ask you about the relationships with the Smithsonian. From your perspective and your experience, what has been the relationship with the Smithsonian Institution? Is it a competitive nature or not?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "The only time we really had this sort of competitive nature was with that Air Force collection that was over there. And that was really the Air Force’s problem. I mean, they were responsible for the problem. But it was also I’d laid some of the responsibility at the door of the appraisal people. I mean, whoever was responsible for the Air Force, it’s like all of a sudden we wake up and find out, oh, by the way, the Air Force has transferred all their stuff over to the Air and Space Museum because they’re going to create a video disk. Well, why didn’t somebody tell us about this beforehand? That’s their job. That’s what they’re supposed to do. They’re supposed to keep their ear to the ground. So we never found out about it until it was after the fact. And, you don’t solve problems after the fact. So that’s the only real time we had had any kind of issues. And the same thing with the LC. I mean, we each have our sphere of responsibility. And, at least as long as I’ve been working here, there really hasn’t been any attempts by the LC or the Smithsonian to try to grab archival federal agency records. They understand that that’s our responsibility." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "And now are they pretty good customers to NARA? Do the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian for the Museums, do they come to NARA for materials?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Okay. I mean, they were copies not necessarily originals." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Sure." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "You know, the Smithsonian is a sprawling place. So a lot of the museums come to us when they have photo exhibits because we have things that nobody else has. All of the Brady material, all of the Western Survey material. I mean, we have the greatest collection of that material here, World War II, World War I. You know, we have things that nobody else has. So when parts of the Smithsonian are doing exhibits, like we’re in a discussion right now with the National Portrait Gallery over Alexander Gardner prints that they want to use for an exhibit in 2015. So that happens quite frequently. Not so much with the L.C. I mean, they’re not really into exhibition. We refer each other back and forth. And about five years ago, myself and the person over at the LC set up sort of a—we go over there and get kind of a half-day preview of what they have. And they come over here and they get kind of a half-day preview of what we have and what we do, which is kind of so the reference staffs on both sides had some kind of an idea about what they do, what they have, and what we do and what we have, which was very beneficial, because somebody could say over there, oh, well, if you want that, you really need to go over to NARA. And if people come here and they’re looking for the, you know, the FSA collection, the Farm Security Administration photos, which were very famous during the thirties, we know we don’t have them. They’re at the LC. We just refer them over to the LC." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Cool. All right. Can you explain the process with preparing Deeds of Gift?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Boy. For a long time we were very involved in Deeds of Gift. We don’t do that so much anymore. We’ve got more than we can possibly deal with from the federal agencies. But really what we would be looking for are things that are unique and that have some connection to federal activity and that fill in a gap in materials that we don’t have. Now, that’s a pretty tall order for somebody to have, because we have pretty good coverage of most federal activity. But, you know, there are these cases where that doesn’t occur and somebody has something that we think fits in. And we’ll transfer it here." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Who might be one of these individuals or companies who have [crosstalk]—" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "[Interposing] Well, we had, I remember having a discussion, although this was a failed discussion. It never resulted in a transfer, but it’s the kind of thing we would be looking for. I don’t know, maybe we were at Archives II. It’s got to be ten years ago. A woman came into the research room and she was talking to reference staff and said she had some photographs she wanted to know if we were interested in. Her husband fought in World War II. Well, we’ve got boat loads of photos from World War II. And, we try to tell people is that what we have is the official photography created by the agency, and that’s our job. That’s what we focus on. We’re not looking for bits and pieces from service guys who served. There are places for that to go and we refer people there. But this isn’t it. But this was pretty unique, because he was at Iwo Jima and he was one of the, I don’t know, I guess you’d call them the drivers of the LSTs that they hit the landing beach, the thing drops and everybody runs out. And he had a bunch of color photographs of the landing at Iwo Jima, which was very unique. I mean, I’d never seen any color photographs of that. So that was the kind of thing that we felt that because of what it was, because of its physical format, color photography, it made it unique. We’ve got lots of Marine Corps photography of the invasion of Iwo Jima, but we don’t have any color photography that documents that. So that was something I felt that really kind of fit the bill or the criteria that we have for accepting donations, whereas you get a lot of things from veterans who say my father served in World War II and fought in Europe someplace. And usually what we’ll do is we’ll kind of see if we have any photography that covers the same time period and the same location. And more often than not, we do. So, we’ll say, respectfully, you know, this really doesn’t fit into our holdings. But here are a couple of places that are really interested in veterans’ photography and have veterans’ history projects that you might want to take your photographs for and see if they’d be interested in them. Does that kind of answer your question?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Yes, sir." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "But once you start down that road, it’s a very involved process. It’s just like accessioning records from a federal agency. You have to do an appraisal report and it has to go through channels and be approved by everyone. The Archivist, of course, has to sign the donation letter and you send it to the donor. They sign the letter. They keep a copy. We get the original back. We get the photographs and everybody’s happy. Usually." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. How does it feel knowing you’ve helped create the standards for accepting digital photography?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Well, I think that’s a real accomplishment, but I’d have to really say that two of the people who are most responsible, at least on our staff, are Billy Wade and Nick Natanson. Yeah, it was my idea to go after digital photography. I could have said, oh, the heck with it. You know, let NUMI take it, and, I mean, that’s the electronic records folks. Let them take it. That’s their problem. We don’t want to deal with it. But, the way I looked at it, and I think we may have covered this a little before, is really photography. You have to look at what it is first. Not that it’s digital, but that it’s photography. It’s imagery. And what is it imagery of? It’s imagery of the same subject matter as the analog imagery we have here. It’s just a different physical form. It’s no different than, the way I look at it, an albumen print from a Collodion negative from a salt paper print. It’s just a different physical process. In this case it’s an electronic process. But we took the approach that these are photographs first, and secondly they’re in electronic form. So because they were photographs and because they’re related to the records we already had from federal agencies, it made perfect sense to us that we would take the digital photography as well. And then we’d learn about the digital part of it. And it took Nick and Billy a couple years to work through when you take in a digital accession, how do you process it? You know, they kind of adapted the procedures that we use for processing analog photography, the same general ideas, but now you’re doing it on a computer rather than going through a box. But it’s very similar. And so they had to figure out step-by-step how you would go about doing this in electronic form and what kind of tools you needed. That’s a big thing. And it’s something that we’re still working on, we needed file-naming tools. We needed tools that oftentimes an agency will create the photographs, and they’ll put the caption information in the header of the photo. Well, that doesn’t help us very well because OPA can’t read the header. I mean, another program could read the reader, and you could just dump the images in and do a search. But OPA can’t do that. So we had to find a tool that would extract the captions out of the header and put them into a separate file. And Billy and Nick banged around, looking at programs, trying to figure out what worked. And we had some help from the electronic records people, as much as they could help us, because it was a different kind of record. And it had required some different tools. And that, what really helped us a lot was when Bob Spangler came in to the agency. He was the head of NUMI for a while and now he’s in a kind of a special office that provides support for the custodial units with electronic records. He was very helpful in helping us find tools. Bob has a long background working in electronic records. He got what we were trying to do. He understood it. So, he was very helpful in us getting the tools we needed. And now this little group that he’s created that’s one of their main jobs is to find tools that would help custodial people working with electronic records do their job every day. But the initial work really was done by those two guys. They worked very hard at it. They developed processes. They figured out ways, not just to process the records, but also to get them in shape so we could just turn them over to Gary Stern in the OPA office. And then Gary would do a little bit of magic electronically with what he did. And then poof, they’re uploaded into OPA. So we’ve got close to a million images from federal agencies, over the past two or three years, that we’ve uploaded into OPA that are available for public use. And that’s a credit to what they’ve done, the hard work they’ve done every day trying to figure out how to do it. And, the thing is, too, there’s never an accession that’s like the last one. Every accession’s a little different. So you have to kind of be flexible on how you’re doing things. And that’s really important, but, yeah. I mean, I feel good about the fact that I didn’t just say well, give that to NUMI, you know. And it’s going to be a pain in the butt, and I really don’t want to have to deal with it. I’m only going to be here for another five years, anyway. So what the hell. But I really felt like that was our responsibility. We were the people who were most knowledgeable about all the records from an agency that related, like DOD. We have everything from Vietnam back in analog form. Just because the new stuff that’s being created, you know, for the Gulf War is in digital form, it’s the same. And we’re the logical people to handle that. And, researchers would kind of scratch their head if all of the photographs were over in electronic records, but if they wanted to do some research on, you know, Vietnam, they had to come to us because that’s where the analog was. It, to me, that made no sense. The whole thing needed to be together. So, I do feel good about that. But the hard work, again, goes to the staff people and they have to slog through it every day." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "I’ve been prompted to ask, what is the General Record Schedule Item 21?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Well, that’s, right now, the General Record Schedule is being revised completely. And we’re very plugged into that whole process, because what they’re doing is, instead of, well, GRS 21 is, basically, the General Record Schedule for audiovisual records: motion pictures, sound recordings, and video materials, still photography photographs, and…I’m not sure is in that. Can’t remember. But, basically, it tells the agencies these are records that you don’t even have to come to NARA to pitch. Okay? They’re disposable right off the bat. So for us one of the big things is like passport photographs. Every agency, particularly ones that have a lot of overseas activities, they have big collections of passport photography. We’re not interested in passport photographs. So if you have passport photography, you can dispose of that without even coming back to the archives. That’s what the General Record Schedule does. It provides a vehicle for the agency to look at the records they have, look at the different categories on their General Records Schedule, and if they fit into that category, then they’re approved for disposal without the normal procedure, which is you’ve got to come to NARA and get approval. So, it covers generic things like that. Training videos, training photography, you know. I’m trying to think of some other things—screen images that were used for printing purposes. They are photographic, but they’re really a printing vehicle. They’re not a true photographic record. So, you know, those kinds of things are disposable. I think there’s kind of a catchall in there. I haven’t looked, I’m sorry, I haven’t looked at a General Records Schedule in a while, but I think there’s a catchall in there, I mean, that just sort of indicates records that do not document the activities of the agency. They’re not critical. But that’s what the GRS is. What they’re doing now is, instead of there being a GRS by media, they’re now taking it apart and creating a GRS based on subjects. So, we’re talking about, what’s the last one we were talking about? It was a grant photograph or grant records. You know, an agency who has money for grants. It would now encompass any photography that was part of the grant process. Instead of it being capsulized in a General Records Schedule, there’s now a reference to the photographs that are created as a result of the grant process. So now it’s kind of, the schedule, the old, simple, straightforward General Record Schedule is kind of torn apart and it’s all over the place. So every time we get a General Record Schedule to review for this process that we’re going through now, we have to look at it in terms of, and of course, they’re always big bucket, media-neutral schedules. They don’t get into any specifics about whether there actually are photographs related to whatever the subject is. We always have to look at it with an eye of, well, if they did have photographs, is what they’re saying workable? I’ll give you a good example. One of the first ones we got was on, I can’t remember how they defined it, but sort of output product, something like that. And Nick and I read it over. We had to read it about four or five times until we figured out what they were talking about. And what they were saying was that when an agency scans its records, the originals are disposable. Well, once we realized that, we did, oh, no, that can’t be, particularly for special media. You never throw out the original negatives. I don’t care whether everything has been scanned at the highest resolution that God can create. You just don’t get rid of the original negatives, because that’s the record copy that was made by the agency. And sometimes you can’t duplicate what’s in that original and in digital form. And from a physical point of view, if I keep those records in proper storage, and I take care of them, they’re going to last 500 years, at least. I have no idea how long these digital photographs are going to last. I mean, I hope they’re going to last. And, they’ll be transformed over time into new file formats so that in the future they’ll continue to exist, but I know those original negatives are going to exist for a long time. So that, that was an example of where once we figured out what they were saying, and we realized what application it might have for photography, we had to say, oh, no. That’s got to come out. Or you have to say something in the General Record Schedule that this does not apply to non-textual records. I hope that’s an explanation of the GRS, anyway. It’s a pretty simple straightforward deal. The problem with this new process is they’re trying to get into permanent records. You know, the GRS was designed for records that were common across federal agencies that could be disposed of. But now they’re trying to add to the GRS permanent records. And one of the things that we feel should not be there. They shouldn’t even be talking about permanent records, when you’re talking about a General Record Schedule. You should only be focusing on the records that are common to agencies that can be disposed of without prior approval. Do not get into permanent records, because you’re just going to confuse the agencies." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "In the overall field of audiovisual records, is there anywhere, any particular section or genre of it that you wish you could have spent more time on, or even worked on at all?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Probably the Western Survey photography. That was pretty much described when I got here, so there really wasn’t much to do, other than ensuring that it was properly preserved and making sure that we got, I think last time we talked, I explained about Doug Munson and how he copied the Brady negatives. Well, he also copied the Western Survey negatives. So we have high-quality duplicate negatives made of those, just as we do for the originals. And making sure that we preserve those records properly, and they’ll always be there. But, yeah, that would have been something I would have liked to have probably dug into a little bit more. But since it was pretty much described, there could have been some more digging done, but, you know, sometimes you get into these things, and you could spend years just tracking down different things that you think you’d want to know. And some point you just have to draw a line and say, okay, I need to get the basic description written so that I can get these records out to researchers. But, if I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time, that’s probably a group of records I would have really liked to have because it’s just fascinating. It’s just absolutely unbelievable the things that they took. I mean, they’re up on top of mountains with glass negatives and chemicals. All this stuff has to be prepared on site, the Collodion has to be mixed. They have to coat the plate. They have to sensitize the plate. And they’re 15,000 feet up in the air, dragging all this stuff around to take these photos. It’s just absolutely unbelievable that as many have survived. I just find it’s kind of mind-boggling. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "You made me just think of a question for you. How many descriptions have you written in your career?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Oh, gee." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "If you had to give a number, what would you say the number would be?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Probably not as many as you’d think, because I ended up getting into sort of a semi- supervisory position fairly soon after Stills. But it’s got to be over 100 at least, and I know that’s not very much, really. But I’ve done some pretty big record groups. One of the biggest ones I did was RG 77, the Corps of Engineers. That was a biggie. That was a pretty complicated group of records. RG 306, the U.S. Information Agency, I worked on those a lot. One of the great things I found in there was, it’s just amazing, the stuff you get and you don’t have information about. They had this big series they called staff and stringer photos. And it’s a great, it’s a great thing. I mean, it’s got a lot of interesting stuff in it, but a lot of it is trash, too. And a lot of it should have been disposed of. So I’m going through the stuff, and I’m looking at it, and I hit this one thing. And what am I looking at, but the March on Washington? Right smack in the middle of this body of records that wasn’t identified. There was nothing on the, on the list that came to us that identified clearly that it was there. And there it is, probably one of the most historic events of the past 50 years, you know, boom, right in the middle of this thing. So, you know, that was, that was fun to write that description. And we actually probably broke a couple of archival rules because I took that whole series of photos out, and I put it aside and made a separate series so we could describe it. I referred to the fact that it came from staff and stringer photographs, that it’s part of the staff and stringer. But, you needed to break a few archival purity rules, because you just had to have that stuff identified so people would know it was there and they could use it. Those were a couple of, but I, yeah, after I got there, I worked in Stills. I got in Stills in 1980. Probably by ‘83 or ‘84 or so I was kind of in a semi-supervisory position, even though there was an Assistant Brief Chief, who was Betty Hill, but she sort of let me be responsible for a lot of the preservation and the descriptive stuff that was going on. So, I didn’t get to write as many as I would have liked, and I have my intent to come back after I retire to work one day a week and help them out with descriptive work, because that’s the fun job. It really is. It’s a lot of fun to go through records and look at things and just see all the documentation and the people and the events. And, I could do that forever." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Who are some of the individuals that you worked with as the Assistant Branch Chief?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Oh, wow. Well, you know, Paul White. Paul was in the reference branch for a long time, and then moved over to processing. I worked with Paul for a number of years. We had a lot of students. You know, we’ve always had a lot of students. Gosh, I couldn’t even begin to remember all the students we’ve had, but they came in and came out periodically as they get to the point of graduation. And then they’d have to leave and go onto another position. But other people on the branch, I worked with Barbara Burger a lot. Barbara was a reference chief so we always had a lot of communication. And that was really one of the important things about the way the special media records are handled. A lot of people think you should do things functionally, well, we’re going to have a pretty little unit. We’re going to have a descriptor’s unit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. One of things that underlies the successes that special media has had, is that it’s always managed by one person who’s got knowledge of the media and looks at the overall to make sure everything gets kind of integrated. So you don’t a pipe for accessioning. You don’t have a pipe for description, which is separate from a pipe for reference. And the supervisor here never talks to the supervisor there. So, some of the things that they do these people can’t effectively use. One of the things we always did is have a close connection between reference and processing so that the stuff that we processed and the finding aids we created made sense to them. They could look at them. They’d review the finding aids before we’d ever finish anything. And I think that was really a very useful tool, and it’s helped a lot over the years. So, as I said, Betty Hill was Branch Chief. Jack Saunders was a Branch Chief for a while. Jack used to be the head of accession and disposal out in the Suitland. Then he came downtown and for a while he was our Branch Chief. That was after the first Branch Chief that I worked with was Joe Thomas. And Joe had been here for eons. And Joe was there for probably another five or six years before he retired. And then we had kind of a gap where we had sort of people cycling in and cycling out, you know. They needed a 14, so if they had a 14 floating around who didn’t have a job, so they’d put him in Still Pictures or wherever. And, hopefully, they wouldn’t get their fingers involved too much and just kind of let us do our job. And then, eventually Betty took over. And Betty was Branch Chief for a long time, including coming out here. And she retired out here. I’m trying to remember some of the other actual people I work with. Boy. Well, Nick came on board when we were still downtown, Nick Natanson. Billy didn’t come on board until we moved out here. Ellen Walker. Yeah, Ellen was with us for a long time. Richard Henderson, who had been working in textual, did a cross-training with Stills. And the Branch Chief decided she wanted, if she could finagle it, to get him in. So, we must have had a position open, and he applied for it. And she accepted him, and he came to work for Stills when we were still downtown. I’m trying to think of some of the students. We had so many, I’m not sure I can remember. It wasn’t a real big staff, but it was pretty good. I mean, they worked. Everybody worked pretty hard. They did a lot of good work getting records described because there were a lot of records. Even though the division or the branch had been around since the place was created, there was still a lot of records that were not very well described. So, one of our focuses was to go back and in some cases re-describe the records, because they were particularly valuable, interesting, and probably had a lot of research value that you really couldn’t identify based on the old descriptions, which often were just like two sentences, if that. So we tried to kind of punch those descriptions up. Gee whiz, I wish I could think of some more of the folks because most of the people I’ve mentioned were supervisory in nature. That’s about all I can think of, though. Other than the students, as I said. We didn’t have a big staff, not a really large staff for processing." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. What are some of the major conservation projects that have needed to be sent off to the conservation lab?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Well, the big one, of course, was the Brady/Western Survey thing that I mentioned before. That was a huge project, multiple, took us probably four or five years to get it all completed, working with the lab to take a look at all of the negatives. The ones that were broken, they had to be set aside. And the lab had to design these sink mattes, I think I explained that before, what the sink mattes were. Well, they had to design those. And we had to take the broken plates and fit them into the, into the sink mattes. Plates that weren’t broken, you kind of identified as to what they were, in terms of physical characteristics. And that process took a fairly long time. And then we went into the stage of getting a contract to get them duplicated. We were successful to get that done. And then the other big that happened along with that was being able to get a room with reasonably decent environmental controls. The Brady stuff and survey stuff was all the way up in 19, which was pretty near the top of the building. And they were stored in wooden crates, God awful enclosures. I mean, everything that you wouldn’t want to do with something valuable, that’s the way it was. But, you know, as time goes on you learn more about what to do about records. So when they first came here, they figured, that’s the right kind of storage, vertically on the long side of the piece of glass. You don’t store them flat, because they’re not even. Most of the plates are warped a little bit, because they were 19th Century glass. So, you know, they had basically what they knew at that time is what they did. And as more advanced knowledge comes on, you look at it and say, okay, we need to do something different. So we were able to get that room. It was 3E4 in the old building. And they had a special environmental unit that was put in the stack outside of it. They sort of carved this little room out that pumped in cooler air, a lot less humidity. I mean, it was very tightly controlled. It wasn’t as good as we have out here, but it was still very, very good, particularly with humidity. And that’s the key. Control the humidity, because it is water that creates all the problems with photography. Anything that can go wrong with photographs is exacerbated by the high role of humidity. High temperatures not great, but of the two, the humidity is the key. So that, that’s what Connie McCabe, who was the photo conservator at the time, she focused really closely on getting environmental conditions in there that were pretty, pretty tightly controlled. You don’t have all these wild swings. You know, one day it’s 34%, then the next day it’s 60%. It’s pretty constant. So that was a big thing. The next big preservation thing was really related to the move. I’m not sure if I mentioned this before, but we sort of had an unwritten rule that nothing left the building that wasn’t in an enclosure. It had to be physically protected to move it from AI to AII. We had hundreds of things that were stored in roller drawers, like long panoramas that were not in separate containers. They were in roller drawers. We had posters that were in large map case drawers, which is fine. But we had to figure out a way to move those without destroying them in the process. And, these oversized materials that we had, like albums that we had that we didn’t really have enclosures for, they were just kind of sitting on the shelf. And they were protected, but to move them, we had to do something. So we spent, must have been at least two years, with working the lab, going through each body we had, pulling it off the shelf, taking it down. They constructed special containers. If you go into our stack now, in 532, if you look at the top, you’ll see all these containers that they created for the move. And basically everything that was not in a container was containerized so that it would be safe in the move process. And it, that was a huge project, and it took us a long time to do that. But it was very worthwhile. And, as I said, the containers are still very useful. So, it’s sort of served a double purpose. We were able to move them safely, but also had something to keep them in and protect them in once we got out here. So those were the probably two biggest things downtown. Out here, because of the temperature controls and humidity controls, things are pretty good. Basically, what we have been doing is, in terms of preservation, is not so much sending things down to the lab, but identifying different series where the boxes are older. The folders the older, and they really needed to be re-boxed and re-housed. So we spent a lot of time, that’s what, students do a lot of that work, is just helping us get series that have been here for a long time re-boxed, re-foldered, negatives re-jacketed, things of that nature, so that they’re in the kinds of storage materials that are really going to protect them over time. But, periodically, we’ll work with the lab. One of the big things that Sarah Wagner, she was one of the subsequent photo conservators, did, is we had a beautiful set of prints that Alexander Gardner did called “The Sketchbook.” He did this at the end of the war, 1865 or ‘66, right in there. And originally it was in albums because I actually saw the albums at a gallery that were selling. And they’re, I think there’s only one or two of these albums in existence. We actually had, that the War Department obtained, we had all of the prints that were in those albums, but they had taken them out of the albums and mounted them on these crummy old Signal Corps mount cards. And they were deteriorating. The cards were tearing, and I was starting to worry that they might start tearing the photos that were mounted on the cards. So Sarah spent a fair amount of time going through and pulling every single image off the mount card and remounting it onto acid-free board, and doing all the things necessary to make sure long-term preservation was going to place. So that was one of the bigger things we did out here. And then the other thing, I’m sorry, I keep going on, is panoramas. We had so many panoramas that were rolled. They were in letterboxes. I remember we got an internal transfer from textual, and it was like 40 legal size boxes. And I said, “What the hell is this?” You open the boxes, and all of these rolled panoramas. And they’re all rolled together, you know. There’s like 40 panoramas in a box, because they’re all tightly wound. Well, we couldn’t do anything with them. I mean, you couldn’t open them because you’d just destroy them. So we got involved in a long-term process with the lab, and they flattened every single one of them. Put them in a Mylar enclosure designed just for the panoramas, and gave them back to us. And now we have them. We can actually serve them to researchers. They can, and some of them are just amazing, because in the early 20th Century panorama photography was really in its heydays. And so you get these long images. Some of them, literally, are ten or 12 feet long of units, military units. A lot of stuff was done overseas during World War I and just before World War I, and they’d do these long panoramas where you get everybody in the unit would be in the photo. And you had to have, I mean, the only way you could do it was with a panoramic camera. There’s an exhibit outside of the lecture rooms that talks about panorama photography. And some of the images up there are examples of the ones or copies of ones that we have. But it was special camera designed, literally, it was on a timing mechanism that panned. And as it panned, the negatives were in rolls. They would, they would pass through the lens this way so they would make this pan of the entire group. Now, you couldn’t have any movement, because if you did, everything got blurry. It was sort of like the photography from the Western Survey and Brady period where they used a lens cap. And they’d pull a lens cap off and you’d make a two- or three-second exposure. Well, nobody could move when you made that exposure otherwise, you’d just blurs. But so that was a big, significant effort we made to get all of those things. And we found some just absolutely amazing images in there. And researchers now have access to the images, which are things they didn’t have before. That was a big, big project. It went on for a number years." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Was that the roll film project, or—" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "[Interposing] No, the roll film project is really a, it’s good you brought that up. How could I forget that? The roll film project began with the identification of acetate-based negatives in our holdings that were deteriorating. Years ago I did a survey. I went through every different series, and I noted physical problems with the records, what needed to be re-boxed, what needed to be re-housed. One of the other things that I identified was physical deterioration of negatives in a series. So we kind of made a priority list of things that we wanted to have duplicated, because they were deteriorating. This began when we were in downtown. It’s become a little bit less of an issue when we’re out here, because we now have put all of the acetate negatives in cold storage. So it buys a lot of time preservation-wise. But when we were downtown, this is when the project, that’s when the project began. And I mean, there were series that were in just terrible condition. You know, 35-40% of the negatives had deteriorated to the point where you just couldn’t use them. What happens is the emulsion starts to delaminate from the base. You’ve got a plastic base. It’s an acid, cellulose acetate base. You’ve got the emulsion on top of that. Well, over time, the acetic acid, in poor storage conditions, begins to shrink. And when that shrinks, then the emulsion on top of it starts to pucker up, and you get these sort of rivulets that run through it. And, literally, if you tried to print it, you’d crack it, because the emulsion is so fragile. You know, normally, you think of a negative as pretty flexible. And, it seems it’d be pretty indestructible, but it sure isn’t. It doesn’t take much for that thing to start because it’s literally coated onto that acetate base. It doesn’t take much for that to begin to delaminate. So we had to address that problem. And one of the things that we did was the roll film project. When we first started, we were using sheet film, Kodak direct duplicating film. And that worked fine. There were some problems with direct duplicating, mostly because it took a long time to do it. But, also, because direct duplicating was a little quirky, I don’t want to get into this. It’s complicated, but if you hand somebody a duplicate, direct duplicate negative, and you don’t tell them, they have no clue which side that they’re supposed to print from, so that they can end up, you know, reversing the negative. And, of course, when you print it, unless there’s writing in it, there’s no way to tell like you’ve got everything reversed. You know, that the guy who was over here is actually supposed to be over there. So we decided to go to a roll project, and we figured it would automate better. We could do many more images a year. And we started using 70 mm roll film, instead of 4x5 inch direct duplicating film or 8x10 direct duplicating film, if we’re duplicating original negatives, 8x10 negatives. And it did. It dramatically increased it. I think, the best we ever did when we were contract printing using sheet film was maybe 35,000 40,000 images a year. And with the roll film, we got as high as 80,000 images a year. So it was a huge, a huge jump. So that project had been ongoing from the time we were downtown until we moved out here. There were just sort of changes in the cameras that were used over time, but basically it was all 70 mm roll film. And that has kind of stopped now, because the lab doesn’t do photography anymore. Everything they do is digital. So we’re continuing to try to preserve negatives that have been identified as potentially having deterioration problems if we didn’t duplicate them. We’re doing that in digital form now, instead of, you know, analog. And all of those images will end up in ERA or whatever the vehicle is where these electronic images will be permanently preserved. So that’s, that was a big project. And that, like I said, that started downtown and continued out here, and continues on today. Not quite as systematic as it had been, but we’re still doing it because we still have a lot of negatives that had been identified as potentially having problems, even though they were in cold storage, so…" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Is the new collections coming in, are those still, do they still have the non-digital format, that—" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "[Interposing] Oh, yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "—they contribute?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Absolutely. There are a lot of agencies that still have tons of analog materials. So, there’s still a lot of acetate material that some agencies are sitting on that they haven’t transferred. You know, they’re always reluctant to, oh, I can’t turn it over. We’re going to need it for this, or we’re going to need it for that. NASA is a big problem. They’ve got a lot of, like I said, all this moon photography they’ve got. There’s a lot of it out there. USGS, a huge body of photography out in Denver. It’s the USGS photo library. We’ve been trying for years to get them to transfer things. We’ve had some successes, some not so successful. But, yeah, I mean, we’re a long way from an only digital world. There’s still a tremendous amount of analog stuff that’s out there. And that’s important for upper management to understand, which I’m not quite sure they get, that we aren’t in an all-digital world yet, that there’s a lot of analog material out there that needs to be preserved, needs to be brought in. And we have a lot of analog material in the stack that we have to be concerned about that, too. We can’t just close our eyes to the fact that we’ve got all this stuff here, and there’s all the stuff that’s still out there." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. Getting back to your staff. Once you became Assistant Branch Chief, and this also leads into when you took over as Branch Chief, with the increased responsibility, how did you maintain your relationships with your staff? Did you, did you have to delegate more to take on the administrative side? Can you elaborate?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Not so much when I was the Assistant Chief, because, as I said, the unit, the number of people I worked with was pretty small. So, I had a very personal relationship with each person. I knew what they were working on. I reviewed what they did, all that sort of traditional stuff that supervisors have to do. Where it really turned was when we moved out to Archives II. One of things that was the management idea du jour was teams. We’re all going to be teams. So they kind of crammed us into this team structure, where we had a processing team and we had a reference team. And the teams took over a lot of responsibility for the day-to-day work, and they still do. And that, even at that point, we still had a processing head, which was me. And there was a reference head. It was Fred Pernell. And the Branch Chief, who was Betty Hill, when we got out here. They retired. So I’m left with taking over the entire place. Well, I couldn’t have done this job, and we couldn’t have been as successful as we have been, I believe, if there weren’t really good people in both of those teams. And there are. There are people who will kind of takeover, unofficially, the kind of supervisory role. More advisory, you know? When new people come in, I can’t train them. When you’re in a position like a Branch Chief, you’re being dragged all over the place. Every day there’s some other problem that somebody wants you to deal with. So, those day-to-day issues that I used to address personally by training and talking to people and, whatever, there are people there now, Billy, pretty much Billy and Nick, who I know I can trust to make sure the processing team does what it’s supposed to. And the same thing is true in reference. There are a lot of people on the reference team who’ve been there for many years. A lot of the people we have, they have a tendency to stay. They don’t wander off other places, because they like working with our kinds of records. So, the reference team does the same thing. Before I came here we had our monthly meeting. At monthly meeting, we sit, the reference team sits down and I’ll impart any information I have that came from upper management that I think they need to know. But, generally, what they do is they set the work plan for the month. Who’s going to work in the research room? Who’s going to do the letters? Who’s going to pull? Who’s going to do that? So they pretty much do that on their own. So I know, again, that that group can pretty much work by itself. When new members come in, they’re immediately assigned to a mentor. And that’s the person that’s their umbilical; they’re literally stuck to them like an umbilical cord. Everything they need to learn, they’re going to learn from that person. And it’s always somebody who’s been around for a long time, is very experienced, and knows the holdings. It’s a way for us to get those people up-to-speed quickly because we need the help working on whatever it is: working in the research room, working on letters, pulling, and refiling for the researchers or the vendors. So that’s a very good process. And the same sort of thing kind of unofficially goes on in the processing. If a new member comes in, Billy and Nick will kind of take them under their wing, kind of show them the ropes and move along. And, you know, I’m plugged into both, so I know what’s going on. But you can’t have the same direct supervisory connection that I had when I was only supervising five or six people. And now I’ve got 25. Well, you know, it’s ridiculous. You can’t keep track of what 25 people are doing. You have a general sense of what’s going on. And the same thing in processing. But, you really depend, and I’ve been lucky that way. I’m sure there are lot of supervisors who haven’t had that much luck, that the people they have working for them were that good and were that dependable and thought the same way I did. And that’s, really, that’s certainly a part of it. I mean, the kinds of decisions they make kind of reflect the way I think, because we’ve been working together for a lot of years. And they sort of know how I think. And the same thing is true in the processing side, so I hope that answers your question." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "It does." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "So, vastly different approach to how you’re supervising. With that little group, you really, I mean, I was really tied in tight. I knew everything everybody was doing every day. We talked about it, what was going on. When you get to the bigger thing, you sort of unofficially delegate to the teams responsibility for a lot of things that formerly you had probably done. And, again, you can only do that if you’ve got responsible people and people you trust. And, you know, like I said, I’ve been fortunate that way, so." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "That’s good. That’s good. Could you speak about the NW design review?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Oh, geez." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well, what is it, to begin with?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "I’m trying to think. I mean, we went through so many of these things when we moved out to Archives II. The design review didn’t have anything to do with the—I don’t think it had anything to do with setting up of the teams, because that sort of came in just as we were moving out from Archives I to Archives II. But basically, ah, geez. I may be at a loss here. If I remember right, basically, we just kind of, and it was kind of reviewing all of the work within NW and trying to figure out a different structure to handle the work. You know, I’m really, I’m stretching here. Mostly, I remember the special media unit going through a design review, reviewing all of the different work that went on in the media and kind of coming up with an idea of how we thought things should be structured. And, essentially, we said, well, let’s pretty much leave it the way it is. You know, don’t start mucking around. There’s a reason you’ve got a Cartographic unit and a Motion Picture unit and a Stills unit. The people in it have been there for a long time, and they know the records. So, be careful what you do because you’re going to end up creating problems when you start redesigning things and changing activities and moving people around. You know, it sounds like a great idea. You know, oh, well, I’ve got a problem over here. I’ll just move people over there. Well, the only problem with that is the work that these people are doing is complicated. And it’s not something you can just take people from one place and put them in another place and have them immediately have an impact. If you’re going to leave them there for two or three years, that’s one thing. But that’s not how these things generally work. It’s like hit teams. You know, let’s run over there and fix a problem. Well, the problem that these people have here is more complicated than something you can do in two or three or four months. You know, it’s a much larger problem and, generally, it has to do with lack of staffing. You don’t have enough people to do what you’re supposed to do. So, it’s like answering letters. You can’t just pull somebody from Cartographic and stick them in Stills and have them begin to answer letters. It doesn’t work that way. First of all, they know nothing about the records, have no clue where to look. They have no idea about the finding aids. They don’t know anything. So, what you end up doing is somebody who is answering letters then has to take the time to train the person who is there to help, which takes away from their ability—it’s a like a dog chasing his tail. I don’t think it ever accomplished anything. But I have to beg off on characterizing the design du jour anymore. But the only thing I can say is that I just remember that there were all these different management ideas that were brought in to help NW or, what it used to be before that was NN, work better. You know, become more functional, become more efficient. And I don’t know whether any of those things ever really accomplished exactly what they thought they were going to do. But I’m sorry. I shouldn’t really get into that. So, I’m sorry I can’t answer that." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. From 1998 to 2005, you were the Supervisory Archivist, Still Picture Branch, Special Media Archive Division. Why did it take so long for you to officially become the Branch Chief?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Got me." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "I asked a couple questions to others, trying to figure out why no—" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "[Interposing] Well, for one thing, it meant a promotion." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well, yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "You know, and they were pretty chintzy about it. You know, we were essentially, the people who were in charge of Cartographic, Motion Pictures, and myself, we were all GS-13s. But we were doing the same job that all the GS-14s in textual were doing. You know, the Branch Chiefs in textual were all 14s. And, unfortunately, we were all 13s, which was okay. We just went along and did our job, and it didn’t make any difference to us. But because of that we never actually officially got titled as the Branch Chief of motion or the Branch Chief. And they were always fooling around with what they called us. You know, we were a LICON and we were a unit, and we were this, and we were that. But, you know, we were branches. That’s what we were. But, yeah, it took a very long time to do that. And I have to credit Bob Richardson. Bob was the Division Director at the time when that all took place. He pushed very hard to get each of the units, not the people necessarily, but each of the units to be recognized as having the same status on the organizational line as the branches in other parts of NARA. And Bob worked very hard at that. He had to convince a lot of people, and yak, yak, yak, yak, talk about it at all kinds of meetings and write all sorts of papers. And, we discussed it ad nauseam with upper management. But, eventually, he was able to accomplish that and got the recognition that the division itself had to have a division head, and it had to have separate branch chiefs. And that they needed to be on an equal footing with the units in what they were called and what their GS grades were in textual. And, yeah, it did take a long time. And, but, as I said, Bob was very instrumental in that. He worked very hard at that. And I think, from our perspective, that was one of the major accomplishments was that we finally got the status. And that’s something, it’s kind of funny. We’ve always had, how do we say this? We’re always kind of looked at as poor sisters, you know, the non-textual division. Like there was something weird about us, you know? So, that’s why they are the way they were. And now, of course, textual was always the king of the block. But so, and I can always remember with other people who were in, like, upper management positions, not archivists, but like NW and WNW and places like that, when they came in and they didn’t really know that much about it, we always had to convince them that, yeah, this is the special media archives division. We do a lot of cool things. And, we really need to be recognized as a separate entity. We’re not part of textual. We do things pretty different than textual does. And the reason we do that is because of the records we have. That’s what drives everything we do, is the kinds of records that we accession and process. It drives everything. But you have to kind of re-explain that, every time. And we had to do it again this time with Ann Cummings. We had to start from scratch and try to convince them that no, you really don’t want to put us under NUMI. And, no, you really don’t want to put us under textual, because we’re not going to fit there. We’re just not going to work. But so I, you know, why it took them so long, who knows? But, you know, it did take a long time. And like I said, Bob Richardson gets the lion’s share of the credit for accomplishing that, which I think was significant." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Yes. From 2005 to 2014 to you retire May 31?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "My last day will be the 30th. It’s a Friday. But the 31st, I guess, is the official day, yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "You have been the Chief, Still Picture Branch, Special Media Archives Division. Was there any change from Assistant to being the Chief?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Not really." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Just the title?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Yeah, because I had been doing the work for five or six years before that. When Fred and Betty left I had the whole ball of wax. So, I literally moved my desk—I had been sitting on the processing side, which I was supervising those folks in 5350. So, I literally moved my desk from there over to the reference side. I didn’t use the office, because, first of all, I don’t like offices. But, secondly, I felt like I needed to be out among the people who were doing the work, because you just hear a lot of stuff. And people will talk to you that when you’re in an office, doesn’t always work that way. It’s kind of formal when they knock on your door and come in. But when you’re sitting in cubicle, they just come by your cubicle, and they start talking, you know? And you understand what’s going on. You understand the inter-relationships between the people. What’s working. What isn’t working. Who gets along. Who doesn’t get along. Who do you put on the same pull team because they get along, or you don’t necessarily put another person it. It’s just all the sort of interplay between people because the one thing you have to keep in mind is when you’re doing a job like this, is you’re dealing with people. And they have feelings. They have personalities. They have good points. They have bad points. And, as a supervisor, you have to deal with all that stuff. I’ve often, I joke with my wife that probably 40% of what I do is kind of therapy, don’t put that in there, you’re just listening to people. You know, you’re listening to them talk about their lives and the problems they have. And they may not have anything to do with work, but they do have something to do with work because people don’t leave their home lives at home and show up to work. Whatever is going on there, it comes into work. So there’s a lot of that that’s involved. And I just, I’ve always felt that when you’re sitting out there, sort of like one of the hoi polloi, you know, people are more apt to talk to you and communicate with you. And so you get a better sense of who people are and what they can do and what they can’t do. And, you don’t put them in a place where you know they’re not going to function, because you’re just setting them up for a failure. And that makes no sense. There’s probably somebody else who can do that, so you figure out who it is. So that didn’t really change much, because I, like I said, I’d already been doing it, but I guess the big change was I pulled myself from sitting over on the processing side to moving over to reference. And, that I just felt like I needed to do that. Because I didn’t really know the reference people that well, and what they did, because that wasn’t my job. That was Fred’s job. My job was working with the processing people. So, I really felt like I had to get over there and know who they were and what they were about and what was happening to them. What was killing them that prevented them from maybe focusing on what they were doing, you know? Something going on someplace." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "So, does a pro-active leadership style, did that help you develop the NWCS roadmap, the pathways career that you developed?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Yeah. It was all, it was all plugged into that. I mean, each of us kind of looked at our units and looked at the people we had working there. And, realizing how under-graded everyone was, in comparison to the work that they were doing, and it was terribly under-graded. We had reference people who were providing, honestly, archival quality reference consultation and research who were GS-7s, you know, GS-6s. It just wasn’t fair. So this was another one of Bob’s ideas, Bob Richardson. We sort of put this thing together, because what we wanted to do was create a vehicle for upward mobility. And so we the managers and Bob got together, and we sort of talked about what we were going to do. And we kind of set up these things. Each of us went back to our units and kind of wrote a little sort of path, roadmap, for our specific units, talking about what grade levels we thought people should be. And the key to that whole thing was not partially getting the promotions for the people who deserved it, which we were able to accomplish, but it was creating a vehicle that if somebody at the GS-11 level happened to leave, that that job didn’t revert back to a GS-5. That job stayed at a GS-11. And if we had a GS-9 who we thought could do that job, we could then move them to that position. I mean, I have to post it and everything. You have to go through the same rules. But you kept that position. That’s why we called it a roadmap. It literally was. If somebody was a 7, and there was a 9 above them and an 11 above them, if one of these people left, duh. It was there was a possible promotion involved there, which is how it was designed. And it worked for a while. And then upper management kind of lost interest in it. And then it just kind of disappeared. But at the time, we thought it was a really good idea. It was a way to provide upward mobility for people who really deserved it. And, the key, again, was not losing those graded positions because what generally happens in NARA is if somebody’s at a grade 11 and they leave that position, they’ll take that position and they’ll stick it back to the GS-4, 5, 6 technician and start all over again. No, we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to keep that GS-11 there. And if we had somebody who could do that job, then we’d put the job out and the vacancy announcement out. And people would compete for it, and that person would have a real shot at getting the job. It’s certainly possible that somebody from another unit could apply and that’s what happens when you put the vacancy announcements out. But the way they were crafted, they were designed for people who actually worked in the unit, because they always focused back on the work, on the media. You know, what we expected out of the person who was going to take the position. So, it created this little kind of a roadmap for people to move from one grade level to another.And like I said, it worked for a while. And then it just kind of disappeared, you know." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Why do you think the interest waned on that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Well, at some point, NW started this pool. And I think that may have been a result of, even above them, that there was some sort of a pool. You know, now we have this freeze board thing. You’re familiar with that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "It’s kind of like the pool. No longer if you had a vacancy, like, let’s say a GS-7 on the staff took a job someplace else. Well, that positon was not necessarily available for us to fill. It went into the pool. And up here they then decided, well, do they really need that GS-7 position, or do we need to put it over here in someplace else? So, the way I saw it, and, again, this is just my point of view, that literally, destroyed the roadmap because now these positions that you hoped you were going to have available for people to move if you had a vacancy, that disappeared. And if you were lucky, maybe the pool gave you the position back. But more often than not, it went someplace else. Then there were other things going on. And that’s basically, the pool thing, is since we were out here at Archives II. That was not downtown. And it came really into effect sometime after we finished with the roadmap. And that was approved all the way up the line. But that whole pool thing just really kind of, and, you know, again, we don’t have enough money. We only have so many positions we can fill, blah, blah, blah, blah. And to me, that’s the job of the Archivist. You go out and get us money. That’s your job. That’s the only thing you have to do, is you get the money to fill the seats in the desks. That’s what you do. If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be there. That’s just my simple-minded position from where I sit. But that’s his job. That’s who I look at it. Go get us the people to do what we need to do. And I don’t know. That has not been happening." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Let’s see." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "So, that’s kind of what happened to the roadmap, the pool. And now we have the freeze board, which is just as bad. They’re not going to listen to any of this, are they?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "No. Never. All right. Going to jump around a little bit." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Yeah, I’m all rambling." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "You’ve mentioned LICON before." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Can you explain what that is? It’s not an acronym, it’s a—" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "[Interposing] Yeah, actually it is." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "—abbreviation. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Yes, I guess. I guess, yes. Well, what it stands for is lifecycle control unit, and they just shortened it to LICON. And, essentially, it kind of replaced the branch structure, because they weren’t talking about branches anymore. They were LICONs. And we were the still picture LICON. And there was a motion picture LICON. And there was a cartographic LICON. And there was textual records LICON. So that, you know, that came in, I’m trying to remember. I think that came in when Jim Hastings was head of the textual division. And he always had a very close relationship with Mike Kurtz. So, like the design review you were talking about, I think Jim was heavily involved in that. And Kurtz, of course, was heavily involved in that. And then, this concept of the LICON came in, which, as best as I could tell, was basically just they didn’t want to call us branches, so they called us LICONs. And, at one point, they were calling us units, the Still Picture unit. Well, okay. So now we’re back to where it probably ought to be." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Now, do you still provide tours of your section, of your unit? Do you still conduct those? I’ve heard that you do those yourself." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Yeah, I do. I do a fair amount of tours. Nick does a lot of tours. I used to do all of the talky things, like the Modern Archives Institute and gobs of other things where you do presentations to agencies. And if the appraisal people wanted a tour for a particular agency, I would do that. And then as I kind of moved and had more administrative responsibilities, I couldn’t really do that anymore. So some of those went off to Nick. Nick does the Modern Archives Institute and does a fabulous job. He does a lot of tours with agencies. But for a long time, I did that a lot. I did them for special visitors, too. You know, there were people who had, buddies of somebody or other, who would come in. You know, I think I mentioned before, Barbara Streisand came in one time. And that was kind of hilarious, because when they had identified the people who were going to give her the tours, when they were passing the information around, they never used her name, because, apparently, she didn’t want people to know she was there. I don’t know why. They kept on calling her “the visitor.” So it was kind of funny. “The visitor would like to see Still Pictures.” So, when she came up, I gave her the tour. I showed her some pictures we had of her in the holdings. And but a lot of the tours I did were really focused at federal agencies, because, again, going back to what I felt was what we needed to do was to turn their opinion of us around, was to give them first­ hand knowledge and understanding of what we did. And as I said, it became particularly convincing when we moved to Archives II because of the character of the building. But, yeah, I did a lot of tours. And, somebody would call and say they had a friend in town, and can I give them a brief tour. Yeah, sure. So, you know, I did a lot of tours." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Can you comment on some of the famous, other famous individuals, that you’ve had visit Still Pictures, Ansel Adams and Annie Leibovitz?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Ansel came in right before I got to Still Pictures, about a month before I got to Still Pictures, so I missed that. I’ve been unhappy about that ever sense. I actually did spend a lot of time working with his assistant. He had an assistant who came in. After he came in and looked at things, he, you know, he sort of, oh, gee, I don’t remember that. You know, one of those things. And so he sent his assistant back to review the entire collection of photographs that we had. So, I worked with her and brought all the original prints out. And we looked at them, and she was talking about she was going to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I mean, she wasn’t really a famous person. But, I mean, she was very knowledgeable and, obviously, she must have been competent if she was Adams’ assistant. One of the other ones, including Barbara Streisand, Bob Hope was here and we showed him around. Yousef Karsh, I think I mentioned this before about that Churchill photo, where he pulled his cigar out. That was a real treat to be able to talk to him, because he was such a great photographer. And the Annie Leibovitz thing, that’s pretty recent. I guess that was about three years ago. She just contacted personnel, or Miriam Kleiman in public affairs, and said she was really interested in Abraham Lincoln. She would like to see some of the photographs that we have of Lincoln. So she, Miriam, contacted me. And we started a conversation with Leibovitz about it. And then she decided she wanted to actually come out and take photographs, not just of prints, but of the original plates. Well, then we started to get a little nervous about it, you know. So Miriam said, “Well, do you think you can do that?” And I said, “Yeah, I think.” You know, I brought in Sara Shpargel and Warren Barga. They were two, well, Sara’s a photo conservator. Warren has a good background in photography. So I brought them into this and we figured out how we were going to show her what she wanted to see. Because one of those plates that she wanted to see was pretty big and another one was broken in half. So, we had to be very careful with the whole thing. But, yeah, she came out here and spent at least two days photographing. And it was kind of interesting to watch her work, because she had these two assistants who did all the work. And then when it was time to take the pictures, she got up and looked in the lens, yeah, that’s right, and clicked the shutter. But she was very, very nice to work with. You know, you never kind of know how these people are going to be. You know, some of them have big heads and they expect you to yes, yes, you know, tug your forelock and everything. But she was very friendly. I found her a very pleasant person to work with, very nice. But she took these photographs, and they’re in her book. She did a book on things that, I can’t remember the exact title of it now, but things that affected her life personally. And one of them was Lincoln. She also had an exhibit at the, over at, I think it was, I think it was at the American Art Institute over in the Portrait Gallery. And she invited us to come to the exhibit, and we went over and saw it. It was very nice. But she’s a very nice person to work with." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Have you recommended any of your staff for awards, such as the, any of the archivist awards?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Oh, boy. That’s a hobby horse of mine. I have put in for archivist awards numerous times and never once, never once, was it even acknowledged. I never even got a note back that we got it, and it stinks, and we’re not going to give them an award. Zippo. Nothing. Zero. From anybody. And that is one of the things that makes me very angry, because I’ve got a lot of people, I think, who deserve the awards. I mean, I look at some of the awards they’re giving out, and I say, “Are you joking me?” I mean, that’s what they’re supposed to be doing. That’s their job. And I’ve seen people who work for me do some really significant things that are well beyond the confines of what their actual job is. But I’m sorry. I just, when I hear the archivist award thing, I just, I want to throw something because it just really rubs me the wrong way. You know, I don’t care if somebody reads something I write and says this is garbage. I mean these people have no business getting an award. Well, that’s fine. Just tell me that. Come on, do a better of this. But zippo. Nothing. I mean, I don’t even know whether it got up the chain of command. I don’t remember how these things even go. I mean, there’s a procedure for filling out the award and writing a lengthy justification for the award. And then it goes on. But it just like goes into the black hole. So, I did a lot of awards, cash awards, for specific things, like when we did the move of the military stuff from, from DOD way back in the ‘80s, and when we moved the Air Force stuff from the Air and Space Museum. You know, things that were really extraordinary activities. I did some big cash awards for those, for those groups of people who were involved in that. And then of the things that we designed, which I thought was a great idea, and actually the reference team was pretty responsible for designing it, was we designed a procedure for getting a day off, the time off awards." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Yeah. By dramatically exceeding all of our strategic plan goals, like I don’t know what the goal is for letters. Let’s say it’s, you know, 92%. Our goal was we had to make 98%. The goal for pulling and refiling for the research room was, you know, 85%. Our goal was 100%. Pulls and refiles for vendors, our goal was 100%. So we designed this, and if every quarter if the team met those goals, and this was approved up the line. We didn’t just institute it by ourselves. Every quarter, if the team met the goal, everybody on the team got a day off for it. And, they really looked forward to that. And they, they liked it. They felt like it was a motivational kind of thing. And it told them that somebody appreciated what the heck they were doing every single day to accomplish that kind of work, given the workload that they have. And it’s a pretty big workload for the number of people who are doing it, to be able to accomplish that. So that award was a great motivator. And disappeared for, I don’t know, a year or two, and now it’s back again, which is great. Unfortunately, we’ve lost so many people that the team can’t meet the goals that they were making consistently every quarter. So it’s like, oh thanks." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Are there any non-NARA awards or recognitions that your section has been given?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "I can’t think of anything, you know, specific, like somebody getting an award from DOD for doing something specific for them. I can’t really think of anything like that. Not for myself. I can’t remember any of the other managers or the unit. Nope, I can’t think of anything like that. I might be missing something, but I just don’t remember anything around that. Now, individual people get a lot of letters. I get a lot of letters from customers about what a great job they do, that sort of thing. And that’s important, but nothing officially like, well, like the DOD move. There was never anything from DOD commending our team for moving the records from Anacostia to downtown Washington, DC, and getting them up and ready for use in a fairly short period of time. Nothing like that. They just said, “Great job. Good. We’re glad you did that for us.”" }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Hmm. Well, is there any person or your whole unit, anything in particular that you want to do a special mention now for?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Well, I think I’ve mentioned Billy and Nick multiple times. They just do an amazing job given the amount of work that’s involved. And it’s going to get even harder after I leave, because that’s one less person to deflect a lot of things that somebody’s going to have to deal with. I’m not even sure who. But, I mean on the reference team everybody really does a very good job. I mean, Holly Reed, for example, she works in the research room three quarters of the time, 75% of the time, and 25% of the time other people cycle through. And you’ve worked in the room, so you’ve seen, in addition to her, there’s always somebody else on the staff who’s in there as well. But Holly does a really remarkable job. She’s learned all this on her own. Holly has a high school education. That’s it. But she is one sharp kid, let me tell you. She is very smart. And she’s picked up the work. She has just a really huge knowledge of all the holdings and how to direct people. And I think she has a pretty good manner with people, too, when working in the room, which is really important. You walk in there and somebody’s looking at you like what do you want? You know, it’s kind of intimidating for a researcher. And I don’t think that happens in our room. And there are other people. Sharon Culley is very knowledgeable about the records. Sharon does a lot of the really complicated letters behind the scenes, because she’s been here for a long time and has done great work. You know, Rutha Beamon does an excellent job with the vendors. She’s in charge of the vendor coordination. She does it for both Stills, as well as Cartographic. She does that plus she does a gazillion other things to help the team because, again, we’re really down in terms of staffing. So she’ll jump in and pull records for the researcher for a week. She’ll answer the telephone for a week, or she’ll do this, or she’ll do that. In addition to doing her regular vendor activities. Those guys are really the kind of the three leaders of the reference team. I mean, and as I said, Nick and Billy on the other side. So, the five of them are really class people." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well, what are your plans for retirement?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Well, I think I alluded to, at one point that I was hoping to come back and work one day a week here. In fact, I talked to Judy Lewis Watson yesterday about it, and she gave me all the forms to fill out to be a NARA volunteer. Probably will do that come fall. Not during the summer. Also, when we were on the extended vacation from Congress, because they couldn’t figure out a budget, I spend some time poking around in different places. And I live very close to the Howard County Historical Society. It’s just a bike ride away from where I live. So, I talked to them about volunteering there, helping out. I asked them if they had any photographs, and they were, “Oh, yeah. We’ve got a lot of photographs.” I said, “Well, I’ve been working with those for a while. You know, I might be able to be some help.” So that, I think, is going to take up some time. I’ve also gone back to the high school where my kids went. This is completely off topic, but I ran into the cross country coach, who is a good friend and worked with my daughter for years and turned her into really a very fine runner, but mostly because of his psychological ability to deal with her because she’s an unusual person. But he said, “Hey, you really ought to come back and help me out next fall. I could use some help on the cross country team.” I’m, “Hey, Paul, I don’t know beans about running. I mean, if you want me to help out with hockey or football, I could do that. But I don’t know anything about running.” He said, “Oh, yeah, I got all kinds of things for you to do.” So I think I might help him out. You know, carry cones around and stand there with times. And at the meets, at the cross country meets, sometimes you have to stand there and point kids to go, no, this way, not way, you know, stay on the track. That sort of thing. I then I might help him out with track, too, because my daughter ran track. And I’ve also thought about contacting the hockey team. And I played hockey in high school and college. So I thought, well, yeah, maybe I’d help out with that, if I could. So I was thinking about doing some work around the high school. And then that’s pretty much it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Great. So looking back over your entire career, how much did you enjoy the work?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "It’s been amazing. It absolutely has been amazing. I think back to when I was in graduate school at Maryland, and I didn’t have a clue what was going to happen to myself. My goal when I finished graduate school was to go back and teach in a small college back in Illinois, hopefully, the one I graduated from. I had a good friend, he’s the one that got me interested in American Studies to begin with, he went to Bowling Green and got his Ph.D. and came back and was teaching in the English Department. And he said, “Hey, you know you really get into this American Studies thing.” He said, “Maybe, I could help get you on board after you get out of graduate school.” So that was my intent, but then I backed into the job at the Archives. They needed somebody to move boxes from the records center to someplace else. And one thing led to another, and the next thing you know, like almost 40 years later, you’ve had just an incredible experience. The records you’ve worked with, I mean, that’s really the neatest part of the job. Everybody who stays here for any length of time will always tell you the records are just so interesting and so neat to work with. The researchers are fun to work with, too. You meet some really interesting people. You learn a lot of things from researchers, too. They have a lot of good ideas. Sometimes they’re kind of way out there, but, you know, other times, they’re really good and you need to listen to them. The photographers I’ve met over the years, learned so much from different photographers that I’ve talked with federal agencies, and even some of the more well-known photographers, you learn things from them. I’ve just been incredibly fortunate. Somebody with a history degree, you’re lucky if you can find a job. When I was graduating, I was thinking, “This is going to be kind of hard to find a job.” But most of the people I knew who were in the same graduate program that I was at Maryland, they were looking at maybe, one-year positions here and another one-year position someplace else. And, nothing long-term that they could count on. I did just kind of back into it. But once I got here, I realized what a place this was. And I really threw myself into it and learned as much as I could, particularly when I got to Stills, learning about photography, because I didn’t know anything about photography. And I’m not going to pretend that I’m a photographer. I’m not. But I’ve learned a lot about the history of photography and the different kinds of physical pieces of photographic materials that have been created, and learned how fascinating they are. And, printed materials and how interesting that is. And how do you make an etching? My God, you’re doing everything backwards, because when you print it, it’s got to come out right reading. But when you’re etching it or you’re engraving, you’re doing it backwards. It’s just mind-boggling. So, it, I’m sorry. I’m rambling, but it just, it really has been pretty amazing. I’m extremely fortunate. I wish every history major had the same opportunity when they got out of school. Not everybody can gravitate toward this kind of work, too, because it is, it’s different. It’s not the same. You’re not a historian. You’re an archivist, and that’s the not the same. There was a period of time there where they were trying to hire people, and they would kind of sell this place as a great historian’s place to come and do research. And when they got here, they found out that isn’t quite what the job means. An archivist is an archivist and a historian is a historian. We’ve got two different tacks going on here. So, in many ways, I guess I sort of like it because it was, I guess I’m kind of an introvert, basically. And I like working by myself. And I like starting something and finishing something. I don’t like to start something and it not get done. So, there’s a real sense of satisfaction when you start working with a series of records, and you go through it, and you look at, and you find things. Oh, my God, you find some interesting things, just incredible. And then you finish it. You write the description. You put it out there, and people start using it. And, there’s a real sense of satisfaction that you’ve done something. Maybe it’s not a car or a tank, but you’ve done something that people can actually use and will want to use and have an interest in. And I guess you don’t think about it that way when you’re doing it, but when you start looking back on it, you say, wow, that you did something. You contributed. You’ve done something that contributes to society. And particularly for our kind of work, contributes to people learning about their government and what it does, what it doesn’t do. That’s been pretty amazing." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "What has been your involvement, your level of involvement, excuse me, with the National Archives Assembly?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Well, you know, it’s funny. I really haven’t had much involvement with the Assembly at all. But when the Assembly was first started, years and years and years ago, I remember I was at a restaurant with a bunch of archivists, one of which was Gerry Haines. And I don’t know whether, Gerry Haines was there, Mike McReynolds was there, John Butler. These are all old-time guys. You know, I’m talking about 70s. The guys I played softball with on the archive softball team. We had a pretty good softball team, by the way. But and I remember that the idea for an Assembly, a group of professionals who were interested in the organization and what was happening to it at the time, I’m pretty sure that’s where it started. And then Gerry and Mike went on to kind of create, I’m pretty sure you’d have to go back into the history of the organization, but I’m pretty sure they were very heavily involved at the beginning with the creation of the organization. And I have to say, I’m not much of a joiner. I don’t do that too much. So, I don’t think I’ve ever actually been a member of the Assembly. I never went through that archivist hoopla that they used to have with the Society of American Archivists, so you could become certified. I never bothered with that. I’m just not much of a joiner." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "That’s actually my next question, about the SAA. If you’d, if you had involvement with them, but…" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "No. I mean, I’ve done some presentations on photography at different SAA things and MARAC, and a couple of other odds and ends. But other than that, I’ve never really joined the organization. And I guess I was particularly offended when they came up with that whole archivist certification thing. I thought something’s squirrely about this. And they were going to grandfather everybody in, if you did something or other. And I just said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got more important things to do than that.” But, no, I’m not in the SAA. I’ve never joined it. And like I said, I’m just not a joiner by nature." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. You’ve served under a number of Archivists of the U.S. Do you feel there’s a trend that each new Archivist has to make their imprint on the agency, that they have to change something?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Oh, yeah. Yeah, it seems like every other one wants a reorganization, to kind of reshape the organization to fit some view they have, like the one we’ve got now with all these pillars and all that stuff. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s kind of a natural thing for somebody at that level to want to come in and kind of put their stamp on the organization. And I don’t have a problem with it, just as along as it doesn’t affect what we do. Once you start mucking around with how we get our work done or, worse, if you don’t even understand how we get our work done, then I’ve got a problem with it. Then it becomes an issue. But, otherwise, I mean, I think I told you what I think the role of the Archivist is. The role of the Archivist for the United States is to get us bodies. I’m sure they don’t think of it that way, but that’s how I look at it. It’s sort of like a general manager of a sports team. Go out and get the people you need to do the job to get it done. And, I’m not sure they’ve been all that successful at doing that. There’s a lot of emphasis on trying to figure out what to do with what you’ve already got. And, yes, sometimes you can shift things around. But, sometimes it’s just a matter of how many people there are and how much work there is to be done, and that’s just the way it is. It’s the reality. But, yes, they all do, pretty much." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "How about presidential administrations? Has that affected the agency at all?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Oh, well, yeah. I mean, take Reagan, for example. When he came into the office and then we had those huge RIFs. I mean that really dramatically affected the agency, as well as the individuals. I mean, it made it very difficult for, I think, NARA to really do its job. So, not very far down the road after all that went through and, he came in and sort of dropped all these little bombs, they had to hire a lot of those people back, because they couldn’t really get the work done with the staffing they had. So, they needed the people that had, a lot of the people who had been RIFed. So many of them, I think, pretty sure came back to the building within a year or so of that. So that had a real, yeah, when he came in, that had a real dramatic effect on the budget. But, I mean, on others, not really. You know, there, sometimes they’ll create something that they think is a great idea to affect some something or other. And, it really doesn’t turn out to be such a hot idea after all, once they’ve put it in place and once you see how it starts working. You know, it creates problems. I think the biggest example I have of that is this Pathways thing with the students. It’s just crazy, I mean, the way it works. It’s like hiring a full-time employee, and these aren’t full-time employees, they’re students. And I understand the intent of what it is, but it’s not being implemented that way here. I think the ultimate idea is that some of these students would eventually come on to be full-time employees. And we’ve got some really good students that have been working here for a number of years who cannot get into the agency, and that is a crime, because they’ve been trained. They’ve been taught. They could make valuable contributions, and they are dead in the water. And that’s a shame. There’s no way to move, I mean there are some positions that, if they were identified that way, like before that there’s a possibility to move them up, but, generally once they finish their college or graduate programs and they graduate, they’re gone. And if you’ve had somebody for a long period of time, and we’ve got, we had two people like that who’ve been here for some quite some time and have done some really excellent work. One of them left last December, because he graduated, and another one’s going to leave this May, because she’s graduating. And it’s a shame. It really is. So, I don’t think the thing kind of worked the way they thought it was going to work. And it has been kind of big administrative pain in the neck to deal with. Anyway, I’m looking at it from a very low level. So but that’s just my opinion, as somebody who has to deal with it, day in and day out." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "All right. I just have two questions left for you. With the Still Pictures unit, what strikes you most about how it has changed from when you first got there?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Well, obviously, use of technology. I mean, it’s dramatically different than it was before. In reference, for example, when I first came to the unit, they threw me in the research room. You know, that’s kind of how you learn. They just throw you in the research room and it is trial by fire. And everything we did was you either had to remember it, or you had to go what we called the inventory cards. They were the series descriptions on these little 5x7 cards. And, you had a general idea. Like if somebody comes in and they said they’re interested in a topic if you’ve worked at the archives before you have a kind of an idea of, okay, well, that’s probably this agency. But then you have to go to the cards and kind of read through the cards and try to figure out, oh, it’s this series, or, well, maybe it’s that series. And then you have to go to the finding aid and pull that out and provide it to the researcher. Well, all of that can be done on a computer now. All of the things that used to go on in your head. I mean, I think the staff still does that, because of their knowledge of the records. But because all this information now is in electronic form, it’s much easier to just point to the, you know, PACP, the public access computers for the research and say, “Take a look at OPA. Do some searches, and it’ll start telling you the kinds of record groups you want to look at. Once you start to identify those, then we’ll take a look at the finding aid.” So, it takes away the possibility that whosever in the room might forget, because people have different levels of knowledge. But if you’ve got it all there, and it’s in the computer, and somebody can go in and do a search then that reduces that. And, obviously, if what’s in the computer when you’re doing a search, if the terms you want to use aren’t there, they don’t come out. That’s where the staff comes in handy, because they can say, oh, well, yeah, in addition to this, you also want to look at that. And that’s based on years of knowledge. And then on processing, it’s the same way. I mean we’re dealing now more and more with digital photography and all the work we do is being done using computers. We got specially-designed computers that are different from the baseline computers, because we needed them to work with the volume of records we’re getting. We needed double screens, so we could be looking at a set of captions, while we’re simultaneously looking at the image. So you’re not having to click in one file, close it, and go to another, you know, back and forth. You can open two files or three files simultaneously on multiple screens and do your work much more efficiently. So, if I would say any one thing that really changed. And, I’m not saying anything that’s earth shattering. I’m sure everybody would probably say the same thing. But we have jumped into that electronic world, I think, a little faster than some of the other units. I mean, textual, I don’t think, is anywhere near this. Cartographic doesn’t go anywhere near it. Motion is starting to move there, but they’ve got the limitations that they’ve got no place put stuff. They get such huge, massive files that even the processing computers that we got from the IT department, we work with Mike Wash to get these, I call them souped-up computers. They’ve got two four-terabyte hard-drives in them. The processing speed is triple anything that the baseline is. So, they really do function well. But even for Motion Pictures, it’s still inadequate, because the size of the files they deal with are so big. So, yeah, for us, I think that’s been the big thing. We kind of jumped into that with two feet as early on in the process as we could, because I think we all realized that this the direction we wanted to go. We wanted to be able to work with those records, because, as I said before, it made sense for us even from a reference point of view. Well, from a reference point of view that the images that were in electronic form created by DOD are closely related to the ones that were created in analog form before that, so. Yeah, that’s the, the technology thing is really, and it’s happening more and more. We’re getting into more and more technology. Cloud computing, cloud storage, all this kind of stuff that we’re going to have to go to, because there just ain’t no place that you can put a lot of the stuff that’s being generated between accessioning and the volume of things at the lab, the preservation labs are doing. And they’ve got huge, a huge volume of material that they have no place to store it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "What’s your favorite image or group collection from Stills?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Oh, boy. Well, I’m not very original. I would probably say the Ansel Adams. Nah, I go back to the Western Survey. Ansel Adams stuff is really great. It really is. It was really interesting because that was right about the time that he was developing his own theory of photography. So, a lot of the images in there kind of reflect this sort of technique that he was trying to create. They’re wonderful to look at. They’re amazing. And black, you know, a lot of people don’t like to look at black and white because they think it’s boring. But, gosh, black and white is just, it’s more than black and white. It’s just, it’s something else. And the Western Survey, there is some just amazing images in there. And that, again, I think not only they’re amazing from an artistic perspective, but the fact that they were able to do it with all the limitations and problems and stuff they had to lug around, gee, to get these images. Very interesting. Very amazing thing. So those are probably, that’s not very original, probably a lot of people say the same thing. But there are so many. I mean, there are so many groups of records that have such interest and interesting things you find in them that it’s hard to say just one or two. But I guess those two are probably the two that I have most interest in." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Is there anything else you want to add? To speak about?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "No, I just, I appreciate the opportunity. You know, I hope it’ll be useful. I know I ramble a lot, and I’m all over the place. And I’m not a very logical thinker. I jump from place to place. So, hopefully, somebody can listen to this and it’ll make some sense and provide a little context. I mean, I’ve been around for a while. So I’ve seen a lot of different things. We haven’t talked very much organizational structure, as it has gone from way back when it was Mabel Dietrich was forming NN and to the time we have now. But, hopefully I’ve given you some kind of idea about what’s going on in Stills from when I showed up in 1980 to when I leave in 2014." }, { "speaker": "MR. KNOWLES", "text": "Well, thank you for time, sir." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCCARTER", "text": "Okay." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. JONATHAN DICKEY", "text": "My name is Jonathan Dickey. I'm an intern with the National Archives and Records Administration History Office. It is 9 a.m. on the 25 of March, 2016. This interview is being conducted for a National Archives History Office Oral History Project at Archives I. Will you please state your name for the record? MR. RICHARD _McCULLEY_ : I'm Richard McCulley." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "And what is your affiliation to the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "I am the Historian at the Center for Legislative Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. Before you came to the Archives, what sort of background did you have that led you to being here?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Well, in 1979, I became the research associate for an administrative history of the Johnson Presidency. That was a National Endowment for the Humanities funded project based at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and directed by Emmette Redford. He was a professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and had been the president of the American Political Science Association. And I had studied under Lou Gould, who was a preeminent historian of the Progressive Era, and still is, and I had planned to be a Progressive Era historian. But by the time I finished my dissertation in 1980, I was already hip deep in researching the Johnson Presidential Library records, and Emmette Redford became kind of my postdoc mentor. And ironically enough, 15 years prior to that, he was the person that when I enrolled as a freshman at the University of Texas, I had my first official conversation with. I enrolled at a government major. He was assigned as my advisor. It was really quite perfunctory, but somebody had to approve the course line up you chose before you could get registered, and Emmette Redford was the first person I talked to." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So he was pretty much there your whole entire college career then." }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Actually, it's funny. He had written a textbook that was used by the government department for the main required course, and that was intimidating to me, since I had graduated from high school of 44 and was enrolling in a University of 35,000, and I heard he was a very hard grader, so I avoided him when I was an undergraduate. So that's an interesting story. So this was at the time when a lot of material had been reviewed and released at the Presidential Library, so Johnson records were ripe for researchers, and one of the purposes of the administrative history project was to bring together top scholars in the field of public administration from around the country, and put these records to good use, and develop a 12-volume series that was about how policies—how the economic diplomatic foreign policies, civil rights, federalism—were organized and administered by the Johnson Administration. My job as the research associate was to know the records, to help coordinate the research among the various authors, and to work with them to make sure that all the relevant material of the Johnson Library had been brought to bear for their books. That was the core responsibility. I also wrote drafts for several of these books. I helped recruit some of the authors in the series, most notably George Herring, who was at the University of Kentucky at the time, and the highest authority on the history of the Vietnam War. Herring wrote the book on the administration of the Vietnam War, and I was co-author with my freshman advisor, Emmette Redford, on one of the books in the series, _Whitehouse Operations:_ _The Johnson Presidency_ , which was about how Johnson organized and used this White House staff. That book is, 30 years later, still a standard reference for anyone trying to figure out how the White House under Johnson operated, how it was organized, and how he used his staff. I'll say a little bit about what I did at the library and how important it was to be there, especially as it bears on the work I now do. I spent a lot of time there, day in and day out. I was probably spending the better part of the decade three or four hours in the research room at the LBJ Library. Nancy Smith, who had been one of the initial hires there at the Library, was on daily duty in that research room, and she taught me an awful lot about the LBJ records. By the time I arrived in Washington, she was at the National Archives as the head of the Nixon Presidential Materials Project, and over the course of my research at the Library, it was really a wonderful experience. All I had to do was show up for work and that's where I met Bob Caro, Bob Dallek, Hugh Graham, Larry Berman, who were this first wave or first generation of Johnson scholars that used archival sources from the Library. So as I said, all I had to do was show up for work, and I knew this network of national scholars, plus the ones that I worked with very closely in the 12-volume Johnson Administrative History Project. So I was really at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, I was always at the Library. People to this day and even back then were a little confused about whether I worked for the Presidential Library or is it the LBJ School, and at that time there was available very close relation between the Library and the School of Public Affairs—Walt Rostow, who was one of Johnson's national security advisors, had a position joint appointment as in the history department and economics department, and I was his teaching assistant when I was a graduate student, and so he had an office right next to the research room at the Johnson Library, and I was up there an awful lot before I before I did any research in those records, and his wife was named Elspeth Davies Rostow. She was a very formidable force herself. She was the dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the time I got there. And there were all of the old LBJ administration people that were there, two of which I got to know quite well—John Gronouski, who was the Postmaster General under Johnson, later ambassador to Poland, my office was next to his. I got to know Wilbur Cohen. Johnson appointed him Secretary or Education and Welfare. I had looked at all of their records at the Library, so I knew their careers quite well, and I tended to gravitate toward those members of the faculty. Wilbur, also known as Mr. Social Security, because he was involved in the drafting of the 1935 Social Security Act, was eager to get on with public policy after the end of the Reagan Administration, and he foresaw the need for a revamping of welfare policy and the social safety net, and it contemplated this really huge project to review welfare policy from the New Deal to the Reagan Presidency. Unfortunately, Wilbur died suddenly. The school wanted to carry forward that project. They appointed me as a lecturer. I actually moved into Wilbur's office so I could have access to all of his papers going back decades, and began directing the project on a topic I quite frankly knew very little about, but this was a project that the students in the seminars knew much more about than me. They were specializing in these areas…So we developed a history of welfare policy from FDR to Reagan that was published as the _Social Safety_ _Net: Reexamined FDR to Reagan_ , and I was the editor of that publication. So that pretty well hits the high points of my years prior to coming to the National Archives in Washington." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So you spent the majority of your young life in Texas. Did you move to DC just to come to the National Archives, or was it you came here for something else and then ended up at the archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "No. I was in a really, you know, certainly in retrospect, that was a very enviable position. I was half-research/half-teaching for most of the 1980s, but I didn't ever have a tenured position, so I was looking for some way to get to Washington. I didn't know for sure what I would do, or how I would get here. I had heard that Mike Gillette was up here. I had been in graduate school in the history department with Mike, and in the 1980s, he was in charge of developing the Johnson Oral History Project, so we had a visit over the phone, and he told me about something called the Center for Legislative Archives, and even better, Congress had created a position for a Historian at the Center, and he encouraged me to apply, which I did." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So that's how you ended up here at the Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. So when the office first opened up, how was it—how did it operate then? Because it's gone through several changes in how it's titled and where it's been under since then to now, correct?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Yes. That was a question on my mind before I got here and I learned a little bit about it when I did get here, and during the course of being Historian, mainly for Congress, but also looking into our own records, I learned an awful lot, so how did the Center come about, and why on earth did they want an Historian? That really happened in 1989 when Don Wilson, who was the Archivist at the time, administratively upgraded the division of Archives holding Congress's records and named it the Center for Legislative Archives, and Wilson's action, I later learned in great detail, was to correct a problem, and from the very beginning in the 1930s, the National Archives had always had this intention–they stated to Congress—of having legislative records as a total separate division within the Archives. That did not happen. Between 1950, when the Archives lost its independence, it became part of GSA and 1985, I count thirteen different reorganizations. Legislative records were kind of folded in with executive records, and things reached kind of a nadir in the 1970s when, for most of that decade, there was one archivist, the full time responsibility for legislative records. That's pretty low. So the ultimate solution for this really came with a 1990 law creating the Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress that assured that the National Archives remain continuously accountable to the House and the Senate concerning the records, and that Advisory Committee is ultimately chaired by the Clerk of the House, and the Secretary of the Senate, who are respectively responsible for the records of the House and the Senate. The Senate report accompanying that legislation directed the National Archives to make the Center for Legislative Archives comparable to Presidential libraries and its staffing levels and pay grades, so the model for the Center was the crown jewel of the system, the Presidential Libraries. That report also gave a mission to the Center of promoting the records, scholars' use of the records of the Senate and the House, and for furthering the study of the history of Congress. And then finally, the report specified that the Center was to have a Historian to work with the Director to make these things happen. So that was a lot more than I knew at the time, but that, in retrospect, is what was going on at the time I learned about this position." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So when you started in the position, how many archivists did the Center have at that time?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Same number we have now." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "And how many is that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Archivists—let me count. About five or six." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Five or six? Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "We have a staff of about 20 when I arrived 1993. We have a staff of 20, 24 years later, so the staff has remained remarkably stable. So I applied for this position–it's a pretty interesting story— in early 1992 along with about 160 other PhD historians. In October of 1992, I learned from Mike Gillette that a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst history department had been selected. After accepting that position about a month later, that professor changed his mind, and decided to stay at UMass of Amherst, so I obviously reapplied. I had learned a little bit about the fine art of submitting an application, which really increased my chances the second time around—just little tweaks in the wording. Also by that time, my dissertation had been published, _Origins of the Federal Reserve Act: Banks and Politics During the Progressive Era_ , and so that was a real live publication, not just simply an under contract or forthcoming sort of thing that must've strengthened my application. I recently learned from one of our researchers, actually, that after Ben Bernanke stepped down as the chair of the Federal Reserve Board, he included _Banks and_ _Politics_ as one of six recommended books to read for his George Washington University course on the 2008 financial crisis, so after thinking for several decades that book had fallen off the radar screen, I was glad to hear that. So Mike Gillette interviewed me in January of 1993, and I was contacted by the personnel division of St. Louis shortly thereafter and told that I'd been selected. So I showed up on the appointed second week of February, and my culture shock of going from academia to a Federal government agency began, [laughter] which is a pretty hilarious story. Again, in retrospect, at the LBJ School, I had a huge window that opened up to a view overlooking the University with the LBJ Library off to the side–[Laughter]and beyond that, the hill country with breathtaking sunsets. Those days of sunny panoramic views were gone. Archives II, had not opened by then. It would open shortly thereafter, but at that time, there were, I was told, over 600 employees crammed into this building. I was given a very small, poorly lighted desk back in the stacks. This was February. And you know, we sometimes go through these days and days of cold weather and cold rain and darkness. I would get to work. It was dark. I would go back in the stacks, very seldom got out for lunch. When I left, it was cold and dark. So I was very excited about the position, but I became a little depressed, and I think it was because of light deprivation, so that was, you know, one of the kind of physical adjustments. The other thing was I was asked to do something that I regarded as very strange. I was told I needed to sign in when I arrived at work, and sign out of the office when I left. I had never done that, and in academia, you are not on the clock—you are never off the clock. You know, you worked any hours and any days of the week until the book is completed or the article is completed, and so this was a completely different mindset, kind of an adjustment at first, but after a few years, I kind of warmed to that routine, and became a creature of bureaucratic habit like everybody else, and I'm perfectly content with it. I'd be very upset if I didn’t sign-in in the morning when I got here at 6:00." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So besides being back in the stacks in the dark all day when you first started, what was your typical day like? Were you reading the materials? Were you making papers? Were you organizing things?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "I was trying to learn the holdings, and of course, that's quite an undertaking. You know, we have as many textual records as all the presidential libraries combined, so where to begin, and as I'll discuss, one way to get in the records in depth, was to just bear down on a single committee. That committee turned out to be the Armed Services Committee, so I learned a lot about the records that way. Within my job description, there was enough work to keep several historians busy, and initially there were a lot of expectations, certainly not all of which could be met, but a real fundamental expectation was really quite similar to what I did on the Johnson administrative history project. It was to learn the holdings well enough to inform scholars what materials might be of interest to them, and what research opportunities might be available in the records of the Senate and the House, and to serve as the liaison with the scholarly community. That was really kind of the heart of what I tried to do, and learn the records well enough to do that, and to reach out to scholars, which was really quite a challenge at this time. The 1980s and 1990s were probably the low ebb for historian's interest in political and policy history. Since the beginning, since really the 1960s, historians had become more and more oriented toward the subfields of social, cultural, and intellectual history, and that's where all the energy was. That's where all the publications were, that's where the sessions of the annual professional conferences were. They were all skewed to certainly what I regarded as very narrowly-defined, almost arcane investigations of race, class, and gender history. Even among U.S. political and policy historians, the major framework was the Presidency, not Congress. You know, Congress was more or less, at best, an afterthought, and more usually regarded as just kind of a nuisance in the way of enacting Presidential programs, so this was a tough environment. In fact, I was a pretty good example, having come from the LBJ Library and LBJ School of just what that problem was. There was no funding for investigating Congress by comparison. There was not yet a center to study Congress comparable to a presidential library, so that was the ultimate purpose, and the whole situation was really very distressing to some people here in Washington. In 1989, there was a conference organized largely by Richard Baker, who was the Senate Historian and Ray Smock, who was the House Historian. This conference celebrated the bicentennial of the meeting of the First Congress, and members of Congress, journalists, and a handful of historians spent an entire day deploring historians' neglect of Congress, and trying to think of how do we go about doing something about this. So this provided a lot of the empathy for the Advisory Committee and the raising of the status of the Center in trying to put more behind the records of the Senate and the House. So where to begin? You have to start with what is there, and those were the national professional associations. And so one of my responsibilities was to represent the Center to those organizations. You know, that in and of itself, was an outreach activity—just to try to get us on the radar screen, and so that's what I did. I started working with the most significant organizations, the most significant of those being the Organization of American Historians, OAH. That was the premier organization of U.S. historians. The American Historical Association, AHA, a much larger organization based here in Washington. Other important organizations included the National Council on Public History, which was mainly an organization of non-academic historians, historians from the National Park Service, other Federal history offices, state government history offices, private non-profit history organizations. There was the Social Science History Association, SSHA, which were made up of sociologists, and economists, and political scientists who had adopted a historical approach to their topics. There was an important journal, The Journal of Policy History, they sponsored every other year a very prestigious—prestigious in terms of who participated in these conferences—sessions on various aspects of public history and politics. So, throughout the 90s, I put a lot of effort into making presentations, organizing panels, speaking about the holdings of Congress, and to discuss research potential, so I referred to this as missionary work, and thankfully, I was joined in some of these efforts by Betty Koed. She had been hired as the Assistant Historian of the Senate in the late 90s. She is now the Senate Historian. So we teamed up from time to time at these conferences to kind of educate the profession about the need for more attention to Congress, and how to go about using Senate and House sources. Every four years, the OAH and AHA and the American Political Science Association held conferences here in Washington, and those were opportunities to really get involved in their conferences and programs. That afforded us the opportunity to organize offsite panels here at the National Archives and introduce them to the Center, and to hold work sessions as well on how to use Senate and House records. Historians had largely ceded to Political Scientists any serious attention to Congress, at least Congress as an institution. APSA had a legislative section. The Political Scientists were mainly—even the ones that study Congress—were mainly interested in quantitative techniques and theoretical questions. Political Scientists generally are not attuned to archival research, and I attended as many APSA conferences as possible, and even the regional–northeast region, APSA conference I made some presentations, but it was really an uphill struggle, and really a quite frustrating situation, because the scholars, Political Scientists, who were really most interested in Congress didn't do archival research. It didn't take long to kind of identify who those were, the ones who would do archival research. Historians who were attuned to archival research were not at all interested in Congress, so the was this disconnect here. Thankfully, the Center had hired Kenneth Kato, who was a Political Scientist, who would later get his PhD in political science at Johns Hopkins University, and is currently the associate Historian of the House, so Ken was much better than me at communicating to this group, and he thankfully took over spearheading the effort to reach them. There were a couple of local organizations that were very important to helping me kind of get my feet on the ground here, and the most important of those was the Society for History and the Federal Government. This is an organization of government historians. I became an officer in the late 90s and early 2000s. So this is a wonderful networking organization where members meet, they share information about their offices, they address the challenges in writing Federal history. Another organization was DC Historians which brought together government and university professors here locally in Washington. It was an informal organization dating back to the 1950s. We met at George Washington University for lunch, heard speakers to share information about what was going on in participants' departments and in government history offices, so in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was co-chair with that organization with Charlene Bickford, with the first Federal Congress project in George Washington University. So that's what I tried to do to start getting the word out about the Center so that historians would know we were here, and how we could help them." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "You said the Center was set up using the presidential library as the model. Presidential libraries are normally based off of, you know, their time as president, four years, eight years. Congress obviously has a much broader history than that, so do you feel that it's setting up based off the presidential library's limits how you can help historians research?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Presidential libraries have a huge advantage. They've got an essentially static collection. Our holdings double, we calculated, roughly every 13 to 15 years, so we've got an expanding collection here. Now, the main thing that makes that attempt to model us after the presidential libraries really work, and what is quite different about presidential libraries and the Center is the unique kind of political context of the records. Presidential libraries, certainly when they're first getting started and even much later—go ask the people at the Nixon Presidential Library—have people around who want to protect that administration, so you have to do your professional responsibilities within that context, and push things as far as you can. We also deal in the political context in which there are many former members here in Washington, which opens really great opportunities for what we can do, and there are members on the Hill. We're a custodian of the records. As I said earlier, Congress owns those records, and they frequently recall the records. That makes us different from the rest of the archives. For example, when the Senate Judiciary Committee holds a hearing on a nomination for a judge, chances are very good that they have gone through this before for that judge's appointment to another position, so they will recall those records, and so we are a service organization for Congress active using the records. We encourage them to archive those records, but we're going to get them right back to you as soon as you need them, so you don't need to keep everything up there, just the things you're working on right now. So we work in that political context, and so that's different from the executive branch records—when they're archived here, the archives owns those records. They can do anything they want to do to promote their use, and those records are on a completely different archival and political standing than ours, so that really is the justification. And you know like presidential libraries, we want to promote our holdings in a way that is not done for the various record groups in the executive branch, so it makes sense." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "With the executive branch records, typically after a set amount of years, they're open to the public to look at. Is there that same thing with Congress, or since the own it, is it a person puts in a request, and you know, Congress may say yes, you can have it today, but a week from now, no." }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Well, Congress sets the access rules of the Senate and the House, and they, unfortunately, have different access rules. Generally, the Senate records are available 20 years after their creation. On the House side, it's 30. It sure would be nice if they were both 20. That makes a lot of sense from a research point of view." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "So Don Ritchie, past Senate Historian, once asked about that, why is the House's at 30? And his answer was, because the Senate's at 20. That's the Senate version of why there's a disparity, but yes, they do, and investigative records are usually not made publicly available until 50 years, so there's a longer time period for investigative records. Now in a case of overriding public concern or interest, that can go outside those access rules, and that has frequently been done with investigations, especially of high interest, such as the JFK/MLK Assassinations Committee Investigation of the 1970s. You know, those were matters of overriding interest, so committees can decide that this material, with the approval of the proper offices in each, in the House and the Senate, that these records need to be made available, because there's an overriding, urgent public need to do so. And in the 1980s, there was a liberalization, and those access rules I just outlined came into effect. Prior to that on the House was particularly guarded concerning access to their records. Any researcher that looked at any House archived records had to write the Clerk of the House and secure permission. This is not exactly promoting research in the holdings, and furthering the study of the history of Congress, so there was a lot of lagging on the Archives' part, but from that point of view Congress didn't really do itself any favors in terms of promoting scholarly interest in what they did, and the level that met what scholars were interested in on the presidential level. So, that was another way in which we were going to be brought up to a Presidential level in terms of access and openness. And for this bicentennial celebration also, the staff back in the 1980s published a volume describing the Senate records and the House records, guides to the records of the Senate and guides to the records of the House. That really helped scholars kind of get their bearings before they even got here in terms of what our committee records consisted of, so that helped a lot. And the other part of my outreach effort really consisted of making the most of scholars who visited the Center, so I not only went out to the associations, but really paid attention to what was going on here at that time. Now, we didn't have nearly scholars come in back in the 1990s that we have today, but there were some really outstanding scholars that, you know, what I regard as kind of the first generation of scholars that took advantage of the opening of the Senate and the House records, and what the Legislative Archives had to offer them in the way of support. And they were very important in developing an awareness of congressional history, and I'll just give you three examples. One was Richard John. In the early to mid-90s, he was at the University of Illinois Chicago circle, he's now at Columbia University. He wrote an award-winning book that was published in 1998, _Spreading the News: the American Postal System from Franklin to Morse_ . He traced the development of the U.S. Post Office and the communications revolution that occurred before the telegraph by conducting an enormous amount of research in petitions that were sent to Congress, and petitions calling for the establishment of post offices and post roads. Probably more than any other historian, Richard put petitions to Congress kind of on the map with scholars, and 19th century historians have really taken note of that, and now recognize their value and importance. They're the single most important set of records for 19th century records. Congress from the 19th century did not have the committee structure they have now. There were not three big Senate and House office buildings. They did their work at their desk. It was not a lot of paper. The committees had no staff such as we have today, so very little paper was really generated by those committees in the 19th century, but what we do have is their connection with the public, and you know, tens of thousands of petitions, which really show communication between people and their representatives, and how people organize politically, and how the public framed issues themselves. Petitions are taken very seriously. It was a very formal way of communicating to Congress, and members of Congress believed that it was absolutely essential that they take note of it, introduce legislation and a response, so it's really regarding as a way of connecting Congress with people in ways we do in different ways today, or don't do at all in some cases. So Richard was really a key figure in that first generation of scholars at the Center that came up in the 90s. Another one that did a great deal of work in our holding was when I first got here was Charles Stewart of MIT. He collaborated with Garrison Nelson at the University of Vermont to publish an absolutely essential reference, the two-volume committees in the United States Congress. It's a compilation of the committees, their members, and their jurisdictions. There was a great deal of attention on the part of the Advisory Committee to create a physical presence for the Center, and so the east research room was dedicated as the congressional research room. That's where all of the publications we had, the Congressional Records and their predecessors, complete run of the Senate Journals and the House Journals, which are kind of a starting point in terms of getting information you need to get into the records. There was an organization called the Congressional Research Service who published an index to the Congressional Serial Set, all the reports and documents of the Senate and House. We had a complete run of those. We had descriptions of our own findings aids for certain investigations and committees. At this time, it was a notion of a place where research was really coordinated, and everything brought to bear. The World Wide Web was quite in a primitive stage at this point. We weren't quite there. So you'd go to the east research room, and all of this stuff, which is now online, you couldn't do, so Charles Stewart was just in heaven when he was here. He said it was his favorite place in the whole world. He loved the congressional research room, so that was the technology then, so we did it differently than today. Everything is available, a lot of things are available–except archive material–online today, so what was a state-of-the-art facility, as the advisory committee called in the 1990s, is not state-of-the-art today, but we thought it was magnificent. Another scholar who really did incredible groundbreaking work at the Center in the 1990s was Julian Zelizer. I got to know him quite well when he arrived in the mid-90s as a dissertation student at Johns Hopkins University. He conducted a lot of work in the House Ways and Means Committee records, and wrote an award-winning book, _Taxing America: Wilbur Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945 to 1975_ . It was published in 2000, and based on his dissertation work. No historian has really done more than Julian to shine a spotlight on Congress, and move political and policy history away from the preoccupation with the presidency, so he's a real hero to us, and kind of cut his teeth in terms of his archival research here at the Center. So he's recognized as a real pioneer in the rejuvenation of 20th century political history, preeminent in the academy, but also he's become this kind of go-to authority in the media when they want somebody who can speak authoritatively about the history of Congress. So I could mention a lot–some more. Certainly Bob Caro, who I met way back at the LBJ Library, shows up, because he was working on his book that eventually became _Masters of the Senate_ . It's about Johnson's Senate years. And so I was working in the Armed Services Committee, and Johnson's rise had a lot to do with his work in the Armed Services Committee and the fact that Senator Russell appointed him to head a special investigation committee, and so I worked with Bob when he was working on that book. But you know, these are scholars that have appeared at Center events, on panels that I've organized, on various professional conferences, and they've really helped us build the Center into this research hub by sending the graduate students, and to this day we stay in close contact with him, and you know, this initial core of 1990s scholars kind of multiplied and helped us spread the word in terms of what can be accomplished here. In fact, Charles Stewart is going to be here next month to give a talk on his book on the history of the Speaker of the House, so we're very much in contact with these folks, and I mean, these were the first big scholars we had that came here when I did the Center. But you know, it was mostly going out to other places. We didn't really have any way to kind of showcase what was going on here. The Public Affairs staff was, you know, nothing like it is today. It's much more organized and larger, but at that time, Sam Anthony, who's now an assistant to the archivist, occasionally scheduled noontime presentations where authors who had worked in the archives records could talk about their books, so I kind of piggy backed off of Sam's effort and would make suggestions about who had been here, who had come out with a book—something significant on Congress—and he took me up on that, but we didn't have any program like that at that time–it was too soon, and we didn’t have the resources. One of the speakers that Sam scheduled and I recommended was Joseph Hernon, who in 1997, published a wonderful book, _Profiles in Character: Hubris and Heroism in the U.S. Senate, 1789-1990_ . The title is obviously a play on the words on John Kennedy's book, _Profiles in Courage_ . I had met Joe at an AHA conference here in Washington when I had organized a panel on the history of Congress. He had been in the audience. We visited after the session. There was this immediate connection. You know, it was clear we were on the same intellectual wavelength. Joe explained to me that he had grown up in Washington, he had retired here, and that he had been a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. So a light bulb went off. This is the guy who turned down the position that reopened it, and is the reason I'm here, so we were intellectual soul mates and became good friends. He's a great guy, so that's an interesting story. I had no idea who this person was until that time. This was I think in 1999, and obviously, he had applied and been offered this position in 1992, so I had been wondering who is this UMass Amherst professor. That's how I met him." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Has your relationship with him, or his relationship having applied for this position helped the Center, like in the academic world, bring more people in?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "With who now?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "With the person from Amherst." }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Joe Hernon." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Well, Joe Hernon was retired at that point, and he didn't, no, he didn't really work with this." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Unfortunately, Joe got cancer and died of cancer in 2007. And before that, because of his partner's career needs, they moved to Massachusetts. Joe was a great guy and a wonderful historian. You could've heard a pin drop in the archivist conference room when he gave his talk. Then he'd quit. Then there was this silence. Somebody finally raise their hand and the question was, how do we get in your class? It was a spellbinding lecture. So you know, we had no way to showcase what was going on here. I worked with Sam a little later to highlight some of the important research that had been going on in the 1990s. I worked with Sam and Julian. We organized a symposium on a really very significant anthology that Julian edited, titled “The American Congress: The Building of American Democracy.” So this symposium was in 2004. About six of the authors who were part of that who wrote chapters in that book participated. It was a milestone, and kind of pulling together some of the best scholarship going on. A number of them had done research here at the Center, so this was really presenting congressional history I think and the first time is kind a coherent subfield of U.S. history, so I was a part of putting that together. And by then, we did benefit from the McGowan Auditorium. But most of the work that went into that had been done in the 90s, so that was kind of the first group of researchers who came here." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "When Archives II opened in the mid-90s, did that change how the Center was working? Do any of the records go up there at all, or is everything still here just as it was when it—" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "[interposing] It didn't change how the Center's working. The records stayed here. All of the Senate and House records stayed here, where they're going to stay for reasons I've already alluded to. Congress does not want their records out at College Park. They want to stay there, so they can have them when they want them. Now what it did do is free up a lot of space. You know, we finally got some elbow room around here. We all got offices of our own. We all got out of the stacks. Richard Hunt, who is now the Director of the Center, also had a table back in the stacks. It was just a pretty dreadful situation, and so you know, we got in the space. One of the things that was not good from my point of view is I was just learning the staff and getting my bearings here when Archives II opened. Well, everybody left, so I don’t really know any of the archivists, or never got a chance to meet the archivist or specialist with certain groups of records. I know names, but I never got to work with them, so there's been a real disadvantage, I think in opening up a two-way out there. I'm one of these people that doesn't like putting Federal facilities outside of the District. I like to keep things centralized, and I think we had space to do that, but we didn't. And so we also had people dread going out there, because it's a huge waste. You spend at least half a day for a meeting by the time you get on the shuttle to come back. So it wasn't all advantage, but it certainly had the advantage of giving us the space we needed here in the National Archives building." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So is that the biggest disadvantage really was just the time and effort it takes to go out there if you have to do something there?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Yes, and you know different archivists do it differently. The Archivist has an office here, you know, as contemplated when the building was designed and built. He also has an office out at AII. David Ferriero, the current Archivist, this really is his office. He doesn't go out to AII that much. John Carlin, who became the Archivist in '95 I believe it was, spent all his time at Archives II. We never saw the man here, very seldom, whereas we see David all the time, so you know, somebody's going to lose out to enter into an arrangement like that, and I think the Archives just does not really encourage a lot of specialization and visibility of specialists, so it's sometimes hard to note who to refer researchers to when they've been to our records, and they need to work in a different group of records, so that all began for me on the day that they all moved out. And I mean, it was sudden. It was just a huge change in work conditions and atmosphere, obviously." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "So with the desire of the Archives to not want people to specialize in certain areas, from what I've seen from previous interviews, at one point in time they did want that and more specialized. How is it that you decided to focus on like the Arm Services Committee when you first started here? Was it a certain project or…?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Well, that's my impression, and that's an impression I got in the 90s. That may not have always been true at the Archives. It is not true with respect to Congress's records. Our records are so different from other records, that there's just not much turnover. You can't bring somebody in from executive branch records and set them in the middle of this, and expect them to make any sense out of it for many years, so yes, our staff is dedicated to these records in ways I don’t think you find throughout the Archives. Rod Ross–did you interview Ross by any chance?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "I've read the interview that was done by somebody else with him…" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCauley", "text": "[interposing] Okay, okay. Well, Rod has a career stretching over 40 years. He's been here, I don't know how long. Bill Davis, same thing. So there's a huge amount of experience and talent we're losing. But we're all more or less congressional specialists. We've been immune from that to some extent." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. In your list of things that you've done in the recent past, this year as being a National Archives Legislative Archives fellowship, what exactly is that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "That came about rather suddenly and rather abruptly, actually. We got word Archivist, David Ferriero, had got the National Archives Foundation to fund a fellowship for scholars who wanted to do research in House or Senate records, so he had been aware that there'd been a lot of neglect of Congress's records and that there was a need to do something for Congress, as the Archives had done for their scholars, especially in presidential libraries. They had funding for their researchers, and we really didn't have any, so he established a fellowship. Richard Hunt and I worked with the Archivist on the eligibility requirements and the initial announcement for the fellowship was made in March of 2011. The amount was rather eye catching, $10,000 fellowship. That's pretty good for a PhD candidate or a postdoc, who were required to spend a minimum of a month in residency on either Senate or House or both records. They were required to make an initial presentation, and another presentation concerning their findings at the end of the fellowship. So, after spending really the better part of two decades trying to promote the use of Center archived records, none of that was going to compare with waving $10,000 in front of a bunch of hungry PhD candidates, or postdoc historians watching the clock tick as they tried to get their book manuscripts published and get tenure, so immediately, you know, you quit trying to go the route of one by one in the research room, then spreading the word through panels, and at the associations, and that immediately raises you to the level of top PhD students in the country and their prominent supervisors, so that puts you on the map immediately, so that was very good. I was responsible for administering that fellowship, you know, developing a selection process, writing drafts of publicity pieces, seeing too that the recipients had a rewarding experience at the Archives, and that he or she fulfilled terms of the fellowship. The Archivist wanted a recipient named by the end of June, so that did not leave a lot of time to put together a review committee of outside scholars, or do the consulting with the applicants on trying to help them put their best foot forward, or tell that the material was or was not here to support it, organize a staff review of the purely research merits of the proposals, and develop a rating system that would enable the selection committee to make a decision, but we got all that done by June. And on June the 15, the Archivist issued a press release announcing that Peter Shulman, who was an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University, was the recipient and Peter had prevailed over—I think there were a total of 26 really highly-qualified applicants, or just a very narrow window open for them to apply. Also, not the best time. By late spring, people had their grants and research plans well in place, so the timing of this was not the best, but we still got a very good group of applicants, including Peter. He was expanding his 2007 dissertation, _Engines and Empire: America, Energy and the World, 1840-1940_ . He had made a research trip here, so we knew a little bit about what he was getting into, and so he put forth a very, very strong proposal. In October of that year, the Archivists hosted a colloquium on Peter's work that I had organized. I thought that, you know, whoever gets this fellowship really needs to take advantage of being here in Washington and kind of the unique resources and perspectives, especially of historians who conducted work related to theirs, you know, would be helpful. So I invited policy experts and historians from the Library of Congress, from the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the State Department, Department of the Navy, a professor from Georgetown University, the Senate and the House Historians, so we had this very lively discussion here at the Archives concerning Peter's work. It was a great colloquium. When his book was published last year by Johns Hopkins University Press with a slightly altered title of _Coal & Empire_ , he remarked in his acknowledgements that that colloquium was the most intellectually- stimulating thing he'd experienced since his dissertation defense, and that it had greatly helped him focus his attention and sharpen his analysis for the book, so we felt like the fellowship really was a great experience for him and for us. So these are the sort of things that were embedded in that original job description, but things take a while around here to unfold, but the National Archives Legislative Archives Fellowship–it's a rather awkward title–actually did that. For 2012-2013, we had a process in place. We followed essentially the same process in equally tight timeline. The recipient was Pascal Massinon. He was a Canadian who had just been admitted to PhD candidacy in the history department at the University of Michigan, a very creative and innovative department. And he was in the very early stages of his research for his dissertation. _Home Taping:_ _Participant Listeners, and the Political Culture of Home Recording in the United States_ –a very quirky title, but he was looking at how changes in home recording technologies really shaped the debate over copyright law. It was a really fascinating topic, and you know, how this all had an impact on the evolution of the entertainment industry from the 1950s to the 1990s. He had a lot of material bearing on that topic. He was in an entirely different place from Peter in his work, so instead of a colloquium, I had arranged for the archivists to host a presentation by Pascal of what his major ideas were for his dissertations, and what his initial findings here had been. Again, I invited experts from the manuscript division of the Library of Congress, the copyright office of the Library of Congress, Senate, House historical offices to participate and comment and make suggestions to Pascal about where they thought his work could go, and to give him some contacts that would help move his work forward after the forward. So to fulfill the fellowship requirement for a final presentation, I had Peter and Pascal return to the Archives and make a presentation on the program for a conference that we were hosting in 2013." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "How did you come to choose a Canadian for the fellowship?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "It had nothing to do with the fact that he was a Canadian." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Just he was a U.S. —" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "[interposing] Actually, there were no restrictions at all of that sort in the announcement. You had to have been admitted to candidacy. It wasn't necessarily, it turns out, although there were historians, but you know, political scientists and communications specialists–all kinds of people applied for this fellowship, so anyone who had been admitted to candidacy or had received their PhD less than five years ago. So historians trying to work on their book manuscripts for tenure were included in this, so they wanted to use Senate or House holdings to kind of beef up their studies." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Is the fellowship still going on now, or has funding—" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "[interposing] Well, you know, I thought the legislative fellowship really went about as well as it possibly could, given the fact that we had no experience whatsoever with awarding fellowships, but the Archivist apparently decided to provide research support to a broader range of scholars, so what was adopted the following year was awarding–they're not really fellowships. They're $2500–I call that a research grant to conduct research at one of the National Archives Regional Records Centers, so that obviously spreads the wealth a little more. There's always a political advantage in that. And also consistent I think with what he had in mind starting with us is that those tend to be neglected records more than a lot of the, you know, here in the Washington Records Center and at the Center for Legislative Archives, but it's not a fellowship." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. You also had something called a Brown Bag Series." }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Brown Bags, yes. The Brown Bags really grew out of the fellowship, and it was really one of the completely unanticipated developments from this fellowship. Applicants for the fellowship had to submit a detailed four-page, single space statement of their topic and their research plans here at the Center. They were encouraged to consult with me in putting that together, so I had spoken over the phone or e-mail exchange with a large number of the applicants, and so when they came here, as I like to do with our researchers on site, you know, visit with them, go to lunch. Then it occurred to me, now wait a minute, why am I doing this? The whole staff could be part of this. You know, they need to know what's going on in the research room, so we just found any space we could, and started kind of, without much notice, really, holding discussions of what these fellowship applicants were doing, and then I said, well, you know, just any researcher doing interesting research who wants to talk about it, they can give us some information about what they're finding, we can give them suggestions concerning their work here and other places in the Archives, so they were quite useful exchanges. The Archivist attended a couple of them. Everyone really had a good time, and that kind of led to the Researcher Talks, which is a public program. Andrea Matney, who's on Public Affairs staff and Diane Dimkoff, who actually was at the Center, I think she was the Assistant Director to Mike Gillette at the Center, they had heard about these Brown Bags, and asked me if I wanted to move to a permanent room that was accessible to the public and had them video recorded, and have the benefit of publicity of a full public program, and I said that's a great idea, you know? I never thought of it. So we selected a room in the research center. G-25 is the training room. And we couldn't call these Brown Bags anymore, because that room prohibited any eating or drinking, so I renamed it the Researcher Talks, so that's how it got its name. So this was 2013, and I'm so glad they did that. Now, in retrospect, it seems very strange that the Archives didn't have, or certainly not that I was aware of, ever had a forum to really showcase serious research that's ongoing, and so I think that was a need that we really did, that was out there. So in addition to works in progress, we also include historians who have recently published books based in part on our holdings, so some of them are book talks, some are reports on works in progress and ongoing research, and we try to schedule about one each month. And you know, we found that researchers really like to have their work acknowledged and recognized, and they really appreciate this, and the like to come to the Archives and talk about their work. It gives our staff a depth of understanding of what's going on. I think it's very good at connecting the reference staff with larger intellectual enterprises. It makes them seem like they're part of something bigger than just finding the records, putting them on cards, and pushing them into the research room, so I think it's really important in terms of staff morale, and in these presentations, they show documents. We love to see what documents they found that are of interest to them, and are helpful to them—it helps us identify documents. We use them in social media, we use them on our website, we can use them for educational projects we're putting together, so it's been very helpful to us, but I think the most important thing it's done is, you know, as I told you, we have this mission to promote the use of the holdings and further the study of the history of Congress, and so it gives us a way to gauge how well we're doing this. You know, what better way to do that than to talk to prominent scholars who are using our records, and telling us why our records are important to them. So that is how this has just kind of unfolded, and it's a good program that helps integrate outreach efforts with the reference component of the Center, so it pulls a lot of things together. And I'm in a somewhat unique situation certainly as a Historian at the National Archives. That's very unusual. Agencies have their own historians. Jessie is the Agency Historian. It's unusual to have a Historian here at the Archives that's attached to a component. I'm the only one, as far as I know, but also a little bit unusual in the Center in that my work really straddles the reference staff and the outreach staff, so I work closely with both. The first thing I do every morning when I get here is I look through the reference slips and see who's been here. Very frequently the reference staff will alert me to somebody I really need to know about. I research the researchers to find out who are these people, where have they come from, what are their topics, and that sort of thing. So again, that was nothing like it was in the 1990s. I've become more focused on that, activities, so that's due to a lot of some staff changes and other things. Charlie Flannigan coming on as supervisor of outreach was a huge improvement. My position is explicitly non- supervisory, and so that the Historian could be the historian and work with outside scholars and outside organizations. So Charlie's focused on educational projects, and has really helped me do my work a lot more. And the same is true, he's really helped Richard Hunt as Director, because Richard had done a lot of these outreach programs, educational programs directed toward teachers and secondary school students. He was doing those when I got here, so he kind of kept involved in that, became Director, and then had to supervise the outreach staff, who were doing a lot of different things, and so Charlie just kind of took that load off of him, so he could do the big picture staff Director thing, so Charlie coming here in the 2000s really let me concentrate on the things I really needed to be concentrating on." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. You said that the number of employees in the Center is the same as what it was when you first started working, but it's obviously for when you just said not the same composition. You have talked about different supervisors now than you had then. What is the balance now compared to then? Do you think the set ups are better now, or do you think there's still more room to improve to make it more usable for the researchers and the public that want to come in?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Well, we're doing many more things than we did way back then. I really get to focus exclusively and very systematically on scholarly outreach in ways that I wasn't able to do certainly in the 2000s. The reference staff, you know, we have a staff member who is nothing but an access specialist, and we're getting more and more records that are legislative commission records–the 9/11 Commission, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Those are big collections with many, many thorny access issues, and so she is devoted to that. We have two people, Rod and Bill, who are essentially the front line reference people. The other archivists have special projects they need to work on. Description, we have a digital archivist who is in charge of the initiative to describe our records online. It's part of a larger Archives initiative. We have two IT specialists. All we knew to do back in the 90s was to be very, very afraid about what we were going to do with electronic records, so now we have them. We have Charlie, who spent decades as a teacher, so he knows how to put together educational products that teachers can actually use. He's got the experience to do that. I had no ability to do that. I was pulled into those projects to some extent, but you know, that was not a good thing for me to do. And most of the educational projects relate to, you know, really impressive 19th century documents. These are showy documents. They're engaging documents. Henry Clay, the big things, and you have to be a real pro to know how to put those products together in ways that teachers can use and that'll be effective in the classroom. I knew nothing about that. And the other thing was, I'm a 20th century historian. I had not looked at that period since graduate school, and also our researchers are overwhelmingly 20th century. That's where the research future of the Center is. It's the modern records, so those records do not always lend themselves quite as easily to educational products, so we get to do that. Another educational specialist is Christine Blackerby, and you know, Christine is a huge resource. She works very closely with Charlie on those things. We have a social media person, and now does more and more social media stuff, so we're just spread out all over the place, but we're actually working together as a unit better than we ever did back then. When I first came here, I think one of the big differences is that the outreach staff and the reference staff had almost nothing to do with each other, and that is not the case anymore, so Richard Hunt has really I think pulled us together, and you know, we get a huge amount done, considering that's the entire staff. That's the administrative staff and the technical staff, and the people that load up the documents and put them in a special vehicle and take them back to the Hill, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on here, and there are not many people doing it, and the big thing facing us right now is the fact that the assistant director resigned in November. I'm not sure that position has even been posted, so the lag time here is enormous. Rod Ross is leaving, Bill Davis is retiring, I'm retiring this summer, and Janet Davis, who's the office manager and been here longer than any of us, is retiring this summer. That's a quarter of your staff gone. We are not going to be in the hiatus and hiring is going to be very great, so I think what Richard Hunt is probably trying to do is make sure this ship keeps sailing as well as he can, but that's a big challenge for him." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Before we started the interview, you talked about you were working on digital projects now." }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Oh, yeah. That's something that has come about I think by accident. Around the corner, there's an office, and a woman by the name of Mary Rephlo, now retired, she was responsible for negotiating terms concerning agreements with the organizations that wanted to digitize records, and she had the technical knowledge to do that and to put these things together, and actually, Mary was in legislative back in the 1980s. She was one of the authors of one of the Guides to the Records that I mentioned that was published in 1989. So about three years ago, a fellow by the name of Tom Ferguson, who is the research director at a New York think tank that seems to have quite a bit of money, called the Institute for New Economic Thinking, he visited the Center to look at the House Political Campaign Committee reports. Those reports date from 1912 to 1971, when the Federal Elections Committee was established, so this was due to a requirement to report contribution expenditures, all political parties and organizations established by a law passed in 1910, I believe, and so this is a huge collection, and Tom had done some research in this collection, and thought it was of real value for them, and he and I worked together for quite a while about four years ago and helped him put together a proposal that he could submit to his organization, and to get those records digitized so they could offer them to finance fellows and hire researchers, and so I'd been working on that project quite a bit. I'm in contact with their imager, and I kind of clear any roadblocks that might come up in the research room with the conservation people and trying to resolve things to keep that project moving forward. I've also interested Tom, after he gets this done, in digitizing the Senate Banking Committee records from the early 30s. This would've been the core investigation of banking after the financial crash, and they're very rich records. They're some of my favorite records, and so we're looking at that. That's obviously not going to go forward until after I retire. The other group in terms of digital projects I have worked with is Ancestry.com. Now they're, of course, geared for this. They've got the labor force volunteered to spring into action. I had worked with their Director of New Projects and the Director of Research to show them the potential of petitions sent to Congress as a genealogy source. Petitions have a place, they have a date, they have names. Some of them even have addresses, although that's a little unusual. So they're what Ancestry calls name-rich sources. So I spent quite a bit of time over the last couple of years, a couple of years ago, a lot of time trying to identify a complete run of petitions that didn't have many conservation concerns that would slow it down and make it, you know, they're about the bottom line–you know, how can we get these materials digitized in a reasonable time and present them in a way that will be useful to their customers, so I have tried to think in terms of those parameters, and come up with a series of petitions that might interest them, so they're still mulling it over. It's not come to a resolution. I hope that someday in the future, we'll get an agreement with Ancestry to do petitions we obviously have no money to digitize around here, so we have to rely on the kindness of strangers. I've spent quite a bit of time working with them, and trying to interest Ancestry in doing that, but those are great documents to get out there to the public and I hope they do it." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. Earlier, you discussed the beginning of your career here. You did a lot of outreach with professional organizations, and I'm going to assume you are still doing that. Is there any that has been more helpful than others with getting to the scholarly community?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Well, that's—yes. I still do that. I think I mentioned the Journal of Policy History. In fact, this year, I put together a special panel, actually, a roundtable discussion, that's almost like a plenary session for that organization. The long shadow of the Great Society Congress, a roundtable discussion. It's going to be a retrospective look at the 89th Congress and some of the major legislation that came out of it, so something very concrete and recently I've done, you know, in that kind work, putting together panels in professional associations that will spotlight Congress and our records. That's something coming up, and I worked very hard putting this panel together. Betty Koed, the Senate Historian and Matt Wasniewski, the House Historian, are kind of co-facilitating this panel. A professor emeritus at Yale University, Theodore Marmor, is the authority on the Medicare Act of 1965. Paul Milazzo, Ohio University, is speaking on Water Quality Act and environmental legislation, and a fellow at the Center for American Progress, Philip Wolgin, is discussing the Immigration Act. They're not going to just talk about the Act. They're going to talk about what the current policy implications are, and you know, how there have been unexpected consequences from a lot of this legislation that have required adjustments in policy. Then a political commentator is going to be Nancy Young. She is one of our key researchers. She came here first in the 1990s. I could have mentioned her. She published a biography of Wright Patman. She’s at the Wilson Center, and was here for an entire year, and she wrote a book on Congress and World War II, and she thoroughly researched those two World War II Congresses, and she's kind our expert on Congress and those records, so she's going to be on the panel. So that's a good example of the kind of work that I've continued to do with those organizations I started out with. Now, what happened in the 2000s is the Center itself became much more connected with some organizations we hadn't collaborated with. This is Center collaboration with organizations, and not just me doing what I refer to as missionary work. And one of those organizations is the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress, and this is an association of repositories that hold members' papers. We have the official records of Congress here, but the Senators and Representatives have to make their own arrangements for where they're going to deposit them, and so this is an organization of the main repositories and of other centers that promote the study of the history of Congress, so this is one of the things Mike Gillette did I think back in 2003. He was a main instigator of organizing this group, and you know, thank goodness he did that, helped get that off the ground before he resigned, and now he's the director of Humanities Texas. He went back to Texas. So this very much came out of the Advisory Committee I mentioned. The Advisory Committee was very focused on getting us off the ground and archiving of committee records that came to us. That began to shift in the late 1990s/early 2000s to really a much more serious problem of what can they do to get a full documentation of the history of the Senate and the House, and that is to pay more attention to the archiving of the members' papers, and so there was a shift to focus of the Advisory Committee, and this association kind of came out of that, and you know, so it was obviously in our interest to collaborate closely with them, certainly from a research point of view, because you can't just come here and get the full story. You've got to get other members' papers as well, so you have to work together, and so this was an organization to help us do that. They held an annual conference where we come together and discuss common problems. I've become very involved in that organization. I started serving on their Program Committee. More often than not, I've a couple of times served as the head of that Program Committee to put the program together. We host that conference every other year, so those years are really kind of full court presses in terms of our engagement. You know, these are people who have a need and like to come to Washington, so we do that. On alternate years, we meet in one of the other places. Those would be places like the Byrd Center, the Robert Byrd Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. This year we're meeting at the Edward Kennedy Institute in Boston, so alternate years we meet at the Centers, and then at the Center for Legislative Archives other years, so I've become very active in that organization. I am typically involved in putting a scholars panel at that conference every year, and I've been very active in identifying scholars who have recently conducted work, and our records are the records of members and putting them together. That's another thing I've done to get a little more down to the concrete level. I put that panel together for this conference. Actually, two panels concerning scholars, which three historians are going to discuss their research and congressional holdings, and how members' papers supported their recent publications. We have a scholar discussing JFK's senate career. We have another scholar who has just published a book, a really good book, also on JFK, and then a professor at the Miller Institute of the University of Virginia, who has submitted a manuscript on Edward M. Kennedy. She's been involved with putting together his massive oral history project based at the University of Virginia, so that's a good group of people. Now we left Robert out, but I found another fellow who is coming out very soon, sometime this summer, with a book on RFK, so we have all the Kennedy brothers covered here in terms of scholars who are doing serious work on them—it's hard work, but a lot of fun to put these panels together and sometimes to find these people that are doing the kind of work we're interested in hearing about, that are the kind of people who are good at telling about it, so you kind of have to know your speakers before you commit to them. So this is going to be a very good people, though. And another thing I've worked on a lot concerning this organization, we have a members panel which former members come and discuss the highlights of their political careers, and we usually get three on a panel, and this is where the most fun–everyone loves this panel, and they talk about the main thing in their political careers, the things that would be in their papers of interest to scholars, how they made decisions about where to find a repository and archive their materials. It sounds kind of boring, but you know, these politicians make it a lot of fun, and they love to goad each other, and tell stories on each other, so it's a really fun panel. We've had wonderful presenters. This year at the Kennedy Institute Conference, we're going to have Barney Frank, so that's going to be quite a program. So a lot of my organizational focus has shifted to the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress, so that's a group I've spent a lot of time with, and have a big commitment to. And it's been a busy year. I was treasurer, vice president, and president of the Society for History in the Federal Government in the late 90s/early 2000s, so after that, I just kind of, okay, I'm done with it, I'm kind of an elder statesman, I'll show up, but I got feeling guilty about this. Before I was treasurer, I was on a Book Award Committee. The Society offers a book prize, a national book prize–it's very prestigious–called The Henry Adams Prize for the best book on the history of the Federal government. And then there's a George Pendleton Prize, the principal author of the Civil Service Act of 1883, we have that award for the best and outstanding book on the history of the Federal government written for or by a history office, a Federal government history office, so there are two awards and I was on that awards committee way back, shortly after I got here, actually, so I hadn't been doing anything with the Society, but last year, I was asked to go back on this committee. Dick Baker, the former Senate Historian, chaired it, but then he stepped down, and so I chaired it this past year, and that's a pretty good undertaking. 64 books were sitting in it. You have to do a lot to find out what's out there. You have to identify the presses, the awards coordinator. You have to find out who these people are. I went through over 800 entries in the OAH series of recent publications and identified titles of interest, and you have to research the websites of the presses to see if this is really an eligible book. 64 entries. Deadline is November 30. We need to make our decision by January 15. Last week, I just presented those two awards at the conference. It's virtually a half-time job for six months of the year. So I continue to put a lot of work in the Society, although I regard it as something kind of behind me, so there's no shortage of work organizations to work through, and I learn about what's out there in terms of the literature. Several, in fact, I'm in the process of scheduling the winner of the Pendleton Award to give a researcher talk this next fall. One of the authors is going to be on this other panel at the Association of Centers, the scholars panel, is the one who wrote the book on JFK and his Senate career. That's how I found out about his work, so it kind of feeds into the other work I do, as it turns out." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. So we discussed a lot of different things. Is there anything that we've missed that you would like to discuss?" }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Well, let's see. Where are we? I should probably say a little something about–how much time do we have left, anyway?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. I don't have a set amount of time." }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Oh, okay. You said two hours." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "It's all up to you." }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "You said two hours. I need to say something about the Senate Armed Services Committee, because that was a curious experience. Shortly after I arrived, actually, it was 1994, the Center was contacted about writing a history of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and this project, I was told, had the strong backing of Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, so most of our House records are committee records, you know, archived materials from the committees, and so writing a history seemed like a good way for me to really dig very deeply into the records, and see how committee records are put together, so this was a good thing for me to do at the time I was just getting here. And also, I thought, well, you know, these are neglected sources. Historians kind of skim the surface of Congress, talk about things going on up here, and what happened on the floor, and they don't really get down to the committee level enough, and so we needed much more work in terms of what the committees had done in the history of the committees to really understand the Senate and the House histories, and so I wanted to share what could be done with that material. I was quite green at the time, so I put together a really ambitious proposal to do a whole series of committee histories, beginning with the Senate Armed Services Committee, which I presented to the Advisory Committee. The House historian, Ray Smock, was still a member of that committee, and he countered that my proposal would never fly. He was absolutely right. I now recognize it would take an entire team of historians working years to do that sort of thing, but you know, the Senate Armed Services Committee became my major research and writing project from about 1995 to 2000, and it did have Nunn's strong backing. He sponsored a luncheon in the committee library in the summer of 1995, and introduced me to all of the past chiefs of staff of the committee. Some of these people had come on back in the late 40s, and these were real old timers, and very knowledgeable people about the history of that committee and the Senate. I interviewed all of them, plus other staff members. Office space–extremely valuable real estate on the Hill–was dedicated to me at the Armed Services Committee. Then in the Russell Office building, so I again got to work on a topic I knew absolutely nothing about, but that had never stopped me in the past, so I spent many, many weekends in my Archives office as well as in the cubicle at the Senate Armed Services Committee that I had. I later learned from the chief clerk of the committee, Christine Cowart, who was a bedrock supporter of this project, that the Senator had had in mind a history that would be available for the 50th anniversary of the committee. That would've been 1997. She told me that she told the Senator that this is not going to happen. There are over 3,000 boxes of material for the committee dating from 1947 when it was established, and she was very aware that the Senate Armed Services Committee was very proudly one of the most documented committees on the Hill, and so they had many records. So I researched and researched, and I interviewed and I interviewed, and I wrote and I wrote until I had more than 500 pages of a completed manuscript done by 2000, and so I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. I showed that you could do a committee history without using any secondary–I deliberately did not use secondary sources. What can you get out of a committee whose records and their publications and other Senate publications, so the draft was thoroughly vetted, it was reviewed by key members of the committee, every “I” was dotted, every “T” was crossed, I made every change they suggested by then. Guess what? Senator Nunn had resigned, and the committee was being chaired by the much less vigorous 95-year-old Senator Strom Thurmond, and then by the time I finished, Senator Warner had taken over the chairmanship. His chief clerk asked if I would write yet another chapter on Senator Warner. I told Mike Gillette about this request, and he said, no, we can't give in the position of writing histories of sitting chairs to committees, and those are recent records. We couldn't cite them, anyway, so there was no legitimate documentary basis from our point of view for doing that, so I completely agreed. So I don't know why the committee has never moved forward on this. Staff members kept promising a publication. There must've been some kind of push back. This continued throughout 2000s, as late as 2015. I was emailed by a former staff member who had written his own book on the Goldwater-Nichols Act, wanting to see this history published, you know, but at this late date, my draft is 15 years old, would need to be updated, and that train has left the station as far as I am being the person to do that, so maybe someday somebody will take it up. It's one of the loose ends, you know, that I hate to leave behind, but I wish that had been brought to a conclusion." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "It happens." }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "It happens." }, { "speaker": "MR. DICKEY", "text": "Okay. Well, thank you for your time. That concludes our interview." }, { "speaker": "MR. McCULLEY", "text": "Well, thank you. ~--..;:o---,_-. -- ### NAT ION ### AL # ARCHIVES #### National Archives History Office #### 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW #### Washington DC 20408" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MS. REBECCA WATFORD", "text": "Today is Thursday, August 31, 2017. We’re in Room 400 at the National Archives Building in Washington, DC. My name is Rebecca Watford and I am an intern in the History Office of said National Archives. Today, I’ll be interviewing David McMillen, a Special Assistant for the National Archives and Records Administration. David, can you tell me a little bit about your background before you came to the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Hmm, boy, well, I started my federal career at the Census Bureau, writing technical documentation, and that’s how I got involved with the archival community. Mostly, though, it was data archiving, not paper archiving, and at that time there was very little attention to data archiving, or electronic archiving of any form, within the archival community, and at the National Archives. There was a small group who understood the issues, but they were very small, and not a major force at the Archives." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Would you mind explaining what you mean by data recording." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Well, what I was working on were data sets that were the individual responses to national surveys, so the Census Bureau does literally hundreds of surveys every year, and they produce data tapes from those that are the individual responses, at least in a way that you can’t identify an individual, but it gives researchers the ability to look at the complex relationship among variables. So, for example, if you want to study poverty, you also want to know something about an individual’s work history and their education background, and a whole series of characteristics. From aggregate data, you can’t do that kind of analysis. I mean, individual records, on an individual, to be able to analyze those things, so we produced data tapes, and then once you produce the data tape, you have to explain to people what’s on it. Now, in character 34 and 35 is race, you know, or whatever, so I would write the documentation that explained to people how the data were collected, what is on the tape, and a little bit about how to use it." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Okay, and so after the Census Bureau, where did you go?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "I was at the Census Bureau until 1991, and then I went to work for the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. I was there for four years, and then moved to the House Committee on Government Reform, and was there until 2006, when I came to the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "And what have you done here at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "I came here as the External Affairs Liaison position that hadn’t existed prior to my being here, and the then the Archivist wanted somebody who would be within the organization, an advocate for the user community, so somebody who would think about what we were doing from the user perspective. So, for example, the research room had a policy that they would not renew your research card until it had expired, so if you came in two days before your card expired, they wouldn't issue you a new one, you had to come back two days later, when it expired. Well, you know, some of our users come from all over the country, and that was an inconvenience at the least, and a major inconvenience for some, so I lobbied to get that policy changed, and they said they would change it. They told the Archivist that it had been changed, but it was my job to make sure that it had been changed, and sure enough, six months later, they had told the Archivist that they were no longer doing that, but they were still doing it, so it was my job to find that out and go back to the Archivist and say, “we need to do some more on this.” It put me in a very awkward position vis-à-vis the staff, because to some extent, I was—" }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Tattling? —" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Yeah. I was checking up on them to make sure they were doing what they said they were doing, and sometimes, advocating for policies that were not what they would like to be doing." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "So did you have to go outside the Archives as well to work as part of that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Yeah, and that has a long history to it. Clinton's appointee as Archivist was a political person. He was a former governor, and when he was nominated to be the Archivist, the archival community all wrote letters saying that this man was not qualified for the position, he should not be confirmed, he didn't know what he was doing, you know, some fairly harsh criticism, which had no effect whatsoever on his getting confirmed, and when he got confirmed, he then said, well, if you don't like me, I don't like you, and so he turned his back on the archival community, and wouldn't meet with them, wouldn't go to their meetings. He felt that they had treated him badly, and he had no reason to do anything differently. That led to about a ten-year period where the archival community was pretty much shut out. The one exception was the Association—I'm blanking on the title, it was basically state and local archives, pretty much government archives, and they had supported him, and so he kept in touch with them, so by the time Professor Weinstein became Archivist, the relationship between the Archives and the professional community was in pretty bad shape. That's why he wanted a position like this, and that's why he wanted an advocate, as opposed to just a PR person. He didn't want somebody who was just going to say whatever it was that the Archives were saying was the policy, he wanted someone who would tell him what we need to be doing to meet their needs, and so the job was created. I was recruited by the then Head of Congressional Affairs, who I knew because I was on the Hill, doing the work for the Committee, and came here to do that job." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Did you continue to work with the Congress while you were doing that job, or—" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Not much, no. Well, after I had been here about a year and a half, the guy who recruited me left and took another job, and so I was acting Director of Congressional Affairs for about a year, and then they hired someone to fill that position fulltime, and I went back to External Affairs." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "So, according to your resume, you were part of the Presidential Transition Team?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Mm-hmm." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Do you mind explaining what that is?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "When a new President is elected, generally, they create a team to build for them a game plan of what they need to do, and it's really sort of a 90-day what is out there that we don't know about that might cause us problems, what do we need to be doing right away, what are issues that are important, what can be pushed down the road, and they put together a team—for Obama, I think it was around 100 to 150 people. My focus was the Census Bureau. I was not working on the Archives. They wanted someone who understood the policy issues at the Census, and who could guide them with what they needed to be doing, and it was very close to the 2010 Census, which was not well-planned, and was about to be a crisis, and so they needed to know what they needed to do. Their first political instinct was to ignore it and say, well, this is Bush's problem, not ours, but we convinced them that that was short- sighted, and by the time the data were released, no matter who planned the Census, it was going to be Obama's census, and he would get the fallout if it fell apart." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "What do you do now at the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Now I'm a writer, and I write feature articles for _Prologue._ I'm the COOP bureaucrat, Continuity of Operations, so I go to the meetings where they talk about these issues, and make sure we get the forms filled out that need to be filled out, and bring back to the unit an understanding of what is going on and what we needed to be doing. It gets to be a sensitive issue, as the bi-annual exercises come up, because we design the scenarios that are presented to the senior staff. There's a bomb exploding in downtown Washington—and we can't tell the senior staff that ahead of time, the scenarios are secret until it actually goes live, and so that gets to be a little complicated." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Do you have any stories from working here that you would like to tell?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "I also do plain language." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Stories, hmm. Oh, gee. I'm sure I do, nothing pops right into my head." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Is there anything from the Archives history that you've worked on that's important?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Yeah, my first exposure to the Archives on the Hill was when I got to the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, they were in the midst of writing an investigative report on the Archives. There was some fairly serious malfeasance on the part of senior Archives officials in the selection of the First Inspector General, and the Senate had gotten wind of that, and had investigated the issue, and wrote a report, and as a result, the Deputy Archivist was moved out. She was considered to be the person primarily responsible for the problem. I think she ultimately was brought back on. I think it was not that anyone proved that she hadn't done the thing she was alleged to do, but the process by which she was removed, and I think if you look at a lot of press reports, when something happens in an agency, somebody will be blamed for it, and they'll be moved out, and then it turns out two years later, they will end up being reinstated, because their rights were violated. It wasn't done in the proper way, and I don't think she ever came back to the Archives, but she, I think, could have." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "You have any other stories like that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Let's see. Well, what followed that immediately was, it goes back to the issue of electronic records, the Archivist who—and I'm not sure he was onboard during that investigation, but he came onboard shortly afterwards or during, and he was a Bush appointee, and as Bush was leaving office, I think the document was signed on the 19th of January, the Archivist gave the President exclusive control over all of the electronic records from his administration." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Is that allowed?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Good question, good question. That was a period when agencies really did not want to consider electronic records, records, because that meant they had to do a series of things to manage them that they weren't in a position to do, so there were lots of agencies, for example, if you made a Freedom of Information Act request, and wanted something that was only available electronically, they would print them out and give them to you, rather than giving you the electronic file, so as soon as he did this, as soon as the Archivist gave away this authority, there was a lawsuit filed, and ultimately the suit was adjudicated against the Archives, and it said that that was not appropriate for him to do, and that agreement was relinquished, and those records came under the control of the archives. That Archivist, shortly after signing that document, left the Archives and became head of the Bush Foundation that was building the Bush Presidential Library. There was never any proof of any quid-pro- quo, but it certainly looked bad. Many people thought that the discussions of him becoming Director of the Library was ongoing when he made that decision, and it wasn't good for the Archive's reputation, so there was that period—and remember, the National Archives only became independent in 1985, so I think what you saw was an agency that had been under the control of the General Services Administration, suddenly was without any supervision, and they did some things that they probably shouldn’t have done. The power sort of went to their head, and it’s probably fortunate that the former governor that the archival community didn’t want to be here, stayed for ten years, and brought a sense of stability to the agency." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "So do you feel like the former governor probably actually did help the Archives much more?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Absolutely, absolutely. I don’t think that's a universal opinion. It’s fairly common in agencies like this, that they never see a political appointee that they like. Their sense is that they know what they’re doing better than any political appointee could, and that these folks just get in the way, and that happens not just here, but all over the Executive Branch." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Do you have any more stories from when you first came here? What were some challenges you faced?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Well, the biggest challenge that I faced when I started as External Affairs Liaison was that these organizations had been out in the cold for so long that they would do almost anything to curry favor with the Archivist, and it was difficult to engage them in a dialogue of how the organizations could be helpful to the agency as an external voice—one that looked objectively at what the Archives were doing, you know, maybe that's not the best thing to do. Maybe you should think about doing X instead of Y. I think, had we gone to them with our initial plans on digitization, we wouldn't have made some of the decisions we made. I had not been here very long, and I was at a senior staff meeting, and the Archivist came in and said that they had just signed an agreement with Ancestry, and Ancestry was going to do all this digitization for them, and they would have exclusive access to those files for five years, and they had signed the agreement, and they were now going to put it up on the web for public comment, and I said, and what are you going to do with those comments? What if they say, this is a bad idea? You've already signed the agreement, you can't change it, so much of the criticism that we got for giving Ancestry such long, exclusive control of those files, would have been thought through more carefully if we had gone to our constituents and said, this is what we're thinking of doing, what do you think? That's very hard for agencies to do, though. It's not unique to the Archives. They tend to make a decision and then present it to the public, as opposed to engage in a dialog with the public before a decision is finalized." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "So would you say part of your job here has been to try and encourage the dialog with the public?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Mm-hmm, absolutely, yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "And how often did you manage to make that success?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "During Weinstein’s administration, I think we made great progress. When Ferriero came in, he didn't really want an advocate, and so there was a period of awkwardness, because he didn't tell me what he wanted me to do, but it eventually became apparent that what I was doing wasn't what he wanted, and so he moved me out of the position without much explanation of why or what it was. I was never given any direction from him about doing things differently, but I figured out afterwards that what I was doing wasn't what he wanted me to be doing." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Have you enjoyed your time working at the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "It has been a mixed experience. I think that the Archives have always had a problem of management dealing with its staff, and that hasn't changed much, and as a result, the staff are not very happy. Most people here love what they're doing, but are dissatisfied with the environment within which they have to work, and they don't feel that the system really pays attention to what they think ought to be done. I think you saw this at one of the recent public meetings on the strategic plan, where the strategic plan says, “we're all about access,” and an employee stood up and said, “no, we're about preservation, and in fact, we're about both,” and it has been the case for many strategic plans now that it hasn't been very clear about that duality. The strategic plans have tended to emphasize one aspect over the other, and this notion that we're not going to collect paper is oversimplified, and consequently, leaves many people who work with paper day in, day out, some concern that a significant part of what the Archives is supposed to be doing is going to be lost. The notion that everything happens electronically is just not the case, particularly when you think about how decisions are made. The reason for archiving government documents is so that you can go back and trace how decisions are made, and some of that inevitably happens on paper, and doesn't necessarily become part of an electronic chain. It may be created as a Word document, but that doesn't mean that somebody's marginal notes on that Word document get recorded somewhere, and I think some of that sensitivity gets lost when you say, oh, we're just going to do electric stuff, and part of that is, you know, trying to do the whole thing in 6 pages, or 12 pages, or some short document, but part of it, I think is a failure to really engage the complexity of what we do." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Would you say doing the data archiving at Census Bureau was very similar to your work here or very different?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Very different, very different. The Census Bureau has always addressed that duality better than just about any agency in the Federal government. It hasn't been perfect, but it has always understood that while it was the premiere data collector, survey manager of the Federal government, it also had a responsibility to make sure people understood how to use those complex files, because it's very easy to misuse data, and if you don't put out a clear description of what you're presenting, then you can be held responsible for the misuse, and so the Census Bureau has always realized that part of their responsibility is to make sure that while they can't stop the misuse, they can at least put out documentation that says, this is not the way to do it. When I was on the Hill, I was at a hearing once where it was on the effects of the minimum wage, and there was an economist, I don't know where he was from, but was testifying, and I don't remember which side of the issue he was on, but testifying about the effects of minimum wage on employment, and he was analyzing the current population survey that is produced by the Census Bureau, a survey done monthly and paid for by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's where our monthly unemployment data come from, and a variety of other things, and he was completely misusing it. You know, the way he had done his analysis was one of the ways the Census Bureau says just should not be done. Well, they can't stop people from doing that, but you can go to the Congressman and say, you should take this testimony with a certain amount of skepticism, because what he is doing is not really good statistical analysis, and so the Census Bureau has always been very good about that. One of my jobs at the Census Bureau for about five years, I was part of the management team that introduced a very complex survey, called the Survey of Income Program Participation, and for about, well, until I came here, I would teach a course at the University of Michigan on how to analyze those data, and the Census Bureau paid for my time, and paid for my two weeks in Ann Arbor. It was a very intensive course, we had a lecture from about 9:00 to 5:00 each day, and then we had a lab period from 6:00 to 10:00 for five days, and it was a very intensive immersion in this complex data set. Most of the participants were new PhDs at universities around the country that were members of the Data Consortium in Michigan, and they came out of that course understanding how to use this complex data set and understanding how not to, and it was the kinds of statistics they needed to be familiar with in order to analyze the data, so the Census Bureau has always, I think, been very good at managing that duality, and here, there does not seem to be that skill." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Do you have any final words on your history? Either Archives, any last stories, anything like that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "When I was doing External Affairs, I went to a meeting in Seattle. It was NAGARA, National Association of Government Archives and Records Administration, I think is the acronym, and I was asked to comment on one of two keynote speakers; an author who was talking about his book, and I got there and discovered that they had told me the wrong book, and that the book I had read was not the one I was commenting on, but it was something else, and I scurried down to the Seattle Library and got a copy of the book and read it. It turned out to be a book that I used throughout my tenure in External Affairs, a book called “On American Soil.” The author, Jack Hamann, was a lawyer and journalist, a TV journalist, in Seattle, and as a young journalist, he was covering a sewage treatment plant hearing. The sewage treatment plant hearing was on the edge of a former World War II Army base, but now much had been turned over to the city, and not surprisingly, he was daydreaming during the hearing, and I looked out the window, and there was a military cemetery, and as are most military cemeteries, all of the tombstones are alike, and it's a fairly uniform vision, but in one corner of the cemetery was this obelisk, and it just looked out of place, and so after the hearing, he went over and asked the park service ranger what that was, and the ranger says, well, we're not really sure what it is. It has got some funny writing in a foreign language on it, and we're not really sure. So, it piqued his curiosity, and he began doing some digging, and it turned out it was a monument to an Italian prisoner of war who had been lynched during a riot during World War II, and three African American soldiers were court martialed for lynching this prisoner of war, and so he went back and looked at the newspaper coverage, and it was one of the largest and longest court martial hearings of World War II, and it was a big deal when it happened, and he did his report for television, and that was it, but it always sort of bothered him, because he couldn't think of another example in history where a group of African Americans had lynched a white person. You just don't hear of that. So, that bothered him, so just after the turn of the century, he got an advance from his publisher, convinced his publisher that this was worth pursuing, and he and his wife came to the archives and began digging trying to find out what had happened, and they were here, they ran through their advance, and started digging into their savings, and there are a lot of World War II records, and they went through them, all of the court martial records, and records about that army base, and just weren't finding anything, and they were about to give up, and the archivist that they were working with said that they had gone through just about everything except the miscellaneous file, and they said, well, you know, bring it on. We've done this much, and sure enough, there they found the transcript for this court martial, I think 3,000 pages, if my memory serves me, and next to it, they found, by comparison, a relatively short report, which was done by the Army, and which exonerated those soldiers from any responsibility for the lynching. Now, they had been convicted, and, you know, served time for killing this guy, and this struck him as odd that this had never turned up in anything. Well, he did a little more digging, and it turned out that that report had been in the hands of the prosecutor during the trial, and he had never shared it with the defense, and it would have ended the trial, it would have exonerated these guys. Well, it turns out the prosecutor was Leon Jaworski, who later became President of the American Bar Association, was a key figure in the Watergate trials, a big deal in American jurisprudence, but at the time, Jack speculates, he wanted to be on the Nuremberg team, but he needed a high profile conviction to get his name out there, and this was his ticket, and that's probably why he didn't share the material with the defense. That's pretty serious, and when the book was published, Jaworski's children said, you know, this is not true. Our father would not have done something like this, and so Jack said, well, look, I am willing to share with you everything I have, all my notes, everything I have. Look it over if you think I've made a mistake, I'll gladly write a clarification. Well, they came back to him about six months later and said, well, you know, I guess you're probably right. The book was read by his Congressman. His Congressman then put language in the Defense Authorization Act requiring the Army to reconsider the court martial. The Army did, and overturned the court martial, and awarded the soldiers back pay, and through the influence of the Congress, and back pay with interest, which amounted to $200,000 or $300,000 a person, and in a rather unusual step, they made their relatives eligible to collect this, and Jack and his wife then spent a considerable amount of their own time tracking down relatives of these soldiers to make sure that they got the money that was due to them. So then I would go online and buy copies of this book, you know, used copies, and whenever anyone asked me why do we have archives, I would give them a copy of this book, because it's a good example of how we keep these records so that at some point in the future, people can look back on what has happened and do an objective evaluation of it, and you have to keep an awful lot of material, not just what the senior officials of an agency are doing, but what’s going on throughout the agency, in order to document that kind of effect." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Alright, well, thank you." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMILLEN", "text": "Welcome. _I_ _((_ \\ ##### --~~f§~ - ########## ~ _--...J,,._ _~ ~_" } ]

[ { "speaker": "Daria Labinsky", "text": "This is Daria Labinsky and I am doing a NARA oral history interview with MaryAnn McSweeney, and today's date is March 23, 2021. Hi, MaryAnn." }, { "speaker": "Mary Ann McSweeney", "text": "Hello!" }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Why donʼt you start just by giving us your background, how you ended up working for a National Archives facility?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Well, I had three boys, three children, and I don't have a college degree, so I was looking for something that I could do part time, and that was in, like, 1983, I think. And so, a friend of mine who knew a friend from the regional archives in Atlanta, a friend of hers, a secretary, told her about an Intermittent [program] opening. But when she found out it was only 20 hours a week, she said, “No, I need more money.” So she said, “Hey, why don't you do it?” [Laughs] So I went in and got that little thing. That's how I started. And so I just started off doing the basic preservation, refoldering court cases, and etc., for about the first, I donʼt know, two or three years I was there? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "So what kind of court cases were they?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "They were everything from bankruptcy, to criminal, “lewd and lascivious behavior.” [Laughs] Yeah, they were just the basic, and I was working on the Georgia courts." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "OK, so that was, you said, 20 hours a week?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Yeah, that was 20 hours a week. And then we ran out of money because they only allowed a salary cap, right? Which was fine for me, because it always happened in May, and the kids were out of school. So to pay money for somebody to watch them would have been just barely breaking even. So, then, I would start back over again. And so I stayed there. And then, I think at the same time I was doing the court cases, my boss put me in charge of the Tennessee Valley Authority records, which I really enjoyed doing those because it was the Depression era. And so, fortunately for me, I gained a lot of experience, because we had the negatives of these wonderful pictures, just incredible pictures of the people standing in front of their little, poor houses, and in front of their stills with guns, churches, all kinds of great pictures. So I had reported to him that Iʼd noticed some of them were bubbling up, and so on. And we started a huge contract to get the—I can't remember what it's called, those particular photos that bubble up like that—is it acetate?" }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Yeah, I think thatʼs right, cellulose acetate." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "They were acetate. So we started this big contract with somebody in Chicago, a company, and I started having to send those, describe them, and then, post that—if you can remember, I don't know what it was called then. Was it EAP [Electronic Archive Project], with Dan Jansen where we started having to put those first photos, anything that went online digitally. I donʼt know if you were there then." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "That was before me." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "So thatʼs sort of how I got started in ARC [Archival Research Catalog] because that was before ARC. So I had to select photos, I had to put them in this database, and I had to send them to Dan. And then they were posted somewhere in NARA [laughs], Iʼm not sure, because the catalog wasnʼt available yet." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Wow, so you were one of the first, like, digitization people, huh?" }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Yeah [laughs], I knew nothing about it, but we had specific instructions, and I did that, and we sent them up there, and theyʼd digitize them, send it back, etc., etc. What was interesting, I was also put on the Tuskegee Syphilis Project with CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and those photos, which means their photos, the people were in full view. And they had been available to the public for a long time, which is kind of sad. But then, of course, NARA realized that that was a mistake, so we had to take them and block out the eyes, and we did all that. And that was really interesting, just to see the case files. So, and then the segue from Dan was, the next thing that got me experience was the ARC project, where Deb Wall and six other people came down. I think they went to every facility and explained what they wanted to do. And when it started to roll out, nobody but me. [Laughs] My kids were so much older then, and you know what I mean, in high school, so I really had a lot of free time. I didnʼt have to worry about it, so. And I wasn't intermittent then. I think Iʼd gone to permanent, part-time. And I was the only one that volunteered to do the project up in Washington for the training. So when I came back aȦer the training, they started to put me on descriptions of the TVA series, so I started doing all that. And just one thing led to another, and I took all the MicrosoȦ classes, I did as much as I could to promote myself for promotions. And I think I finally got up to like a [GS] 5 or something. And then the appointment came up in the library for a [GS] 7-9-11 specialist. And I had already made inroads with Bob Bohanan and Dave Stanhope, because they were both involved in the ARC training up there. So I saw a lot of them, I guess they liked me, and I had a good segue into that job. And I got that position and started from there into the library." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "About when was it when you started working on the TVA stuff?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Oh, probably ʻ88, ʻ89." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "OK. And then the Tuskegee stuff?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Same." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "OK, thatʼs really, so thatʼs interesting. So they realized aȦer the fact, that they needed to protect these people's privacy?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Yeah. Well, their faces. And so not only that, but the whole case files were open, which was really, you know, a total invasion of people's privacy, to talk about their sex life, you know." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "And the whole thing—it was amazing to me that that ever happened. And to see it firsthand was something else." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Yeah, I can imagine. It must have been a bit disturbing, you know?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "It was disturbing. Well, we know there was penicillin available, and that was horrible, just to know it was withheld." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "So, yeah, that was bad. And even with the Tennessee Valley Authority records, those were also open—the case files, which I complained about not too long aȦer I started. I said, “you know, these government officials went out to these homes, and they interviewed, and they wrote down this case file, and theyʼre calling them morons, or ʻthey're retarded,ʼ or just went on and on about how dirty they were.” I just didnʼt feel like that needed to be in the public eye, or at least take the name out. I think it was a good 10 or 15 years later where they decided to do that." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "So you could get all of that. And I mean, it is history and I understand it, but it was to me, the way they described people, they wouldʼve been fired now. So it was weird. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "So was that, was that also put online?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "No, they weren't online, but they were open. The regions don't have, like we do, restrictions. So you can come in and say, “I want to see all the case files.” And so researchers did that, yes." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Wow. That is pretty disturbing. So, how long were you at the records center then—or at the archives?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "[Thinking] Probably ʻ83 to ʻ96, maybe, ʻ97." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "And that was 20 hours a week, usually?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "No. Well, I was, like I said, I would do part-time, permanent part-time. Iʼm not sure what year that was, but then my husband died. And it wasn't a matter of emergency, but I needed to get more hours, so they put me at full-time." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "I see." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "And that was in 1995, when he died." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Wow. So how old were your kids? In high school?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Yeah. Yeah. The twins, the youngest ones, yeah. They were seniors when my husband died, so." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "So that was a different building, correct? So where was that building?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Oh yeah [laughs], youʼve never been there?" }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "I went to the Atlanta archives, now, the new one." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "The new one. Yeah. That was an old military supply depot in East Point. It was really kind of nasty. And I was so scared to go to the library because we always said, “Youʼre going from the slum to the country club. [Daria laughs] Youʼre not going to fit in. [Laughs] But I found that not to be the case, real quick." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "So who was working? Who on staff was there, thatʼs there now, when you started at the library?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Letʼs see, now. Ceri [Escodi, now McCarron], Youlanda [Logan]. Keith [Shuler]. I think that's it, as far as the archival staff." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "OK, I thought Betty [Egwenike], maybe." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Oh, Betty. That's right, Betty was there." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "OK. I just happened to see a list of employees from ʻ96 somewhere. Anyway, OK, so you were doing processing. You were hired to do processing?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "I was there doing processing. I wasnʼt expecting to be thrown into A/V right off the bat. So they put me on this, I donʼt know, project back there with indexing, where I had to listen to the First Lady [collection] tapes. And most of them were a minute or five-minute introductions, what she said at every event, I had to write all that down. And I have to tell you I was about in tears aȦer two months of working there. I was used to doing a lot of different activities at the region. And I wasnʼt used to sitting in the same chair and doing the same thing for eight hours a day." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "So, I finished that project for Dave, and I went to Bob Bohanan, who was supervisory archivist at that point. And I said, “Look, I don't know, but Iʼve got to have some other things to do.” It wasn't just that. But even the first textual project they put me on, I was just shocked that they wanted me to read every page. And I said, “I just simply don't get this.” Anyway, there were some problems in the beginning, and Bob agreed with me. He felt sorry. And he says, “Well, do it the way you think is most efficient. And then Martin [Elzy]”—who was the deputy director—”he'll go over everything with a fine-toothed comb when you're finished, anyway.” And so thatʼs what I did, and Martin had to admit to Bob, “Well, you know, she did a damn good job, and I couldn't find any errors, as far as what she should have closed [for security or privacy reasons].” So basically, that was that. And then I asked Bob, I got frustrated—there was no electronic stack inventory. So every time we got a new accession, Martin would make me type up 16 pages just to add that one in the middle. [Laughs] So I said it was kind of weird, because I came from the region where we'd already electronically done all that. And there, they had done nothing. They were still doing typewriter folder labels. We hadnʼt done that in years at the region. We had Avery, the laser labels. Weʼve been doing that for a long time. So when I got there, I brought that up to Bob, and, I guess there was pushback, some new person comes in saying, “Oh, why canʼt we do it this way?” Right? But, yeah, eventually we did sort of go to all the electronic stuff, they did let me do a whole inventory, I spent time going through, stack level by stack level, and putting it into the inventory." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "So that was the stuff that was unprocessed, as well as the processed stuff?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Yes, it was, but mostly it was the unprocessed that I had to work hard on. And thatʼs how I kind of got to know the records inside and out. And then, as you recall, there was the at-risk survey that came along, and nobody had looked at those unprocessed records, ever (ugh). So I was assigned that, of course, and that took a long time to do. I really just got to know a lot of the records that nobody looked at." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "So you did a lot of processing?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Oh, yeah. My first processing was the anti-inflation adviser, Alfred Kahn, records. I went from there to doing the very first of the First Ladyʼs Office, and that lasted years, before we even got to the end, or close to the end, of that. And then I just did whatever processing I could—DPS [Domestic Policy Staff], I did almost probably everything I can think of, every collection, I did one or two series in." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Wow. So what was your favorite part of the job?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "At the library?" }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "At the library, I think that once I got involved in accessioning, doing the inventory. I liked the fact that I didnʼt have to process all day, but I could do two hours here, I could get up and move around. And I really enjoyed that, moving around. And once I was in that part, I was a lot happier. Iʼm just not the type of person that can do processing eight hours a day. I just canʼt do it." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Was everybody doing that, was everybody on one task?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "I think for the longest time, I canʼt remember the exact years, but at some point it was just me and Youlanda processing, because they put everybody in the vault. They just leȦ the two of us." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Oh, wow." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Yeah, so like Keith, Chuck Stokely, Betty, all of them, they had a huge staff down there, because they were so far behind. And I knew nothing about their processes, I didnʼt really pay it much attention. But, yeah, eventually there were just a couple of us upstairs. Even, yeah, James Herring went down to the vault. And they werenʼt happy about it, but, you know." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "But who was doing the Research Room, then? Did everybody split that up?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "The Research Room was rotation. I think it was on a daily thing, actually, like, on Tuesdays, I would do it—yeah. And then they switched to Keith and somebody else, Chuck Stokely, maybe, splitting it. And that was really great. [Laughs] And then it was Bert Nason—he was there, by the way, I didnʼt think about that. But Bert started doing it full time. And when you were in there, you would, if you were full-time Research Room, you did all the requests, researcher requests, while you were sitting there." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "But somebody else had to do the pulls?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Yes. So there was a pull person, and a person in there, and I canʼt remember. But I think thatʼs how it worked. Like, if my day was Tuesday, then somebody else did the pulls on Tuesday. And Keith and somebody else had Wednesday, etc., etc., and then later we switched to weeks, and then stuff like that." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "So how many supervisors did you have at the library? Can you remember, can you think about it? Supervisory archivists, I mean, direct supervisors." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "[Counts] Four." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Oh, thatʼs pretty good. I mean, you were there a long time, so thatʼs not that high of a turnover." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "It was Bob, and then Dave, and then Sara [Mitchell], and then back to Dave, and then Aisha [Johnson-Jones]." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "So Dave was a supervisory archivist for, like, most of the time you were there?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "I canʼt remember. It depends, because Jay Hakes was the director…first when I got there, Don Schewe was the director and I canʼt remember exactly when he leȦ and Jay came. And when Jay came, Bob was promoted to deputy director, right? So then Dave came in and took his place. And Iʼm sure it was at least five or so years, yeah, for Dave to be the supervisor. So if you count Brittany [Parris, who had just become supervisory archivist at the time of the interview] then thatʼs six. [Laughs]" }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Thatʼs true. How has the library changed over the years? Positives and negatives?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "[Thinks] Well, to be honest with you, Iʼve always told everyone about a year aȦer I started, I had a lot of different things that I could do. The first year, I just wanted to leave and run away, because I was so bored. But aȦer that, I would tell everyone for the next probably 10 or 12 years, that I had the best job in the whole world. And I really enjoyed working there. We had these great Christmas parties, there was good feelings among people, there was good cooperation. And I donʼt know what really changed, just little by little, with the new director or with different things going on, I just—. Of course, electronic social media came into play, which was different, but—yeah, there was a time where I was so happy, for 10 or 15 years, and then I was miserable to the point of ridiculous, basically." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "I mean, I was literally miserable, because we had new people come in, there was a lot, there was a conflict, and it was really, really difficult." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "But you still enjoyed the work, right?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Oh, yeah, Iʼve always enjoyed the work. Iʼm sort of anal retentive. I love to organize and go down to the detail level. So, yeah. I like what I did, and I just wish I hadnʼt gotten involved in the other political aspects that came into play." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Right. Which you canʼt, you know, you canʼt really help, right? They come, things change." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Things change, and I tried to make the best of it, I did go through the, what is it, the—" }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "RESOLVE?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "RESOLVE program, trying to help out, and that helped quite a bit. We got some things settled at that point. But yeah, I just wish that had never happened." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Right. So, what are some of your favorite collections that youʼve worked on?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "I think that my favorite collection was the unprocessed, pre-Presidential Carter Family Papers. That was stuff from his gubernatorial era and also his state Senate [career], and you got to see him before, as he was moving through politically up the ranks. More candid, more annotations, more handwriting, a whole different period. And I think also, aȦer that it would be the First Ladyʼs Office, that was pretty good, too." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Did you work personally with Mrs. Carter, Rosalynn?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "I would see her when I first started doing the papers, I probably met with her, like, maybe like three times, maybe once a year. And she would tell me things that she was worried about being seen, and I assured her that I had not seen those, and that I would take it into consideration. Of course, not open them. So thatʼs how that went." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "And then you worked a lot with her assistant, right?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Yes, Melissa [Montgomery]. Because we started getting into the post-Presidential [papers]. I donʼt know how they slopped that on me, but one day they said, “Oh, now youʼre the Carter Center post-pres liaison.” I was like, “Really?ʼ So that was a whole mess. And I did as much work on it as I could. Because itʼs not our records [i.e., not accessioned], so I didn't really feel like we should be spending a ton of time. Itʼs courtesy storage, as far as I was concerned." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "But I guess the idea is that eventually, that will become part of the library, is that right?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Correct. And to this day, I donʼt know the status of that. I've asked many a time. Iʼve even talked to Phil Wise [Carter Center vice president of operations and development], I said, “Hey, you can hire me as a contractor when I retire, for, you know, maybe one day a week, and Iʼll come in and start processing that stuff on Floor Two.” And when I told him what my salary was, he said, “No way.” [Laughs] We didnʼt go further than that, it was sort of like a joke, you know. At some point, thatʼs going to be a huge to-do over there, because we are now closing all Presidential handwriting, correct?" }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Well, if you see whatʼs down there, itʼll be a disaster area. Thatʼs going to be, really—if they continue with closing everything, I donʼt know. Itʼs going to be hard, really hard. Thereʼs going to be a lot of decisions to be made, basically." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Can you talk a little bit about how description has changed, since you started there? Well, even before that, starting, when you were at the Atlanta archives, how—not just electronically, but also like, at the library, you have paper finding aids, etc." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Yes. The paper finding aids. Then they went online. The worst part was, every supervisor had a different format. So, the format, we finally had a big committee, where we came up with the final format, probably in 2007, somewhere around there. But that was a problem—every supervisor had a different format of how they wanted description done. So that caused a problem in the legacy finding aids that theyʼd done before I ever got there. Everything was so much different, and we had to switch everything over to the new format, electronically, and then print them out, put them back in the notebooks. And it was very labor intensive. And I was always wanting to collaborate with other libraries to see what they were doing, but I was told not to do that, and did not do that." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "And then, of course, now theyʼre trying to standardize it across all the libraries." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Oh, they are?" }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Yeah, well, processing. Yes, a recent memo came out, and itʼs pretty much—standardizing processing is what itʼs about. Thereʼs not a lot of detail yet, but thereʼs a thing about basic and augmented processing." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Was there an electronic archives before ARC? A catalog, I mean, before ARC?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Yeah, that was NAIL [NARA Audiovisual (later NARA Archival) Information Locator]." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Thatʼs right. I heard about NAIL." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "First it was NAIL, and thatʼs why I did my training, and then that stayed in for about four years and then five and then went to ARC, and so on and so forth." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Do you have a preference over those, which one you liked working with the most?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Oh yeah, I think ARC was so much better and easier than DAS [Description and Authorities System], which we have now. It just was. And the printouts in the catalog from ARC were so much easier, better, they were more concise. It was so much easier. Yes." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "I think what I was impressed with NARA, with the ARC program, when they rolled it out—was they actually had a team of archivists—theyʼd have one archivist from every region and one from every library. And for a solid year, before they came out with the platform, and how it was going to look, and the input system, they collaborated, right? And I think thatʼs what made ARC work so well, is because you actually had input from people who were going to use the system." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "And so with DAS, I donʼt think there was any input, it just—boom, they were working on it. And then we just rolled it out. And to me, that shows how important it is to talk to the people that use the system every day, and what researchers want, and what they want, right?" }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "So, yeah, ARC was definitely much better." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "So do you like working with researchers?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "I did, for a while. [Laughs] I think the older I got, the less I wanted to be interrupted. So it was fine with me, if people [other staff] were in the research room. I couldnʼt care less about going back in there [post-pandemic]. Uh. I donʼt know, it just wasnʼt my thing." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "So how has the library building changed?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "You mean the structure?" }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Inside, you know, the offices?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "We actually had more space when I first got there, and then of course, they had to make accommodations, and then we had the whole renovation. And I think a lot of people were a little upset over that, because there wasnʼt enough staff input. And I canʼt think of many people that like the way itʼs arranged in Suite A [archival staff office] now, because itʼs just, weʼre on top of each other, one right behind, and phone conversations and all of that gets skewed. Thereʼs no panels. Thereʼs no nothing. And I understand that that was the Google way to do it, but weʼre not Google. [Laughs] So, yeah, I think I even found out that Google is now going away from all that." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Theyʼre actually going back to cubicles and such, for privacy." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "So before, you had more like cubicles with walls?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Yeah, they werenʼt cubicles, but they were, like, really full walls, wooden walls with a top. And they were about, I guess, they came up to just below my neck, so I could always look over and see the next person. But they were a much bigger area. And, yeah." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "So what are you going to miss about the job?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Iʼm going to miss a lot of not being able to control things [laughs], because I know where thereʼs a lot of errors in DAS, and in describing, and cubic footage, and Iʼll miss not being able to finish those kinds of things, you know, make it right." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Yes, unfinished business." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Unfinished business. And I hope that moving forward, somebody will dig in, and be anal. and just say, “hey,” you know, do it. You don't get paid extra for doing those things, but itʼs very frustrating to go to my series, and I have .504 cubic feet, DAS says I have .252. And Iʼm like, “Howʼd that happen?” And you start delving in and comparing those discrepancies. Itʼs really difficult, and itʼs also detailed. We had that problem of people putting the same series in the same box, which has really caused a problem. So you have one series, “Subject Files,” itʼs Box One through Seven. Then you started “Correspondence,” but you put half of the Correspondence in Box Seven. Youʼre basically counting everything twice, which itʼs not that much cubic feet, but it does add up aȦer a while." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Yeah. And I donʼt know really where they are, with how important that is, thatʼs my point. How important is it, is my thing." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "I know what you mean, weʼre still not using HMS [Holdings Management System], so thatʼs when you would think it would be important. I donʼt know." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "But if you look at other libraries, theyʼre way behind us, you know, especially the older libraries. And I always wonder, you know, “Well, if theyʼre not enforcing certain things with this library, then why do they enforce it on everybody else?” I mean, to me, the most frustrating thing, working at the library, was the way everything was done differently at every library. Right?" }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "And at the regions, you had these forms, when you added cubic feet—I don't know, it was a 14044, or something like that. And you had to put it down precisely, it had to go up to somebody, you had accessioning forms when new material came in, you had a database. And all the regions, as far as I know, pretty much had to do it the same way. And then when I went to the library, I said, “Well, where's your loan database?” or “Where's your this?” And they had nothing. And that part is weird, strange." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Yeah, I mean, for the regions, theyʼre federal forms right? Theyʼre actually, yeah, part of the federal record to have these official forms. But they don't have those at the library, or didnʼt. I guess they might have some more now than they did before." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "I think for even loans that we took out to other libraries, I donʼt even think everybody was using the same loan form back then. And I said, “Well, how do you record when nothing comes back, if it's not dated somewhere?” You know, there were just different things that were really different. Because [in the region] we could get in big trouble, like putting the wrong amount of cubic footage on a form. And maybe thatʼs because we had the agency records. And if the agency wanted something, and you couldnʼt find it, well, then you were in a lot of trouble." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "And so maybe with the library, itʼs all donor deed, at least in our library. And maybe things are more copasetic among the PRA [Presidential Records Act] libraries. I donʼt know, I havenʼt worked there, so Iʼm not sure." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Is there anything else you'd like to talk about, as far as work?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "No, Iʼm just going to miss a lot of my work. And as I told Brittany, Iʼm not a winter person. So maybe when itʼs raining, and freezing cold, and Iʼm bored, Iʼll come in and do some crap work. And nobody has to train me." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "That's true. Youʼre ready to get started." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "[Laughs] Yeah. And then, like I said, the biggest problem with volunteers is having to train them—or interns. And at least if I come in and do something, I donʼt need any of that." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Thatʼs right, thatʼs right." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "So Iʼm hoping everything goes well for the library moving forward." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Well, I guess the libraryʼs almost done with a lot of their collections, right? How much still needs to be processed?" }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "And thatʼs going to change a lot of what you guys are doing, of course. The most stuff leȦ is that Presidential Personnel Office [Collection], which is probably pretty boring and a lot of Social Security numbers. And then, if thatʼs done, I mean, youʼre pretty much, I think itʼs only like a thousand cubic feet that are leȦ to be processed." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "So thatʼll change what everybodyʼs focus is, and Iʼm sure it'll be going back to checking mistakes previously and stuff like that." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "And maybe doing some rehousing of stuff thatʼs in older boxes." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Yes, thereʼs some problems with that. But again, as when I came from the region to there, that part was the country club. The way the records [in the region] were stored in the most horrific FRC boxes and all over the place. That was nice, to come into that environment where everything was in a little Hollinger box." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "Right, right." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "So moving forward, I think thatʼs kind of the way itʼs going to go, yeah." }, { "speaker": "D", "text": "OK, I can shut off the recording now. Nice talking to you." }, { "speaker": "M", "text": "Thank you. Iʼm just a little nervous about being retired, but thatʼs OK. National Archives History Office 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW Washington DC 20408" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MS. JESSIE KRATZ", "text": "Today is February 24, 2014. My name is Jessie Kratz, Historian of the National Archives. I’m here with Ellen Mulligan. We’re interviewing Jennifer Nelson, Chief of the Records Division in the Enterprise Services Directorate at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in her office at 1200 First Street, NE, in Washington DC." }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "So my caveat is that everything I’m going to say is going to be rooted in my personal experience. I’m not offering this as concrete history or anything that I perceive to be utter fact, but my understanding of facts, things I’ve heard, or what I’ve experienced." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "All right. Well, did you want to just jump right in then? We’ll start just with the questions but we’re not wedded to these questions, and if we veer off, that’s—" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "[Interposing] All right." }, { "speaker": "MS. MULLIGAN", "text": "Or if there’s something more interesting please don’t hesitate to steer us in that direction." }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I thought we would start, even before the questions, for you to just give us some general background on you and your education and your experience leading up to your decision to have a career in the Archives." }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "So I always had an interest in American history. As a child even just seeking out the little kiddie history books, but always on the United States. And while my family, some of my family members had interest in European history, I saw it for myself as a distinction that I was interested in American history. And then in high school I took a course called American Civilization, taught by two men, Bob Johnson and Pete Lumer, who taught what I didn’t realize at the time was really an early high school version of something called American Studies, which is an actual field and has been for several decades. So American history and American literature became a great love of mine and I was going to go get a master’s and a Ph.D. and teach. And so I came from Los Angeles to The George Washington University in Washington, DC to get my master’s in American Civilization and American Studies, and I enjoyed it a lot. By the time I finished that degree, however, it just seemed to me the better thing to cast a broader net to get an understanding of what else there was to do besides teach. Not that I had any issue with teaching but I just hadn’t been very curious yet about what else there was. Plus, student loans start to, well, you start to feel there’s an “ouch” point. So I thought, well, I could come back and think about a Ph.D. if I want to. So meanwhile, a colleague—I was working part-time as a contractor at the Smithsonian helping to write abstracts for the African American Abolition Project. And so a colleague, Della Lehane, who was an archives tech working in the Center for Electronic Archives at NARA, who also was in the same GW program as I, and also working for the same professor, Jim Horton at the Smithsonian, said, “Have had you thought about the National Archives?” And beyond having come to NARA to do some field work for a class, I hadn’t really considered it. No one from NARA had talked with me; nobody had talked to the class. We just understood the National Archives as a source. So I said, well, not really, and so Della said, “I know a couple of people over at the National Archives who might be interested. They’re always hiring students for evenings and weekends working in the main search room.” And so she connected me to Sharon Fawcett, Cindy Fox, and Mary Rephlo. And so I interviewed with Sharon and she hired me. So I started, I was still finishing up my master’s paper for GW, but I started working evenings and weekends as a student temporary; this was before students were considered Federal employees. And so then I heard about the, what was unfortunately called then the CIDS program, Career and Development Services, but not meaning the other thing we sometimes unfortunately think about. So I applied to the CIDS program and I was accepted into it, and so I knew that I had to look forward to two years of intensive archival theory and practical training by NARA, which I saw to be an opportunity not only to learn what an archivist is and to decide if that’s what I wanted to remain doing, but to understand whether I wanted to remain with the Federal government, and a sense of just the culture of the place. So I started there and I took full advantage of the cross-training, which was, I think, really the most valuable aspect of the CIDS experience was the having a built-in, structured program by which you moved through, you know, topics, topics of learning, but also you could find people who might be mentors, or might be work friends, or might be supervisors, or might be colleagues. And so that was, that was very valuable. And so the career in archives and records really was, for me, sort of right place, right time, right connections, and desperately wanting to do something with my education that was pertinent to what I’d studied, I mean, with my next step, which was pertinent to my education, is what I mean to say. And I feel that I did that. I can’t say that I started out at any point in time saying, “I want to work in archives and records.” I wanted to work in a history field, and where the National Archives owns, the National Archives’ assets are the written record, that tied into my interest in literature and in documentation and in peoples’ expressions, or the, at least, if not the expression, it’s the historical record that people could use to create literary or artistic or, you know, fundamentally historiographical-based works." }, { "speaker": "MS. MULLIGAN", "text": "Did you have anyone who acted as a mentor over time?" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Not early on. I sought that, and what I encountered at NARA, I think, were people who were experts in the processes of the National Archives, and maybe wanted to be mentors if they either felt they had the time or knew what mentoring really is, or were kind of personally suited toward that. I did not encounter, frankly, a lot of people who I could classify as being mentors. But I could say that there were a couple of people that stood out that were very, very helpful. One, not in this order in terms of impact, but in just chronologically speaking, Sharon Fawcett not only hired me as a student, but she saw a utility in a student learning a thing or two about the agency and would spend time talking with me about what the customer service division, which was what she headed at the time, what it was. And from time to time throughout my career, she would offer an opportunity, or, you know, help me get my hands on a tool or a resource so I could do my work a little bit better. And so, in that way, I could say she might have been a mentor. Another person, John Scroggins, was a long-time NARA manager, a GS-15 when he left. And I would say that he certainly had a wealth of information about the National Archives, and he also offered trust and opportunity. So, you know, I guess I could say that there was a mentoring that he offered me in that he would give me something to work on, give me some responsibility. For example, as a kind of a mid-graded person within the motion, picture, sound, and video branch, he headed the division; he needed assistance with someone who would help to run the research part of that branch. And while there were a lot of challenges, organizational challenges in the branch and the division at the time, it was an opportunity to begin to learn how to lead, to begin to learn what supervision is and what it isn’t. And I can’t say that John taught me what those things were but he invited me into a space where I could begin to learn what those things are and what they mean. And last but definitely not least, and I’d say actually foremost in terms of potential mentoring, it would be Tom Mills, who was the former Assistant Archivist for the Office of Regional Record Services and, at the time that he retired, the first Chief Operating Officer for the National Archives. I’d say Tom was more of a mentor, if I had any at all, in that he would pay enough attention to what he was asking me to do and watch how I was delivering what he wanted, and then give me feedback about it. And was flexible in allowing for my own style, but yet, at the same time, if he thought that I was, you know, heading in a direction that wasn’t particularly useful, he let me know that. And he wasn’t afraid of having that kind of a conversation. He would tend to be fairly quiet and reserved and immediate about it, but at least he would have it. So, so I would say those three people stand out in my mind." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well, we want to explore some of your specific jobs—" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "[Interposing] Sure." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "—but we want to go through chronologically through your various careers and then we can come back and hit some highlights." }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So, we’ve left you where you were just hired as a student. When did you become full-time?" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Okay. So I was a student starting in May of 1991 and I became a CIDS kid, as they called us—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Yes. Were you the first class of the CIDS or not?" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Oh, no, CIDS had been around." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Was it around for a while?" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Oh, yeah. Oh, CIDS, yeah, CIDS had been around since at least the ‘70s." }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Some—" }, { "speaker": "MS. MULLIGAN", "text": "[Interposing] Why did they stop CIDS? Do you know?" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "I think that there were, well, there’s my opinion and then there’s, I mean, I can’t really tell you exactly why. I don’t think that the reasons for why CIDS was stopped was ever very clearly explained, ever. I think that, you know, I think it might’ve had to do with money. There was maybe a question about whether or not the program really developed people the way that the managers, or the leadership, wanted that to happen. And it may have been that someone realized that it had been a long time, if ever, that the program was properly evaluated. I have no idea if anybody knew exactly how to evaluate the program. But I do know that I think around the time that it slowed or then stopped was when we started hitting our budget crunches, and we started having hiring freezes. And so I think that that was just kind of a mechanical response to a budget problem, but then it became more of an organizational development question that I think few people really understood how to approach. That’s my opinion." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "But you felt that it was a valid program, and it was—" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "[Interposing] Absolutely. The only thing that wasn’t valid to me about it was the paper requirement. There was a paper writing requirement at the end. And something that I think was not particularly well-explained is that, one could write a paper that was, again, technically valid in terms of the need for that topic to be explored in the world of information management or archives, manuscripts, libraries, whatever. But if it didn’t sit squarely in a political sense or, I think, in terms of personal perceptions of the managers who were assessing the paper, things could get terribly bogged down. So the only advice I remember receiving that was at all useful at the beginning of writing that paper was, “Make sure you choose a bland topic that nobody cares about.” Once you chose something that somebody cared about—" }, { "speaker": "MS. MULLIGAN", "text": "[Interposing] Oh, geez. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "—that was actually the way it was put to me by somebody. And I’m not saying that all the topics were bland. I’m not saying that my topic was bland or any of my colleagues’ topics were like that. But it was, you know, kind of a shot across the bow to a young archives professional to hear that because it suggested that if you want to move forward, you have to stay safe. And staying safe means don’t come up with things that cause other people to think hard, or to have to deal with some sort of conflicting information, or interpretation that, you know? So it’s kind of hard to perceive yourself being in an organization that wants to move forward, if it’s not behaving in forward-moving dialogues." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] What was your research paper on? Do you remember?" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Oh, I don’t even remember. It had to do with privacy. It had to do with application of privacy, you know, FOIA exemptions. Most people ended up with something that they had to change or tweak. And then sometimes the papers just sat on peoples’ desks. You know, it just wasn’t always seen as, you know, sometimes I think that some of the CIDS applicants were kind of perceived as kind of like cogs moving through a program, as opposed to a program that could be very vibrant, and very mentoring in that way. So I’d say it was a mixed bag, but without a question in my mind, the huge benefit was getting people to move around in terms of their cross-training. And if I might project way forward for a moment, one of the massive distinctions that I’ve noticed first coming here to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is that whereas my experience with colleagues at NARA was that more often people at NARA would not move. They would remain, let’s say, a reference archivist at what used to be considered the civil records or military records, and they would specialize in that and they would stay with that. I’m not saying people didn’t move at all, but it, more often than not, they’d stay. Here at USCIS there is a massive value in people doing all sorts of kinds of work. And I’ve noticed in my conversations as I have worked to learn my new agency that so many people who are even in an administrative job were once adjudicators or what we call immigration service officers, doing interviews for naturalization or for green cards or for any other types of benefits people are asking for. So they know what it’s like to sit there, to work the process, to talk across the table with someone, to interview them to try to assess their situation and make lasting life-changing decisions sitting there at the table with them. And so, wow, what a difference. So I wish that the National Archives would put a premium on finding ways to move people through a system or some sort of a rhythm or a flow of different kinds of activities, decision-making requirements contributing to the life of the agency. I think that there would be nothing lost, and everything gained for that. And I think it would’ve made, I mean, so the way I did that in my career, the way I did that was to ignore advice I had been given which was don’t move around too much because then people will think you can’t hold a job here. I decided to try to apply as often as I could to keep moving and keep learning. You know, I’d stay working in a job for a year and a half I’d start to get bored with it. I’d start to feel that I’d learned the processes. I didn’t feel that I had to learn to be a records expert. I wanted to learn how service was delivered, and how decisions were made, and to get the broadest sense possible of the challenges facing the agency, and the best ways of asking questions about ourselves, about those challenges, and then develop approaches to begin to mitigate certain things, and to drive other agendas, mission agendas, forward. So I would work somewhere for a year and a half, and apply for a job, and get that. And most often it was a promotion. And all of that’s a pretty sweet part of the deal when there’s a promotion, that’s part of it. But, so you know, the automatic CIDS-related promotions, of course, end with the GS-11. But between the 9 and the 11, I worked at the Center for Electronic Archives and also for, I already mentioned, the motion picture, sound, and video branch. Then I lateraled to, because I realized that I had not done a lot of work getting to understand the processing and the service of paper-based records. I understood that from the cross-training I had had, but in terms of handling thousands of cubic feet of records around certain record groups, I thought that would be useful. So I lateraled as an 11 to what was called the textural processing branch and division. Worked there for about, again, about a year and a half. Then applied for a GS-12 promotion to the cartographic branch and worked mostly reference for maps and plans, as opposed to the aerial photography group, which sort of was a division of labor there based upon the media format. But I learned there the importance of how the different record format types intersect depending upon the research question that the customer is asking or that we’re asking of ourselves, because there would be maps. You know, let’s say Civil War maps, of course, that would have a very direct relationship to some of the textual records downtown. And understanding the relationships and the, and doing some systems thinking around the relationships of these records was something that became more and more interesting and meaningful to me as I experienced that. And I learned a lot from my colleagues there, particularly Debbie Lelansky taught me quite a lot, as did Bob Richardson, who was the Assistant Branch Chief when I started there, and then he became the Branch Chief. And then after I’d been an archivist at that point about for seven years, where things were getting really interesting and hot and sexy, I suppose, was with project management on the IT side. And so there was an office headed up by Reynolds Cahoon, C. Reynolds Cahoon, Ren Cahoon, who was responsible for IT project management and lifecycle issues. And so I applied for a GS-13 promotion as an IT project manager. Very different move from having been an archivist so I took on a number of challenges and tasks. I was team member there when the Y2K reared its very ugly head in government life, and so did everything from started traveling across country to meet people in the Presidential Libraries, and in the regions, elsewhere. You know, trying to assess their Y2K needs and helping with that, to I was the project manager that ended up delivering NARA’s first electronic-based researcher registration card system, which I think is still the system that’s in use at Archives II. And one of my other major projects was that I was to work with the contractors at the time to further improve and develop NARA’s agency webpage, which at the time was literally a laundry list of things. And that’s not anybody’s particular fault. The resources that the agency had put toward the website at that point in time was a few hours from one of their contractors. And we didn’t have an awful lot of information on the website. I think maybe 50 or 75 pages, tops. So everything was linked from literally just a list on a on a main page, the National Archives website, and people would come to NARA.gov, and that’s what they found. And I see you have some questions that go into more detail about that, but I’ll just try to do a quick overview of the career. So I was IT project manager for the Web program for about a year, a little over a year, year and a half, at which point we were beginning to encounter requirements from the Archivist’s office and from other parts of NARA where we needed an exhibit, an online exhibit for this or for that or for something to support an initiative, you know, an interface for a database, or for an electronic tool, or something like that. And so NARA started to realize that the utility and interaction with customers through the Web was more than listing the pull times on a webpage and posting that. That there was more interaction. There was more value to be had, but we needed a way of resourcing that and approaching those questions and seeing those things through. So there started to become some talk between the Office of Policy that was reporting to the Archivist’s office, and Ren’s office, about what that would mean. So money was pulled, as I understand it, from a variety of places in the agency, and cobbled together to create a Web Program. And that GS-14 Web Manager, Web Director position was posted. I applied for that. I competed hard for it, and I didn’t see anything wrong with that. I mean, for something so new, and so important to the agency, nobody should be just shoehorned into that job simply because they had some sort of a history with it. So I fought hard for that, and was very glad that I earned a place, and began to then, in the year 2000, cut my teeth on really understanding what it means, or beginning to learn what it means, to supervise and to lead people. Supervise, manage, and lead, I see those three functions as three different things. So got a budget all told of about $1 million between funding a Web contract design, a Web design contract, I mean to say, and about 10 or 12 staff members, ranging from I think a GS-7 is where the lowest grade of person started, although they ended up at a nine, and, you know, including GS-13s. So I proceeded, over seven years, to define that program. I wrote the P.D.s, I wrote the crediting plans, I wrote the job analysis for all of the staff. I hired the staff. I supervised the staff. I wrote the policy defining what content management roles and responsibilities in the agency are, and what Web content management means in the agency, and what content was and was not allowed, and what the processes were to conduct that Web content management work agency-wide, not just for the program, but how everybody had, who touched Web content or had a role in making sure that the website is what we needed it to be, what they needed to do and how they fit there. The Web, with my fantastic staff, we identified the electronic software tools needed for authoring, and for the metrics, you know, assessment of the website performance. We designed a number of exhibits. We created code and programming that was incredibly lean, and if I might say, elegant. And I’m simply quoting Haseen Uddin in saying that everything that we did, we passed by the Chief Technology Officer to make sure that as we were innovating new ways to deliver Web content as affordably as we possibly can, that it aligned with the IT architecture of the agency. That was necessary because one of the great failures for us at the time was the attempt to implement a content management system, which would have been, and is, a receptacle or a repository for content that then has a variety of views that users creating Web pages could use. So instead of having to learn HTML code, and scripting, and having to go and do deeply technical work, the idea was they would open up this application and they would cut and paste from a Word document that they had already authored, and dump it in this little window, and click a few things, and pick a few things from some pick lists that would control how that content appeared on the page and how it was delivered, hit a submit button. They’d never have to learn coding. They would be efficient, quick, and there would be a work process flow attached to this so that then the next person in line, let’s say the person who was designated as the Web content owner, would take a look at it. It looks the way they wanted, then they hit the okay button, and it just published. That was the idea. We had some serious, serious project management issues on the IT shop. We didn’t actually own that contract. We owned the requirements for it to make it happen, but there was terrible implementation problems with the contractor. It never ended up going live, and that was a real killer. We were really depending upon that working well to help us move forward, because what I’d envisioned was that we would have a Web program staff where the staff were able to spend more time being engaged with people across the agency, discovering what good Web content should be and helping to actually develop that content with people. You know, using the data that had come to us about the website to understand what people wanted or needed. Looking at the Web surveys that we had implemented, understanding what people wanted and needed, and then working directly with people across the agency to actually develop that content and get it onto the website, as opposed to doing technical coding work all the time just to maintain the website. And I imagine if the National Archives does not yet have a Web content management system behind the website, it is probably still operating as a very, very labor intensive coding operation." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "It is." }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "And that was a huge disappointment to me, because I think that the agency could’ve been better served if we’d been able to move on that project and make it be what we had funded it to be. So 2006, I think I felt that I had learned everything that I could learn where I was. I thought that maybe there was a new vision that was needed for the program, and I was burning out on that particular topic. And I had actually, at that time, started to look around outside the agency, see what else there might be. And what I remember is having this kind of epiphany thought while I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next, that once upon a time, like, once upon a time, a year prior, I’d had this really interesting conversation on a train between Washington and Philly. I was going to go participate in the Philadelphia city level National History Day judging, as a judge for their multimedia topics. And I had this fascinating two hour conversation with this guy named Tom Mills. And I thought, well, it would be, maybe it’d be interesting working for Tom Mills. And then I felt embarrassed thinking to myself, you know what? I just committed the same sin that I have thought that many people in the National Archives do, which is that the regions are always thought of last or not thought of at all. Here I was thinking about going outside of the agency for my next step in my career, and I hadn’t even considered the regions. So I made an appointment with Tom’s clerical assistant to see him the next day, and we agreed that we’d find a way for me to come and work for him. And so in 2006 officially in August, I guess it was, I lateraled over into the Office of Regional Record Services as their senior archivist. Diane Vogt-O’Connor had been the senior archivist there, and she had just left NARA to go to the Library of Congress, so the timing was strangely fortunate for me, anyway, that that opened up. So I went into the Office of Regional Record Services, and began to learn the culture of the place, began to learn some of the programmatic challenges, some of the opportunities, their various strengths of the regional program. And then, I guess about a year later, I became GS-15 as the Director for Archival Programs for the Office of Regional Records Services. I was reporting directly to Greg Pomicter, but it was really Tom Mills that drove my work agenda. And the scope of what I did included, well, let me say this, and this might help clarify a few things. I directly supervised a small headquarters staff who supported the archival program. Having said that, though, the work assignments and the direct tasking that ended up being, you know, worked by each of the branches, field office branches, were, that actually happened through the tasking from Tom to the regional administrators, down to the assistant regional administrators, down to the GS- 13 directors. So one of the things that I continued to learn to do, which I had started with the IT project management work, was to try to define direction and to build buy-in and interest in certain kinds of programmatic direction through influence of others as opposed to direct chain of command. I could not go to the regional administrators and say, this is what we’re going to do. You know, do it or help me do it. I had to work directly with people and learn their management styles and learn what they thought was important. And certainly it helped that those people and I reported ultimately to Tom. You know, what Tom said he wanted would be the direction we would go. But we would all then work together to move ahead. So we worked on better defining the education program at the National Archives in the field offices. There were no properly graded, properly assigned in terms of position descriptions, people who were actually doing the work. We had to define the distinctions and the similarities between archival work and education outreach work. I worked with human resources to rework the education PDs to the proper series, the 1700 series, rather than having all the education people in the 1400 series. And then we worked on getting training for the people who needed it. And not everybody needed it. And everybody who was doing that work felt very deeply about, again, the value of education outreach work. So we built the education program. We defined it. We had a fascinating branding and messaging project, which resulted in a clearer, a clear identity for what the National Archives in the major metropolitan areas was. Instead of having brochures that said, you know, Regional Archives, National Archives, it was the National Archives at New York City, the National Archives at Fort Worth, for example. And all this was based upon professionally facilitated public conversations that helped us understand the distinction and the difference between how we thought we were presenting ourselves versus what people knew or didn’t know, and what we could clarify in order to help improve the understanding of the public about who and what we are, and then also to encourage, of course, their use of the archives. So, I’ll just pause there and ask if you have any questions about some of the things that I’ve mentioned so far." }, { "speaker": "MS. MULLIGAN", "text": "You’re hitting a lot of the questions that we had broken out under regionalization, like your role as director, and some of their accomplishments. Do you think the existence of regional archives affects NARA’s relationship with agencies and researchers? And in what way?" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Oh, hugely. And actually, this was a point I wanted to make. I’m glad you asked that question. What it must be like to be in Chicago, you live somewhere in Chicago, and you hear from someone that there’s this place called the National Archives that might have some useful genealogy stuff, family history stuff that you might be able to use, and you look up on the website or you Google, and you find out how many different buses you need to take. And you take the time to go to that somewhat remote location and spend some time there. That is the agency’s face to those American citizens and to the public there nationally. Their view of the National Archives is that place. They’re not going to think Rotunda. They’re not going to think Charters of Freedom. They may think about it if maybe they were lucky enough to come through on tour as a child or bringing their kids through Washington, DC. But most people who are not in the Washington, DC area, who have direct person-to-person interaction with the National Archive staff, it’s the field office that is the face of the agency. So at that field office, if you remember the public and you’re doing that kind of genie research, okay, that’s the experience you’re going to have. If you are a lawyer in Chicago looking into Health and Human Services programs or Superfund things you’re going to come to the National Archives there at Chicago to access the accessioned records. Or if you have permission from the Federal agency to see records that have not yet been accessioned but are still in the custody of the Federal agency, you are going to go to a research room at that location also, and you’re going to look at those records. And of course, the agencies are directly, they work directly with the records management and with the FRC people at that location. So every one of those, whether they’re collocated or not in a building, if they’re collocated in a city, there is interaction all the time between the Archives and the FRC people helping to deliver services. And that is the hub of archival activity and records activity for people in that area or in that region. So if there is no regional face, or if there is no field office face or branch office face to our customers and to the public there, who still care about personal interaction, you know, that that immediacy is just incredibly important. And it can be lost. And I think that’s something that people crave. You know, I think we’ve seen sort of an ebb, or maybe the beginning of an ebb and flow in how people use digital resources and electronic resources. We’re starting to see that people want to use websites and information on the Web to make themselves smarter about what they can expect or how long it might take to do something. But they also, I think, have begun to appreciate that there’s a fine line between, depending upon everything being on a website, to get what you want versus having a phone number where you talk to somebody who’s an expert, because they want to interact with people often. They want to have somebody who’s an advocate who understands how to resolve a process problem. And human beings just like having other people do stuff for them. Often they don’t want to fully, completely rely upon a fully-automated system. If not only to at least toward the end or at some place in that process be able to check in with somebody to make sure they’re not missing something. Or there isn’t something else that hasn’t been put on that website or in that database yet. Or is there something I haven’t thought of that you guys know. So, so I’ve always personally and professionally perceived that effective customer service is delivered in a national respect and a local respect. Think globally, act locally, that kind of stuff. There’s this polarity. It’s not an either/or. It’s not everything on the website and nothing local. It’s a combination. It’s a combination of human interaction and electronic services. And we, all Federal agencies, too, this isn’t just NARA, have to continue to get smarter about what people really want and how they’re using those tools now, in order to be as effective as possible. And that’s a huge challenge when you consider, for example, you know, Federal budgeting. Let’s say you’re right on it in terms of your timing for doing requirements definition for customer service for IT resources and for knowledge management and transfer of knowledge and information among staff and employees. Let’s say you’re right on it. You really understand what those requirements are and what’s needed. But then how do you fund the services, the design services, the technical design services, the marketing. Marketing is not an evil word, I think, by the way, in the government. It never should be, because that’s what we’re doing. When we’re understanding what people want and we’re figuring out how to speak their language to them, and how to present ourselves in a way in which people are open to using the government as a valued resource, that’s marketing. And so being able to plan that and budget for it in a way that keeps us current and moving ahead so we’re not behind the eight ball in terms of finally delivering those kinds of services and behaving the way in which we want to, and enhancing our own knowledge, and transferring knowledge between employees and between employees and the public, that is a huge burden to bear. And it’s just a really tough challenge, I think, in the Federal environment, the way that budgeting is done and how we’re encouraged or not to, to plan how we devote those resources and then get support for it, speaking very broadly." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I had this is on the list, but it’s sort of related to what we’re talking about, is you mentioned when you started working for the regional archives that you hadn’t immediately thought about that and how lots of times the regions feel that headquarters kind of neglects the field. Do you feel that as you were leaving towards the end of your NARA career, when the Archives became “one NARA,” I guess, do you feel like that made a difference and the regions became more incorporated? Or do you feel like that really was just not the case, it wasn’t bringing the regions into the fold and they were still isolated? Were they still not getting the amount of attention or credit that they might need or…" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "[Interposing] That’s a very good question. So there was the “one NARA idea” that really, I think, was problematic in that I don’t know that we really defined what we meant by “one NARA,” especially in terms of what we intended to deliver and what people needed. What I can tell you is this. In my opinion, and in what I observed, while creating a “one NARA” idea and doing reorganization in the way in which we did, while we did do this idea scale, outreach, and collected opinions from people, and ideas, in terms of mature data and problem definition analysis to understand what we were trying to achieve and what was the best way in doing it, in terms of identifying strengths that we wanted to retain and specifically what we needed and wanted to change, and why, and how, in my opinion, I don’t think there’s a lot of data to point to right now that says that was a success. I felt that we did not do a very good job at all in understanding what we were trying to achieve. I think that we were doing a lot of planning and some good, broad thinking at the time, but based upon our personal and professional interpretations and our assumptions about what we wanted to achieve and why. So I don’t know now if much changed for the regions in the end, other than who they were reporting to. But what I do know is that many, many people felt, and I absolutely experienced, a breaking apart of established networks, professional networks that was, in my opinion, a travesty, and was not appreciated in headquarters. It didn’t quite fit the script of the direction where we wanted to go. But, you know, John Cotter’s writing and the writing of other organizational development and management gurus, you know, taught us a number of things, and say a number of things about how you proceed with change management. And NARA has mightily struggled with that, in my opinion, and in part led to my desire to continue to look elsewhere for agencies that would take a properly focused urgency, kind of an urgent approach toward change management, but would try to do that in a way that allowed leaders to lead a little more effectively and, and take responsibility for leading change. I don’t feel that NARA really taught its own leaders very well how, how to try to move forward with organizational change, other than pointing to a couple of books. And, you know, the National Archives Foundation paid a chunk of change for Cotter International to come and work with the leadership group at the time to get together a change management plan. And to my knowledge that was shelved, and that spoke volumes to me. It was discouraging. But you were asking about the regions. One of the great strengths and admirable characteristics, I think, of the regions, is they know their work. They know their jobs, and they just keep swinging. They are not easily distracted from their work by political discourse, by change in management. You know, there was an awful lot of upheaval with the reorganization, but people kept doing their work. They kept serving customers. You know, they kept chugging along. And I think that over time, with all of the various reorganizations and things that have happened impacting the regions, in the end, they’ve kept at it. And there’s something to be said, I think, for that kind of persistence and, and engagement. The other thing that I think is not well understood about the regions that I think kind of gets back to our point we were making earlier, and I’m just checking my time to make sure that we have it, is we were talking earlier about the opportunity to move around in the agency and learn. Well, at least in the regions, there’s a lot of shared responsibility. I’m not saying you’ll never hear someone say I won’t do that work in the regions, but they’re, at least the regional archives, depending upon the location, maybe six in some places, or at least it used to be as little as six out in Anchorage. It’s even fewer now. And, you know, including student employees, maybe, you know, 35 or so in other locations. Or maybe that used to be so. That might be a little high even now. But in any case, people would just be asked to do the work they needed to do, and they take, they’ll be working in the research room this one day, and the next day, go work on this scanning project, or go work with these records or a description project or whatever. And people just did what they needed to do, and learned, I think, more about what archival practices mean and can mean, and I think, developed a greater culture of sharing, and shared purpose. I’m not saying that there’s no sharing or shared purpose at, let’s say, Archives I or Archives II, and I can’t speak to the Presidential Libraries. I have no in-depth experience at all with the Presidential Libraries, I must say. But I know that there’s this perception that the regions are not, the knowledge and the skillsets that the, if there’s such a thing as an average person working out in the field offices has, because of the shared responsibility. That headquarters doesn’t quite get that and doesn’t, whether that happens in headquarters or not is another question, but that it’s not acknowledged and validated in terms of the value that the field office employees bring. I thought that was true, and whenever I’d go to visit, I loved traveling out and seeing what people were doing, and I’d, big quotes, \"trying to help.\" You know, headquarters were here to try to help you in the field. You know, and that was always, I think, looked upon, probably very rightly so, with some skepticism, but I always enjoyed seeing what people were doing, seeing the creativity and the ingenuity. Kansas City, for example, how that staff has managed to run a facility that’s twice as large as probably what that staffing can bear, the exhibits that they put on, the educational programs that they do, and the work that they do in, in partnership with the FRC. Shuttling records back and forth, storing records, preserving records. It is magnificent what Kansas City does, and New York City, too, has done a fantastic job, from what I understand once they moved, especially once they were faced with very similar challenges that New York, that Kansas City faced, New York City staff, once they moved from Varick Street down to the Bowling Green location, had their work cut out for them. And I don’t know that leadership understands it, because I never observed many leaders at NARA actually getting out from behind their desks, getting on the plane, and going out and spending time. They might go and meet with some prospective foundation partners, but the sense of being invisible and the sense of being underappreciated in many respects I think comes from an apparent lack of interest from leadership when they’re not going out and just saying, hey, who are you? What is your name? What do you do? What can I learn from you? Teach me something. Show me how you’re doing what you’re doing. And then just be quiet, except for asking questions, and give these people a chance to learn, to help you learn. Help them reverse mentor you, don’t be afraid to be reverse mentored by people. I think that the NARA culture would benefit greatly from some, some recognition of what reverse mentoring could mean for senior leadership, if I may say so." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "That’s a good idea. Well then, Jen, before we move on, what time is it? Do we have time?" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Oh, so it is noon and we’ve got about 25 minutes." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well, let’s finish, and we can go back. Let’s finish your last your last couple years at the archives after the regional archives." }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Well, that’s pretty brief. So let’s see. Toward the end, it’s the summer of 2010, I guess, is when the taskforce, the transformation taskforce was pulled together and I was put on that. And so it took most of my time, and I had to ask my senior archivist, Michael Moore, to basically act as the Archives Director for the regional program. And so, you know, one thing turned into another. I mean, I was on that taskforce, and then in the following fall there was a second kind of taskforce- related effort that had to do with organization and values definition and, you know, action items to try to encourage peoples’ understanding and buy-in to the transformational ideals. And so I was a member of the steering committee for that effort, and I was also kind of a, kind of a junior co-chair under Jay Bosanko, who had the organization subgroup responsibilities of trying to define, at a high level, what a reorganized agency would look like. And so when that was up, then I was a transformation officer in that I helped to prepare some of the offices for that actual technical reorganization and the administrative things that needed to be done. So I would meet with the managers of those organizations for many for whom their senior leader was going to be hired. And so to try to lead them toward feeling positively toward that change while they didn’t know who they were going to be working for was an interesting learning experience for me, for sure. And so they would create these briefing books and talk with the staff and figure out what their communication plan was. And I just tried to help them with that. And so all of this kind of segued into then since at the point that the office of the Chief Operating Officer was created, and at that time also the Agency Services Office was stood up, that meant the dissolution of the Office of Record Services, regional record services. So I had to go somewhere, and it just made sense given the work that I had been doing for the previous year and a half or so, that I would go and be part of the office of the Chief Operating Officer. So I was special assistant for I don’t remember how many months. It wasn’t quite a year, I guess, but maybe it was almost a year. And then I became the deputy COO, but Tom was planning to retire. That job did not get particularly well-defined. Jay Bosanko became the COO when Tom retired, and in my opinion the job remained undefined. And so at that point, once again, I found myself interested in seeing where is my career going to go? And so then the position here for the Chief Records Office, for the records chief, for the records division here at USCIS opened up. I applied for it, and came here, and so I’m leading a division of 92 people. Responsible for the records policy, the records management training, and for records program evaluation throughout USCIS. And I have colleagues in ICE and CBP who are doing the same, but USCIS has the lead insofar as DHS is concerned, in terms of records policy. So it’s been a fun challenge, and I’ve got some great, great, great staff members, and a leadership that is very interested in seeing GS-15s move and work with authority. And I didn’t have an awful lot of that sometimes at NARA, particularly at the end I didn’t. So this is a very, very welcome change for me, personally and professionally, and it just kind of continues in my career vein of keeping moving, keeping looking around, and continuing to learn. One thing I’d like to add that I did during my career that made a tremendous impact on me, personally and professionally, and really helped me think about what my distinctions and my values were that, that helped me define what I wanted to do next was in 2011 I attended training at American University. I entered an eight-month certificate program of AU, which is called the Key Executive Leadership Program, and so began an eight-month intensive training with an executive coach assisting me. It was a classroom experience, learning the various characteristics of good leadership, and the difference between walking the walk and talking the talk, and talking the walk and walking the talk, and what it means to, as a public servant, to emphasize the work that your staff is doing to help develop them and to develop their own leadership skills. And what it means to do that rather than pointing to yourself as a leader and saying, a-ha, this is my agenda. This is what I’m doing. But what it means to truly develop buy-in among people who want to be engaged but perhaps have worked and lived in a chain-of-command kind of environment where they have not been invited to do that or trusted to, to step up and learn to lead themselves first and then lead others. And I learned that as a public servant and as a government leader, my first obligation is in developing and leading other people, and trusting that their expertise will help us get where we need to go, but not to make my agenda the driving factor in what constitutes an organization’s mission, or how we go about doing what we do. And that that is a major key in developing workforce satisfaction in the moment and in the future if people truly feel engaged and trusted. But what it takes to do that is to have a leadership that listens, that listens critically, and that does not have hidden agendas or something else that’s going on that is not transparent and not conveyed. To use a tired and possibly inappropriate phrase, that’s where we separate the men from the boys, or the women from the girls in leadership. When you have a leader who is willing to trust the expertise of the people around them to invent the solutions, and that what an excellent leader does is create space for people to do that by listening and asking questions, not by dictating and pushing. And there’s an awful lot of the latter in Federal work, you know? And I’m not speaking generally about NARA, just in general. So to me, one of the great takeaways from my work at NARA, and what I’m continuing to work on practicing and learning here at USCIS, is how to be that kind of leader. And I’ve got a long way to go. I mean, you know, it’s a never-ending quest to learn how to lead oneself like that and lead other people, but it is absolutely eye opening. And it gives so much more value and happiness to me when I come into work knowing that that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m not trying achieve a deadline. I’m trying to help remove the barriers from the paths of people who are trying to make that happen. I’m trying to create space where the right questions are being asked. I’m trying to develop trust so that people feel like they’re human beings and not cogs in a workplace environment. And every day has its successes and every day has its challenges." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I just wanted to follow up with one last thing, because, that you mentioned, and I could tell by your tone how you feel about the transformation a little bit. And part of the goal of these interviews are we want people to learn from them, and learn from the successes and learn from mistakes. I know that the Archives has gone through several transformations while you were there. Is there anything, not just maybe this last transformation, or that you would say, I guess positive and negatives. Things that people at the Archives should really take away if they’re thinking about doing a transformation again in the future." }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "I’d advise and I think there’s plenty of management literature that advises that if you’re going to reorganize be as surgical about it as you can. What I mean by that is be as precise about what you’re trying to do and touch the areas that you’re pretty sure are the contributing areas to whatever the problem is that I hope you’ve already defined, and well understand. You know, sometimes, we reorganize things because we want things to look different, or we want to put our stamp on something. But there are good things and bad things about any kind of a reorganization. So the question is, what are we trying to do? I would encourage to really take the time and the effort to wisely understand what we’re trying to achieve. And it’s possible to do that with urgency, but we have to take the time and make sure that we’re asking the right questions. And then choose the change wisely and in bite size pieces. Choose a change that people can digest, that they can stomach, that they can perceive that will turn over a result within a reasonable timeframe so that people have an opportunity to kind of experience that and say, oh, well, that didn’t hurt quite as much as I thought it might. And I can see what that was intended to do, and it sort of worked and it sort of didn’t, but the things that didn’t work didn’t break us. I have heard so many people who have left NARA in the past couple of years say that NARA before was kluge and didn’t work too well, but now it’s broken. And I got to tell you, that’s the way I felt. And I didn’t feel that anybody was listening. But I felt that there wasn’t an environment so that the people who might listen could actually challenge themselves to listen. So creating a listening environment is important. We have to have leaders who will, who can walk the talk. They got to get out of their offices, learn what the agency really does and not assume that past experience defines the current situation. For me coming into my new job here, I’ve been begged by people here, please don’t draw conclusions about us based upon what you have heard. Please take the time to spend time with us and get to know us from who we are, not from our reputation. So I’ve started doing that. I’ve got my schedule the next two weeks is jam packed with these reverse mentoring opportunities where I’m just going to go and I’m going to learn whatever people think is important for me to. And I’m going to come to it knowing that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Just because I worked at the National Archives for 22 years or something, doesn’t mean that the way in which systems are used here or records are used here, that they’re the same kinds of problems or that people feel the same. I have to have very open ears and be willing to learn new stuff, rather than just kind of pile everything into boxes of knowledge and information that I’ve already created for myself and that are easy for me to access that way as a manager. I have to be flexible. And I think that in the future, if we’re flexible at NARA, and anywhere that we work, if we’re flexible, if we’re good listeners, if we’re willing to learn from people around us, if we will take the time to define the problem, to not make change because we want something to look different, or to make change because we imagine, based upon our assumptions about how things function, that magically people are going to take to a change if we just make it, make that change, that they’re just going to come along with it. People need to be encouraged. And people can’t be encouraged when managers sit in their offices and don’t circulate. We need to circulate. NARA needs to circulate. NARA needs to do all of the things, I think, that I suggested. And I believe there are individuals who have tried to do various bits and pieces of these things but not in a way in which the leadership team is perceived as coming at it from this place of behaviors that are so open, flexible, and learning. And transparency is important. I remember early on there being a lot of talk about how the leadership team meetings were going to have minutes posted and there was going to be information that people were going to be seeing. And so a lot of the things that were being discussed and were with the taskforce, the transformation taskforce, never got implemented. I think that once certain individuals and once certain needs and agendas kind of transferred over into implementing, I think there was a lack of understanding about how to do it and a lack of maturity in understanding how to do that kind of leading. Their hearts were in the right place, but the skill sets were not there. And that the senior team, so many members of whom are brand new to the National Archives, did not, I think, as a senior team, get the level of attention that they needed to have in order to gel to create that new vision of what a changed National Archives would look like from the top down. And I haven’t heard much about that changing recently. So, you know, I offer all of this with the hope that, knowing that it’s only my opinion, I suspect that there is some, I’ve heard some people say some similar things. But it’s because I love NARA. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t love NARA. It’s easy to love NARA, and I’m proud of having worked for NARA. But it’s had some painful, painful years, especially recently. What I will say is this. In secession, I think, starting with Don Wilson, and I’m just saying that because that was my earliest Archivist I knew in any kind of way, there’s been this progression where Archivists have seemed to understand the need to pull the National Archives out from under the rock it’s been hiding under and to help our stakeholders and our customers understand our value. And so I hope that’s continuing. I hope that your questions about customer service, and outreach and regions and digital services are part of that thinking. I’m not being harsh on NARA for the sake of being harsh, and I’m not bitter. I’m very happy where I am, but it was a tough experience for me personally and professionally. I know that, you know, and there might be some tougher times ahead. I don’t know, you know? But change hurts, but there’s good ambiguity and there’s very bad ambiguity. All ambiguity is not okay. And so maybe a little less ambiguity, a little more clarity, would help. Ad as I say that, I’m also thinking about what I’m trying to do here in my new job. You know, I’m ambiguous about things I shouldn’t be ambiguous about. There are things that I need to work on. So I’m pointing to myself, too." }, { "speaker": "MS. MULLIGAN", "text": "Would you come back to the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Not now. And again, it’s not about the mission. If I saw mature leadership that truly, truly knew how to seek and develop development of its own leaders internally, and I’m not talking about identifying an organizational development function and making sure that it’s doing well. I mean, all leaders at the top truly understanding what it means and what it’s like to look somebody in the eye in their own office space, for, say, out of the Presidential Libraries or in the field, and to truly say I hear you. And to take that time and personally connect so that people feel their validity, organizationally and personally, and then to begin a dialogue about what is truly our shared interest in this agency. And what will it take to achieve that rather than committing things, doing things through closed doors, doing things through electronic means because it’s easy or it’s cheap, or that’s the way everybody works today is, you know, no. People still talk. People still need to look eye to eye and to understand one another. I think from a place of true understanding is where that could start. If I saw that happening, I’d be delighted to come back. But I don’t see that happening anytime soon, the way things have been. But it’ll happen. Things will cycle around, and, you know, but by that time, I’ll just years away from saying to myself, gosh, I could retire in two or three years if I wanted to. And at that point, I’ll be in a different part in my career. But I have never personally returned to a place where I came from, okay? I have, for better or for worse, for whatever that means, I mean, a person doesn’t move from Los Angeles to Washington, DC at the age of 23 never even having seen the place she’s moving to, and, you know, and do that lightly. So I move with a purpose, and I don’t know if after this interview, I’d be wanted back, but under a, under a different kind of environment, yeah, I’d, I’d consider it." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well, Ellen, you might have another question, but this kind of falls in the same area—you talked a lot lately about the morale problem at the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And some people say that it’s been there the whole time and we just didn’t notice it. And a lot of people say, no, it’s new. You were at the Archives for 22 years. Do you feel like the morale problem is new, or do you think it’s something that’s been there?" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "So I tend to say yes and yes. I would say that both of the responses are right. I’ve got a ton of assumptions that are packed into, you know, what you’ve just suggested. I would say its yes. Yes to both. And so here are my assumptions about what you’ve said and what I imagine people may have meant. So the morale problem that I remember, and kind of experiencing when I came in, and what I mean by morale, I don’t mean my morale, although eventually I started feeling one. So there’s a sort of a victimization and sort of a high school kind of environment thing where it’s you speak if you’re spoken to, don’t dream too big. You’re in your class or your silo or whatever. But I’ve always experienced NARA as not knowing how to encourage and then reward people for really trying to innovate and encouraging and giving true authority to GS-15s and GS-14s. And from a place now in a different agency, I can tell the main distinction is where I am not an SCS in my current position, but I am afforded the respect of an SCS. I have huge responsibilities, and I am expected to exercise my authority, you know, directly, and how I see fit, as long as I’m also, of course, seeking the guidance and counsel of my supervisor and my reviewing official. And, you know, checking with people to make sure that something that I want to implement makes sense, especially being a new person in the agency. So how does this compare to NARA? I have known too many GS-15s and GS-14s, I feel, at NARA who truly don’t feel like they’re the captain of their division, you know? And I think there’s an awful lot of passive aggressiveness in that. So I’m not saying that they are being unjustly done to. I think that it is an environment where there’s no expectation that people will really step up and really own, really drive like a general or a colonel, you know? Really develop a vision, and really drive it, and really own it, and here’s the money and the resources that you can have at your disposal to reward people. But I don’t, I never experienced a genuine clamor among the 15s and the 14s that, to lead like that. Where’s the fire? Where’s the fire in the belly to do that? I’ve not observed it. So when I say they’re not being unjustly done to, everybody owns at least 50% of the responsibility for their situation. And so they’re not bringing it, and it’s not being required of them. So I see that as a real distinction. Did I answer your question?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah, I’m—" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "[Interposing] Could you repeat the question?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "—well, I was wondering—" }, { "speaker": "MS. MULLIGAN", "text": "[Interposing] Morale." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "—yes." }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Morale." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Wondering, yes, I mean—" }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "[Interposing] Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that, so there’s this victimization when you see your 14, your 15, your 13 behaving that way, I mean, we’d love to think that we’re all self- commanding, that this is our domain, we’re adults. But the reality is we tend to, as human beings, react and respond and put ourselves forward according to what we see above us in an organization. And so leadership really, really matters. And so this victimization thing does roll downhill, and you end up, so that kills innovation. When people wake up kind of like, well, what can I make sure doesn’t fall on me today, rather than, how can I make a difference? And where does public service fit into my life? So I think that that is part of the ongoing staff morale problem. I think the more recent thing gets back to what I said, that people have a feeling that the agency is broken. There was this belief that if we reorganize, people will just make things happen. No. There were networks that were shattered. There were trusts that was shattered and not rebuilt. You know, the new leaders weren’t exactly put forward in a way that I think made it very clear that they were valued and trusted. And, you know, so what was new and what needed to be new was not defined by senior leadership in a clear way at all to give good marching, I’ve got quotes around this, \"marching orders\" to the SCSes that were hired in. But yet they were supposed to create something visionary and new, and again, and lead that change and communicate it downward. So I think that some of that stuff contributes to the broken feeling. And it will rebuild, but it’s going to take different people and a lot of time. Now your folks are really never going to want to have me back. But that’s okay. I, I own everything I’m saying. It’s my own personal opinion, professional opinion, like I said at the beginning of this tape. But I, you know, that’s what I feel for an agency that needs to work on its own sense of well-defined urgency. The current Archivist has talked about the need for urgency. Okay. What does that really mean? Is that a behavior? Is it, is it a value? Is it both? What’s important and can… Is it fair to people to say behave urgently? Do urgent things. But to what end, and what is the shared interest? What can people get behind? So I think that there is, in pockets throughout the agency, employees who understand that and they do see things that are going well. And they see things that energize them, and they want to contribute and contribute even more. But there is this massive gap between, I think, those individuals who are experiencing the agency in that way and probably have not been around more than five or six years or so. I’m just saying that. I’m just guessing, I don’t know, in terms of the number of years. And then there’s everybody else, who is of a certain age. You know, I think the average age of the NARA employee keeps climbing. It was some years ago something like 46, and I think it’s higher than that now maybe. But there’s the everybody else that remembers and has experienced this long-term staff morale problem. And those folks are really hard to turn around when you’ve been experiencing an organizational behavior for the majority of your career. But I refuse to personally believe it’s impossible to reach those individuals. I think it can be, but it takes, again, that concerted, personal effort from senior leadership to really engage people. One-on-one, if that’s what it takes. And up until the last day that I was at NARA, I didn’t see anybody really going out, you know, from senior leadership and trying to do that. And there was a lot of talk about that." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "All right. Well, we’re running out of time, so is there something you really want to add, or…" }, { "speaker": "MS. MULLIGAN", "text": "I don’t think so. I think we hit most of the questions. We didn’t talk much about specific web things, but you gave us some good overview." }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Yeah, the, like, for example, I mean, you know, NAIL, I can’t give an awful lot of insight— that’s Deb Wall, Carol Lagundo kind of question. First venturing in online services, you know, it was NAIL and that laundry list webpage…Hang on just a sec. We’ve got to run, huh? Okay, I’ve got to go." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay, yes. Well, I mean, I think that your overviews were very helpful, anyway, rather than going to specific questions." }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MS. MULLIGAN", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So this was great. Thanks for your time, and we might want to follow up." }, { "speaker": "MS. NELSON", "text": "Not a problem." }, { "speaker": "MS. MULLIGAN", "text": "Yes. Thank you." } ]

[ { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "This is Rebecca Brenner. I'm here at AII about to interview Charles Piercy." }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Chuck Piercy." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Chuck Piercy, and it is July 14, 2015, and we are in room 5100. So, Mr. Piercy, could you please provide a brief overview of your career at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "I've worked here since about September of 2008 and will be retiring, and moving to another position on July 25, 2015." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Have you held multiple positions here? Or what positions have you held?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Yes, I originally came here to be the Deputy Chief Information Officer and then while I was in that position the Chief Information Officer retired and so I was acting CIO for about 10-11 months and then I was offered the position I'm in now which is the Executive for Business Support Services." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "How did your education and previous work experience influence your decision to work for the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "My previous work experience was with NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and I had worked there for a number of years in engineering and program management, and those were skills that were deemed to be useful by the Chief Information Officer for the Electronic Records Archives and some of the other big electronic records projects that were going on." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "What were your original impressions of NARA?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "I guess I originally expected to see much more in the way of electronic records, storage, and preservation. And I was initially surprised to see that many, most of the records here at the archives were in paper and other analog formats." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Any particular reason? Or could you provide some more context as to why you expected there to be more digital than more paper?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Well, I've been in the working world for about 35 years, and maybe in the first five of those years we actually had born-analog records on typewriters and things, but for the last 30 years all records have been created from electronic sources, and therefore it just seems like it would be more efficient to accession the electronic version of the record rather than a paper version of it. They're essentially all created electronically—we used to the term born digital—almost everything is born- digital—it's just that we archive the analog version." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "How has the balance between paper and digital records evolved during your time here?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "I've been here for almost 7 years and I haven’t seen any real breakthroughs in terms of a movement toward electronic records. Except possibly for the Presidential Memo and the update to the Federal Records Act, which I think has the potential for some real movement." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "What exactly is the Federal Records Act?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "The Federal Records Act is the act of Congress that controls the preservation and management of Federal records." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "What successes have you achieved here at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Well, I think a big one was helping to make the Electronic Records Archives system program operational with the initial operating capability. The program was in real danger of being killed by OMB (Office of Management and Budget) and Congress, and we worked very hard to keep that from happening; it was shortened but it was not killed, and at one time it was about 20% of the NARA budget, so that's a pretty important thing. When I was in the CIO shop we had quite a few successful projects, including the network attached storage that added about two petabytes of storage here that was critically needed. Both for email file storage, shared drive file storage, but also for scanned image storage, and we updated all the servers and since I've been in been in Business Support Services, we've had a couple of historic building renovations including the National Archives Experience Phase II or NAE II in the National Archives Building in Washington, DC and the Customs House renovation for the National Archives space and the Customs House in lower Manhattan. So quite a few accomplishments, I think." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "You mentioned sort of the friction in the budget with congress and in the importance of the ERA—could you speak to the urgency of the electronic records archive?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Yeah, the electronic records archives program had been going on for quite a few years, and Congress and OMB grew impatient for signs of success and milestones that would point to our success, and so one thing we had to do was we were given a firm deadline—I believe it was the end of calendar year 2011—to complete it and make it operation. And we met that deadline and were able to preserve the funding for the program" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "What aspects of your work do you most enjoy?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "I really like working with people and sort of forming teams to get projects accomplished. And I have a project management background and I would really like to be able to point to something as a firm accomplishment." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "What's the greatest team you’ve worked on here?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "I would say probably the team associated with Electronic Records Archives; also the storage area network was a pretty large project: it was a four or five million dollar project and had hardware at both College Park and Rocket Center, and that was a pretty large and successful team." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "What is Rocket Center?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Rocket Center is really two things; it's our continuity, or COOP, Continuity of Operations site. So, in the event of a catastrophic event in the Washington, DC area we could go to Rocket Center and resume operations of the agency. I hold the position called the continuity coordinator, which is one of my many hats. And so we annually have a continuity drill at Rocket Center. In addition, the base instance and the EOP instance of ERA are at Rocket Center, and so we have a full-time contingent of staff that are up there to maintain that." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Where is Rocket Center?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "It's in West Virginia, really in the middle of nowhere, really. In the panhandle of West Virginia and that's sort of by design, as we wanted it at least 50 or 60 miles out of Washington, DC in a relatively unpopulated area. It actually is on a Navy base in West Virginia." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Have there been any instances where it seemed possible that you would have to go there or were there any near cases of that?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "I can't think of anything that was catastrophic enough that we would need to go there since I've been working here. We did have a pretty severe earthquake in—" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "(interposing) Summer 2011, right?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "2011, and we've had the possibility of tornadoes that could have affected the College Park facility, possible flooding in the National Archives, but, no, we've never had any actual events that where we've had to actually activate the COOP plan." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "And the name of that particular hat is the Continuity Manager, you said?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Continuity Coordinator." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Continuity Coordinator. And how did you take on that position?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "It's position that all agencies have to have, and as the head of Business Support Services I have many hats that I wear that are requirements of law or requirements in executive orders. We'll get a new executive order that says we need a senior official in charge of X, Y, Z and sometimes that comes to me in Business Support Services." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "And what are some examples of your other hats? I like that analogy." }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "You see my hats over there on the desk. I am the Senior Official for Historic Facility Preservation Policy here at the Archives. I am the Designated Agency Safety and Health Official or the DASHO. I am the Senior Agency Security Official, and there's several other ones, as identified in NARA 101." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "What do you do for the policy one?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "It has to do with historic preservation, and we have several NARA properties that are significant historic buildings, such as the national historic archives building in Washington, DC, and these buildings cannot be modified without going through a number of steps to make sure that certain facades or certain spaces within the building are left in their current historic state, and so that's what the position has to do with." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Going back to your daily activities: can you describe a typical day in your unit?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Pretty typical day is I arrive at about 7:30 in the morning and I have a cup of coffee and then will read emails. I get quite a few emails, even overnight I'll have quite a few emails, so I will scan those first to make sure that nothing urgent, and then I'll read them basically in chronological order. Fairly busy schedule, sometimes meetings back to back all day, and then will end my day with more emails, after noon. And sometimes there are crises. We've had a garage fire while I've been here, which had four fire trucks that responded. Two cars completely burned up and the possibility of many more cars being burned and possibly losing the entire garage. There's always something going on, always some sort of exciting crisis to solve." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Hopefully the garage fire isn't a typical day, but that leads right into my next question, which is, what were some of the challenges and issues that you faced in your career with the agency?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "I think events like the garage fire and the earthquake were pretty challenging. We did have some shelving collapses at Suitland during the earthquake, and we had to make some emergency repairs to the building. We had to quickly assess impact to the College Park facility and Archives I and I think those things are probably some of the biggest challenges." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "What has been your relationship with other Federal agencies?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "We have a pretty close relationship with Federal agencies, particularly with the CIO council I've worked a lot, and that is primarily the CIOs of the cabinet-level agencies, work closely with them and with OMB and in some cases with staffers on the hill to help meet our objectives." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "How so? Can you provide some examples of working with congressional staffs?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Well, we've had meetings with them on budgetary issues, particularly a lot of interaction during the ERA, something called the tech stat, technical status review, which were done government- wide and identified ERA as a program in trouble or a program that was not meeting its objectives, and so I had to work close with both OMB and the Hill in terms of that, in terms of making sure that we identified milestones that we could meet and keep the program going." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "What are some of those milestones?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Well, the milestones would be completing the last software release that would enable the system to become operational and other milestones were in terms of the volume of records that we got into the system and the number of agencies that were able to utilize it." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "And what exactly is the mission of the ERA?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Well, the mission of ERA is to store and preserve and provide access to the records of the Federal government in electronic form, so the records that get accessioned and injested into ERA are completely in electronic form; we never see the paper versions of those records." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Correct me if I'm wrong, but it does not include the records that were paper and then become digital?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "No, it does not." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "It includes a digital surrogates, which are essentially digitized paper records, although it could, it could be expanded to include those, and may in the future." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "How do you foresee the future of the ERA? Especially as more, let's say, agency records become more and more digital." }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Well, I'm not involved in it, but there are plans for a replacement of ERA that are being made now. I don't know if they're going to call it ERA 2 or next-generation ERA, but those plans are coming together now from an architectural standpoint. And that's the future of the archives, I think. It may be a slow transition, but I think eventually our job will transition to full Electronic Records Archives." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "What technological changes over time have you observed?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "That's an interesting question." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "I'm actually writing a research paper on it too." }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Oh, okay." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "(interposing) But it's also on my sheet." }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Well, I'm an electrical engineer by training. And I've seen massive change in computer technology in my career. I was working in the Navy in the early days of the internet, and we would have this massive minicomputer that will fill this entire room almost. And that was our connection to the internet. And people would access the minicomputer by dial-in modem. Seems almost primitive by today's standards, but we also, at that lab, had supercomputers and, you know, some of these computers had less computing power than my smartphone does now." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "That's interesting: the analogy you made between computers and what your smartphone can do now." }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Yeah, in fact, the Android smartphones run the Linux operating system, which was the same one, Unix, Linux, same operating system these massive old computers used to run like 30 years ago, so the more things change, the more they stay the same." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "More broadly speaking, what other changes have you witnessed at your time at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "I've seen one sort of constant change is the need to acquire more storage space for analog records, and that was a priority when I first came here, seven years, even though I was working more on the electronic side, but it remains a big challenge today and we're constantly looking for ways to acquire new space to store analog records." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Are you involved with any other professional organization such as SAA or OAH or any of those those?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Not to any great degree. I have attended some of the conferences though." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Have you attended any particularly interesting conferences for your work here?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Yeah I've actually attended some of the sort of forward-looking technological" }, { "speaker": "symposiums that discussed new approaches to electronic archives such as the LOCKSS approach", "text": "Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. Which, we propose an electronic archives that is in many geographical locations and data are simply copied from one spinning disk—one array of spinning disks to another array of spinning disks in a different geographical location and perhaps you wouldn’t even need to keep the data on tape because you have so many electronic copies scattered throughout the country. So, I've heard some really interesting approaches to electronic archives. We've also I will also say that I've also seen some interesting innovative approaches to traditional archives as well, in particular the Library of Congress facility up in Fort Meade, Maryland, which was quite interesting." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "And how would those-- I don’t really understand it, but that's okay. Those spinning reels and the changes in geography, how would that affect daily operations, let's say, in the research room?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Well, the current operations in the research room is original—original records are presented to researchers and they have the option of coping those original records. If the original record is electronic, then the access copy is electronic, and my thing—I'm not an archivist, nor do I claim to be an archivist, but my feeling is that that has to result in less wear and tear on the original, particularly if you can get into a mode where your access copy is electronic; whether the preservation copy is paper or digital, you have less wear and tear on the original." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Interesting. How do you view your time overall at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Very positive. I've had a lot of opportunities working here that I wouldn't have otherwise. I think, in particular, a big benefit of working at NARA is its status as a mid-sized to small independent agency, and so you're able to participate in a lot of activities that you may not be able to participate in a larger cabinet-level agency." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "What are some examples of those activities?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "well, interactions with OMB, interactions with the Hill, interactions with the GAO (Government Accountability Office) and other things like that that might in a larger agency be handled in the headquarters by political appointees." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Can you speak to your significant contributions to the National Archives such as the ERA or the historic preservation field?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Well, I think a big contribution was the oversight of the NAE II project that really-" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "(interposing) Can you define what did that acronym stand for one more time?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "National Archives Experience, Phase II, which at a visitor orientation plaza in the National Archives Building it provided the Rubenstein Gallery, which houses Magna Carta, and I think it just makes the museum portion of the building work much better. Much more user friendly, much more inviting to guests. I think it increases the throughput of the museum, it makes the learning easier and natural for visitors with the Rubenstein Gallery, and overall I think it has been a very big improvement to a very historic and important building on the Washington mall." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "what year did you say that was?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "That was completed about 2 years ago, I think, in about 2013." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Does that include the Public Vaults?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "No, the public vaults were existing were actually part of the NAE I, the original National Archives Experience renovation, part of the original renovation of the building." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "When was that, the first preservation?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "That was before my time. I believe it was about 10 or 12 years ago." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "And where will you be going next?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "I will be retired for one day on Sunday on the July 26 and I will start a new job with the Harris Corporation on Monday, July 27." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "To what extent has the National Archives influenced that move?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "I basically got a very nice offer from a private-sector firm and I happened to be able to retire, so it was just a good move. And I like to not stay in the same place for too long. I think seven years is a pretty good run here at the National Archives, and I really appreciate the opportunities I’ve had to advance my career here and learn." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time, and do you have anything you would like to add to the interview such as anecdotes or words of wisdom?" }, { "speaker": "CHUCK PIERCY", "text": "Well, I think that the National Archives staff really needs to strive to embrace the future and move toward an electronic records as soon as possible, and not only follow the trend, but lead the trend towards electronic records, archives preservation, and access. #### NATIONAL ### ARCHIVES ####### National Archives History Office ####### 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW ####### Washington DC 20408" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. MARVIN PINKERT", "text": "There are several ways to look at it, but probably the place to begin is with Archivist John Carlin. John had a challenge to face. There was going to be, he knew that for reasons of both security and preservation, the cases for the three Charters, the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were going to have to be re-encased. When they went to come up with solutions to re-encase the Charters, it ended up removing an entire floor of stacks from the archives. When they removed the floor of stacks, there were 14-foot spaces behind the three charters and no concept of what would actually go in that space. Carlin invited one of his Presidential Library directors to come up with a plan, called the American Idea. I assume there is a copy at the Archives. He called together a group of museum-wide people in the summer of 2000 to get their opinion about this exhibit, which was an audio-animatronic journey from Runnymede to the Bill of Rights. They asked him two questions. John, why do you want to do this? The second was, if you're absolutely determined to do a high-tech exhibit, don't you think you should have someone on your team with a background in doing high-tech exhibits? The first was a really good question because, to this day, I can't think of a really good reason why the Archives would have invested in an audio-animatronic exhibit from Runnymede to the Bill of Rights. The second was even better for me, because John went on a search for someone who would lead his museum team who was a bit more familiar with what was deemed technologically advanced exhibits. That turned out through the auspices of Dr. Franco, who was one of the people in the room to name me, and John said that he would hire me. That is why some of the documents actually pre-date my official arrival at the museum. By the way, John, in his first meeting where I was present, wanted to reassure the Records Services side of the house that there would never be a museum at the National Archives, just to give you something of the flavor of the environment. That was part of the reason it was called the National Archives Experience and the other part is I wanted to emphasize the experience side of it. Stop me if it's too much detail." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "No, go ahead." }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "Okay. When I arrived, I looked at the situation and said, “Well what is the problem that we're really trying to solve?” It came to me after several conversations with John that the issue was, for those people coming into the building, and we later proved this through a study, had no idea where they were. They didn't know that the National Archives was a separate agency from the rest of the Federal Government. They thought it was a part of the Smithsonian, maybe, or maybe part of the Library of Congress. Secondly, there were some who correctly identified the National Archives was its own government agency. When you asked them what the National Archives did, the answer was it protected the Constitution, Declaration, and the Bill of Rights. The fact that their family records were located here and that people had suggested that general visitors were not important to the Archives; maybe they'd have to give the Charters back to the Library of Congress. James H. Billington was willing to accept them, or maybe they would want to go to the Smithsonian. There were active, behind-the-scene efforts happening to take the Charters away from the National Archives. John had enough good sense to know that that would have been disastrous in terms of the long-term image and support for the National Archives despite the fact that there were concerns going beyond the strategic plan that the Archives had adopted in 1997. There was sentiment to do something to keep the Charters, so I contested to John that what we really wanted was an exhibit that dealt with what else the Archives did, the importance of records, why records matter, which became the theme of the exhibit very quickly. It had a theme, but it had no vision of what it could be. Through that early spring of 2001, as we brought Gallagher and Associates design firm aboard, one of the moments that stuck in my mind is when we started to do focus groups with board members of the Foundation, which pre-existed the creation of the National Archives Experience. The Foundation had been created by the Center for Legislative Archives in 1991, but we were about to convert them into a support group for the National Archives Experience, so we sat down with them and we asked them, what causes you to join the Foundation? What is that you get out of this? One gentleman turned and said, “Well, they take you upstairs into the stacks and then from the stacks they take you into a room that's a vault and they put a record in front of you that is from, you know, Thomas Jefferson, his own hand, and it is such a spectacular experience.” That moment I knew what we were going to do with the exhibit and it was when we decided that we wanted to have that experience for a million people and the way to do it was to create a Public Vault. That's the point of origin for the project." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "So, you sort of touched on what I think Ray [Ruskin] was also hinting at when I talked to him. That it seems like almost from the beginning, it was never really about taking away from the Charters themselves, trying to distract from them, but rather an addition to the experience of people who weren't aware of the extent of the Archives' work, so when most-­" }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "[Interposing] My goal was, I told John a couple of things right at the beginning. I told him that we were never going to see an increase in visitation, that the number of visitors was restricted by the number of people who pass by the Charters and that we were already at capacity, so that was a delusion that there has been an increase in visitors. What I said we could accomplish with the exhibit was not getting more people in but getting more people to have a greater depth of understanding. We went out on the mall that first year and asked people who had just seen the Charters of Freedom, where they had seen it and what that place was, and we had 25 percent correct answers. After the opening of the exhibit, we interviewed people in the new building in a similar manner. We had 75 percent correct answers, so we're about preserving the records of the Federal Government. Our goal, which was not a very dramatic one when you think about it, but very important, was that people actually visited not just the Charters but the National Archives and that we accomplished." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "So you mentioned, just a few minutes ago, about bringing in, I think it was Gallagher. Can you talk a little bit about that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "Yeah, Gallagher and Associates." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "Patrick Gallagher was the lead designer. And we worked on a team basis. In other words, we all sat at the table. The Foundation, including their marketing folks, Gallagher and his team, and our team all met together from the beginning to the end in creating the project." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Okay. So from the, was it from the onset, in terms of the design of the exhibit, was it always intended to be based on the Preamble of the Constitution the way the different aspects were broken down or was that something that was later on decided?" }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "Okay. It would be fair to say the division of the exhibit into sections of the Constitution was an inspiration of the Archivist of the United States, John Carlin." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "So, what was your day-to-day job in this project from the start? Was it, did it focus on a bunch of different things and it just depended on the day, or was it geared towards the Vaults itself? My understanding is you were overseeing not just the Vaults, but also the creation of the McGowan Theater and the galleries and pretty much that entire renovation project. You were an integral part of that process." }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "My job was to make it happen." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Right, so that-­" }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "[Interposing] So that means doing whatever it takes. Sometimes I was a fundraiser. I had authority to go with the Foundation board to make the pitch for funds for the project. There were times that I was an exhibit project manager, making sure things came in on time and on budget. There were times when I even had some creative input, though compared to the talents that were on the team, that was a fairly meager contribution, but it was for me to lay out the vision and see that we had the resources necessary to complete that vision." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "What were, for you personally either during the project or from your perspective as the manager at large, what were the biggest obstacles that you guys faced throughout your work on the project?" }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "Well, it started on the money side and then we moved ourselves across." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Fair enough." }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "On the money side, the Foundation for the National Archives, I was the one who pressed the Foundation to pitch the project. Now, this required a lot of heavy lifting, because not only was the Foundation a little squeamish about taking on the project, at the time, they were an all-volunteer organization and they had raised a total of $100,000 in the first 10 years of their existence. I was asking them to now raise $22 million in three years. That's a fairly ambitious operation, so I don't think it was unreasonable for them to be a little reticent, to take some convincing. On the government side, there was a huge amount of suspicion of using the Foundation as the intermediary here, but I actually needed the Foundation not only to bring some money without walking out and saying, we're the government, would you like to give us some money? Which was the original strategy that John had, which was not working terribly well, but in addition to their fundraising capacity, I needed the Foundation's flexibility in managing the project. In other words, as a government agency, we would have gone out and had 56-60 bidders and they would have had to be a lowest cost proposition, even if the firm's experience had been designing windows for department stores. We needed to have a more controlled process, and so we went out, I think, to four firms and the Foundation had its ability to set its own criteria for what a firm had to be able to accomplish, and I could get a high quality firm to complete the project. I could also put things in the contract through the Foundation to make sure that things were going to be delivered on time and on budget, so I, I think that that was the set of challenges around money and around management of the project, of course, from my position were the biggest challenges. We also had a series of challenges that cannot be talked of that dealt with some of the internal politics at the Archives, and that you'll have to wait for another day to hear about." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "No, that's fine." }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "Suffice it to say that there was a certain individual who'd been banned from participating in Archives decision-making who was nonetheless in a position to overrule decisions made by the Archives. It was a very unusual situation, and if I were to publish a tell-all memoir I will share it with the world, but this individual felt that the no item of controversy should be in the exhibit and their definition of controversy was pretty broad. One of the first items I wanted in the exhibit was when I learned the story of how the Holocaust funding, the Holocaust reimbursements were based on discoveries in the Archives records. I thought this was a great example of what John had initially told me was one of the major messages that he wanted to deliver, which was that records matter and that records are not just things that are kept because they fill up a lot of space, but that people actually use them to assert their rights as citizens. I thought, well, here's a wonderful example and the individual I'm speaking of told me that we couldn't include a Holocaust unit unless we included a unit on Arab Americans, which left me kind of speechless. I also was told that I could not include a unit that dealt with the Freedman's Bureau records because they were too controversial. These decisions were all near the end of the project. We were almost done with the project at the time that these decisions came down and I complied as best I could. Then I went to Archivist Alan Weinstein when he came in, which was a few weeks after the completion of the exhibit, and I asked for his permission to go ahead and amend the exhibit. That's why there is a unit on Freedman's Bureau and a unit on the Holocaust and it all worked out." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "You talked about funding and I was going over some of the things that you sent me. It seems like from your end, the thing that you pushed on the Foundation that you wanted to get across to them as a sort of way to convince them to help with the project is the idea that it was, it centered around educating the public. Is that, would that be a-­" }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "[Interposing] Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "In other words, this was the inspired moment that instead of when the objection was made that there's nothing about education in the strategic plan of the National Archives, I said, great. Well, that's where we should be a part of the process because there are a lot of people who think that the records of the National Archives should be used for educational purposes. Let them fund the educational side of the Archives and you can keep the strategic plan right where it is and you can fulfill the goals of the Archives. Let those who want to, in the same way that you let researchers make use of the records, let people who want to use the records to educate on the process of using them in that way." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "And that seemed to be the way that you thought would be the most efficient way to convince them that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "I think it was one of the factors that worked in both directions during the years we were working on the Public Vaults. At the time, he was thinking that he didn't want to get the Archives involved in some educational program and the Foundation was thinking that they wanted to be an educational institution, so that combination, the clarity that existed for a brief window of time is what allowed the Public Vaults to move forward at such speed. And it was easy. Every donor we went to, we would say the Archives is there to preserve and to provide access to records, but the intellectual, the ability to use these records to create a better-educated public requires private sector support, and that was very clear. Subsequent Archivists, the situation became much less clear." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Okay. I think that makes sense from the standpoint today. Sorry. I'm just reading over my questions, making sure I'm not missing anything here. So you came on, how long did you work at the Archives? You came on in 2000, correct?" }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "Yes, I came on in December 2000 and I left in April 2012." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Okay. So what was your, what was the majority of your work after the Vaults and the majority of that restoration was completed. Was it still overseeing the continuation of that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "No, first of all, we did at least a dozen temporary exhibits on our own." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "Everything that went into the Lawrence F. O'Brien Gallery was something that was done by the Foundation, the Archives, and me." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "And then, some of my proudest accomplishments are the Digital Vaults and Docs Teach online educational tools. After we worked on those, we got permission to change the entry and create Records of Rights, and I was there up to the final design of Records of Rights. I was not there when it actually opened. For all but the last six months of my tenure, I ran both education and exhibits of the National Archives Experience." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "One of the other things that was very important to me was that exhibits and education be considered as one and not separate from another. We had joint team meetings, there was always an educator involved to plan. I've never been able to see why education in a museum was not intrinsic to what the intended process was, and vice versa." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Okay. So, the Public Vaults opened more than a decade ago?" }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "Yes, 2004." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Yeah. In my discussion with Ray, he touched a little bit on things he thinks could, hypothetically if the Archives was deciding today to do an overhaul to the Vaults and change it up, he touched on something that he thought would be good to consider. To begin this approach, he said that if they were doing it now, he would go back to square one and the thing he focused on was the emphasis on digital tools for education in the exhibit space, because at the time it was cutting edge, but now, at least in his opinion, it seems somewhat antiquated. Would you agree with that assessment?" }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "Yes. The original lifespan of an exhibit like that was 10 to 12 years, and now, this is clearly going to be up for at least 14 years, maybe 15, and, if I had stayed, one of my tasks would have been to go back to scratch and to keep the same purpose but think through a completely different exhibit. The exhibit went through one update in about, what was that? 2009? Even that update is now too old and we just keep thinking about doing things incrementally. We won't really produce an innovation that matches today's audience, so I'm in complete agreement with Ray. I think the whole thing needs to be scrapped and we need to go back to the beginning. It's not because I don't like the exhibit. There's lots of things I liked, but everything has its time." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "And its time has now passed." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Do you think that also part of it is that people 10 to 15 years ago used the Archives, in terms of the general public, used it pretty differently than people would use it today? And so the-­" }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "[Interposing] On the research side of the house, it's changed so dramatically. I have to laugh, because before when everything got digitized, the research side of the operation used to have a line every April for the census or similar records but we had no lines anymore. The exhibit side, the lines were around the building, and there's something about that. It was a message about what makes the records powerful on the exhibit side, and there really is no, it’s not that the Declaration hasn't been digitized. It's digitized wonderfully. You can get to detail that you'll never see in person, but it is not a substitute for being in person, one on one, with the Declaration in the Rotunda. The fact is when people question whether museums have had their day, I always point out the difference between records that are there for information and records that are part of an experience. In records that are part of an experience, there is still room for innovation on the exhibit side of the house." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Seems to be sort of a reversal in that sense that it seems like people, in regard to museums, maybe just in general people 10-20 years ago, were all about putting everything online and having it be accessible to everybody, and now people are so used to that, we want to see the real thing." }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "I personally find that pretty fascinating. And yes-­" }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "[Interposing] I think we have never lost the need for the authentic. If we were to re-write Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, authentic would be somewhere near the top of those things that people want, and it helps explain a lot of human behavior and authentic can be authentic goods. It can be authentic stories, but there is a real desire to be in proximity to that which is real, and the more artificial our society gets, the more that has value." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Interesting. Was there anything that I didn't cover or I didn't ask or you didn't say that you wanted to be able to say?" }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "Talking about 11 years of my life, there are a few things you have not covered, but it's probably more than enough to get you started. If there are other things that you're interested in, I have all sorts of things down in the basement that I don't know what there is a copy of in the Archives. But if there is a specific period or issue that you want more detail on, you know, I know the history. The other people were basically half the Foundation." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Absolutely." }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "And now works for Gallagher and Associates." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Say that again? I'm sorry." }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "Thora Colot now works for Gallagher and Associates, so if you visit with Thora, you get a two-for." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCMANUS", "text": "Thank you again for your time. I really do appreciate it." }, { "speaker": "MR. PINKERT", "text": "No problem. Glad to be of help - ­ ## ( _((_ \\~, ~~,;1 ~ ### NATIONAL ### ARCHIVES ##### National Archives History Office ##### 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW ##### Washington DC 20408" } ]

[ { "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", "text": "Today’s Monday, June 27, 2016, and we are in the conservation lab conference room in the National Archives Building in Washington, DC. My name is Jessie Kratz and I’m the Historian of the National Archives. Today I’ll be interviewing Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler. Mary Lynn, can you please spell your name and give your title at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler", "text": "It’s M-A-R-Y middle name: L-Y-N-N last name: R-I-T-Z-E-N-T-H-A-L-E-R. And I’m the chief of the conservation lab at the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Ok, well, first, congratulations on your retirement next week." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Thank you." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I'm so happy to be able to get this in before you left. We’re going to start with some general questions and we’ll ease into your National Archives career. But first can you give me a little brief bio—where were you born, where did you go to school?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Ok, I grew up in Michigan, near Detroit, and I went to Michigan State University, Wayne State University and at Wayne State, I got a degree in Library Science as well as a specialty in Archives Administration. I moved to Chicago and worked in the manuscript department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which is where I really got my interest in conservation and bookbinding. I studied for over 12 years with a local well-known binder, Bill Anthony, who came to Chicago from Ireland and studied with him for quite a long time. And then I went to the Society of American Archivists, where I ran a couple of NEH-funded programs, one on conservation of archival materials. And the next project was on caring for photographic materials. So, that included workshops and doing site visits and assessments and developing a couple of manuals that were published. And then I came to the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Can you explain how you got your job at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Well, there was an opening of the lab and given the work that I had been doing for a number of years and my focus on book conservation and the training that I had done, it seemed like a natural and like a wonderful place to come. I contacted all the people who were currently working in the lab and in preservation, Ken Harris and Norvell Jones. I was interviewed by Norvell at an American Institute for Conservation meeting that I think was in L.A. and we really hit it off. And then I came to Washington for my interview and here I was for a long time." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And this was 1985." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "I started in January of 1985. Right. That was Reagan's second term and there was a lot of concern about job freezes. And so I was basically brought in and signed in and sworn in and spent a week here and then went back to Chicago for about a month so I could pack and make arrangements to move." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "You started right around the time that the National Archives was gaining independence from GSA. What was the atmosphere like around here?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "I think it was an exciting time and people were really happy. And I wasn't here for all of the years of people working towards it. But it certainly was a wonderful thing. And to have an agency that was independent and focused on the mission and goals of the archives and not part of another organization that had many other responsibilities, I think people were excited. Bob Warner was the Archivist and it just was a pretty exciting time. I still like to see that one photograph out of the steps on the Constitution Avenue side of the staff, the massive numbers of people representing freedom." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Were you in that photo?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Oh, yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "What was your job like when you first began at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "My job was as a senior conservator, so I did some treatment on paper-based materials as well as bond records. But since I had done so much training through the SAA job, I also began to establish a lot of basic training programs for archival staff and technicians in terms of records handling. We started to get into a more formal approach to holding’s maintenance. So, developing that part of the program and doing training all became part of what was going on." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And how has your job changed over the years? I guess you've been here over thirty years, so yes, I'm sure it's changed quite a bit." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "After being hired as a senior conservator, I was promoted to supervisory conservator and then in 2002 I was promoted to chief of conservation. So, over the years my responsibilities got progressively greater and I certainly gained more knowledge and experience. As you know, working here is a lifetime of learning just in terms of the records and the people and the programs. So, a lot of things you kind of had to learn as he went because it hadn't been done before. I came to the Archives also at a time when the conservation lab was really expanding. Norvell was the second conservator that had been hired. The very first one was a man named Timothy Vitale. So, I was amongst the very few conservators that were brought on and then that just expanded over the years. So the lab was growing, the preservation program was growing, and everybody was really excited. It was a great place to be." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And you were here during the move to College Park and you yourself moved. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like working downtown versus working in College Park?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Well, I can talk a bit about the move prep and the fact that the lab was very actively involved in so many things that related to the move. There had been a lot of records that had been probably overlooked in terms of their housing needs just because, you know, there were so many things and some of them were really challenging big or, you know, unusual shapes. So, one of the big focuses of the lab for several years was to do what we call “move prep.” We worked very closely with the archival units and with the records relocation team that was, I think, led by Maida Loescher. And staff were basically working through the stacks, doing location registers, and identifying records that needed to come to the lab for custom housing. We also worked closely with the design team, the people who would be developing new lab spaces for College Park, and also helping to come up with the requirements for archival storage in the new building in terms of environmental conditions, shelving, and materials. And so there was a lot going on." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And so when did you yourself move out to College Park?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "I think I moved in early 1994 or could have been late 1993." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "You touched on this a little bit but how has the role of technology played in your job as a conservator?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Well, when I first came to the Archives, we had a secretary and the secretary was a very nice man named David Grigg and he would type up on the one lab typewriter [laughter] all of the treatment proposals and documentation. And then that changed. And we finally had one computer in the lab and we would take turns on it. But then when we went to College Park, the world was really different. I mean, the whole approach in terms of every staff member really having the ability to use a computer and communicate that way, I think changed things a lot. [](https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2016/06/30/the-last-hands-to-touch-the-declaration-of-independence/)" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "You talked a little bit this morning in [your interview](https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2016/06/30/the-last-hands-to-touch-the-declaration-of-independence/) about the Charters of Freedom Project, and I want to talk about that in more detail. If you can talk a little bit about how it originated, I know it was in the works before you came, but then how it started and then your involvement and then we will go on from there?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "For as long as I have been at the Archives the conservation lab was involved in caring for the Charters of Freedom. And when I arrived, all of the documents were in the NBS [National Bureau of Standards] encasements and had been since the early 1950s. They were housed in the Mosler Vault. And, you know, the mechanism for that required that the documents move daily up and down from the floor of the vault up to the display area. And that was one of the concerns about that glass and the design of those NBS encasements, because the glass was able to move a little bit on the surface of the document. I think the glass was there to help keep the parchment flat, which it doesn't really want to be. But given especially with the Declaration and any movement across the surface impact it would have on the ink, any flakes or abrasion that would take place. And the other thing that began to be observed was there was some evidence of glass deterioration and that was of greatest concern because the glass was in direct contact with the parchment. So that, I think, was one of the things that began to get some ideas going in terms of a change, a new design, you know, just based on the field has changed. We know more about display techniques, encasements, materials, and kind of the interface of all of those. So, I think a lot of things really came together nicely in terms of the renovation that was going to be going on, and the work in the Rotunda. Another issue at that time was thinking about ADA requirements for people looking at the Charters. Back then people had to climb steps. They were not low enough that people in wheelchairs could just come up in and look. So, there are a lot of factors, I think, that came together in all of that." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Can you talk about the actual conservation process? You mentioned today earlier that you did the Declaration last. What did you do first and how did you go about that?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "OK. We were lucky to have access to colleagues at what was then NIST, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, and it was kind of kismet that their predecessor organization, National Bureau of Standards, had developed the very first encasements for us. They had partnered with Libbey-Owens-Ford, and Libbey-Owens-Ford provided the glass for the encasements and one of the technicians from Libbey-Owens-Ford helped to seal those encasements. It was basically lead ribbon that was soldered and held the elements together. So, we had the advantage of having a mock-up encasement that had been fabricated at that time. So, that was the one we practiced on in terms of opening that. It did not contain one of the Charters documents, so the fear level was, you know, like it wasn't there. [Laughter] And we just got to test some techniques. So, we had different kinds of knives and tools that we were able to use. The lead is really soft, so that was easy to work through. But then at the corners, there was a lot more solder. And so working through the solder was a little bit more physically difficult. And then once you had the two pieces separated the top and the bottom, then to delayer and to remove the frame and to remove the glass that was sitting directly on the parchment. So, by the time we did the first of the Charters documents, which was the transmittal page, we had a little bit of experience and then we progressively just learned more as we went through the various seven encasements and did the Declaration last." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Ok, and then did you do the conservation work on the documents?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "How much time did it take and what did that entail?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "The project, we think of it as running from 1998-2003, and the 1998 date is kind of the very early deliberations and thinking about design criteria and all of those related issues. I don't think anything came off exhibit until 2001. So, we actually had a really compressed time with the documents off exhibit to do everything that had to be done. So, it included opening the encasements. We did those sequentially, we wanted to get something completely done so that the documents would not be out in the air for any longer than necessary. So, we started with the documents that were not on exhibit and the transmittal page was not ever exhibited except for one time, I think, in the last few years when it was a featured document. But it does not have a history of display. And we went to, I’m trying to think, it was page one probably page 1 and 4 [of the Constitution] and the Bill of Rights that were in the Rotunda and the Declaration. So we had access to pages two and three. So we started with those. And as we removed one of the parchments from the encasement, we did a whole lot of examination and documentation, and developed treatment proposals that were approved up through Michael Kurtz, who at that point, was our office head. And then proceeded with the treatment. We had worked closely with an advisory committee, the Preservation Advisory Committee for the National Archives that does not exist anymore. And experts from NIST to really develop the requirements for what the conditions would be inside of the encasement in terms of temperature, relative humidity, and what the ambient moisture inside of the encasements would be. So, we knew that we needed to work in a space where the conditions in the space would begin to acclimate the parchment to the conditions that they would ultimately be sealed under. So, we worked in a vault that had been really carefully renovated to achieve those conditions." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And you mentioned in the interview this morning that that Declaration had been handled and stored in a lot of places are not ideal. And the Constitution looks pretty good." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "It looks amazing. Yeah, that really does." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Thank you little about the history of the Constitution, but also the Bill of Rights which doesn't look quite as good as the Constitution. And can you talk about any knowledge you have about the history of that document and why it's not quite as crisp as the Constitution?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yeah, I don't know when the Bill of Rights came to NARA" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "1938." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yeah. OK, OK. And who had it before then?" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "The State Department. I think it was in a bound volume." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "OK, so it's probably one of those really big GPO bindings." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "So, it was really protected, probably not accessed and handled. The skin of the Bill of Rights doesn't seem like the very best quality and there is some modeling on the surface that you can see kind of little, not spatters, but little orangey areas. We don't know what that is; we were never able to figure that out. But I think the quality of the skin is probably not as good. The Constitution looks really great. It was, you know, in the custody of the Department of State, transferred, I think that it was in 1921, to the Library of Congress. So, the Constitution and Declaration were both exhibited at the library. And I think the conditions of the library really led them to start talking to NBS about doing something, just because of the really major changes in our age that would happen kind of seasonally. That had a big impact on the Declaration and the tear in the upper right corner. There were insects that were feeding on the Constitution. Luckily, the insects didn't get to the Declaration. But, you know, some of the bad things that happened were really under the care of the Library of Congress, so we always have to be kind of careful of not maligning one of our sister institutions. But, you know, then they started the discussions to figure out what they could do to improve conditions and started those conversations before World War II. And then the war interrupted everything and the documents were removed to Fort Knox. And there had been an examination by a conservator, George Stout, at the library before they went to Fort Knox. And then while they were in residence there, the Declaration was treated and they repaired that corner that had torn because of the skin and the changing RH. And then they were encased after the war." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah, I saw that the Declaration was on display at the Jefferson Memorial during the anniversary. Was that outside? [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yes, I think it was." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And that was before they were sealed." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I can't imagine that." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "I mean, things have changed so much in terms of people's understanding." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah, I know it's hard to speculate, but could you speculate how long these documents could last? I know you said earlier they'll be in this case for 100 years and I’m sure new technology will come along." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Theoretically, I mean, and that's kind of extrapolating the numbers that were achieved when the seal was made. I think the seal could last many, many decades. You know, things keep changing in terms of knowledge and new technology. We do look at the documents and the encasements quarterly, so we observe any changes that are taking place, any shifting. The other thing that's going on is we have been working with a man who had been involved at NIST, Charles Tilford, who I think he's a physicist, but he's retired now. But he also worked with the Library of Congress on their encasements and has developed technology to create an oxygen sensor so we can use a probe and figure out what the interior conditions of the encasement are. So, we're just getting started on that and we'll start with the transmittal page. And so I think readings over time will help to determine whether or not there needs to be some kind of intervention." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And you said the entire Rotunda was renovated. So did you have a role in the renovation and the restoration of the Faulkner murals?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Kitty Nicholson was the lead, the contact for the firm that did the conservation. Olin Conservation did that treatment." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I’ve been trying to bug her." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "I will give you her home email address so you can reach her. But we have a lot of documentation on that project. And that was also a pretty amazing project. There are lots of photographs, slides, actually, but even taking the murals off of the walls was just an amazing feat given their size. And so, you know, the AI renovation team helped to get that contract going. But Kitty was the conservation liaison and they really worked closely with her." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah, I’ll try to contact her again," }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yeah, that would be cool." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Not Charters related but can you tell me about the work you did in Baghdad with the Iraqi Jewish Archives and how that came about?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "OK, when the headquarters for the secret place was bombed, people went in and found different rooms that had a lot of different materials that have been gathered together, including a space that had been devoted to collections of Iraqi Jewish material. And that population went back for hundreds of years. Doris Hamburg, who is director of preservation," }, { "speaker": "received a call from the White House basically asking for advice", "text": "“Yeah, we have this stuff, the building was bombed, water came in, and we now have things that are wet and they're moldy, and what do we do?” So, that started a conversation. And I think they turned to the Archives partly because of our experience in working with records that had been damaged in emergencies. It worked out that Doris and I went to Baghdad under the auspices of the Department of Defense. We spent three days in Baghdad proper looking at the materials, and developing a report. I think that was in June of 2003. And then later that summer the materials came to the U.S. under military transport. They went first to Fort Worth, Texas, where they were vacuum freeze dried, because at this point it was really hard for them to keep things frozen in Baghdad because of power problems and everything else. But they did the best they could. So, the materials were frozen, sent to the U.S., freeze dried in Fort Worth, Texas, and then transported up to College Park, where they still are. But we've gone through the entire preservation project. There was an effort to try to find out whether or not the items could have been treated locally in Iraq, in terms of the conservators or labs. But things were in such chaos at that point that it wasn't really feasible. So that evolved into the project. And if you haven't interviewed Doris, she could be a good person to get a lot of insights into that." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "We talked a little about these special projects you worked on. But can you describe what a typical day in the conservation lab is, if there even is one?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "A typical day? You know, it's been a long time since I have worked at the bench. So, I mean, my typical day is very different." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah. Or maybe your typical day when you first started? So, like your typical when you started compared to now? Or how things have changed there since you started there 30 years ago?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "OK, I think my typical day when I first arrived was probably a mix of things—getting involved in some of the administrative projects that were underway. We began to work on developing specifications, good specifications for archives boxes and folders. But I would also be working on treating documents either because they were going to be used by researchers or exhibited. So, doing examinations of photography and treatment and, you know, whatever was needed. But, over time as my responsibilities changed and I had more supervisory responsibilities, I got further and further from the bench, so to speak, but was involved in developing systems and approaches and strategies for the work we did for getting ready to move to College Park. All of the move prep work, and training staff. We had a group of people not only working at Archives I, but at Suitland to do the prep work. And that's what we did a lot of shrink-wrapped in both buildings since we didn't have the resources to box all of the volumes that were just loose in the stacks. So, supported research projects. There is a research and testing lab that did a project to determine the long-term impact of enclosing materials within that shrink film. So, my fingers were in a lot of things and it made it more interesting. So that's good. And, all along working with really fabulous people, I feel that I grew up at the Archives in a way. Professionally, I grew up working in a really collaborative, great environment. So, that was nice. And I'm sure it helped me a lot as I moved along and did more things." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Well, your tenure spanned several Archivists. Can you talk a little bit if things have changed for you under them? If you had a favorite or about the various transformations you've been through." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yeah, there have been a lot of different Archivists. I remember some key things, I guess, about different Archivists. I remember Bob Warner was always very enthusiastic about the work of the Archives. And I think he made a point of coming around and just interacting with staff, including staff in the labs. So, that was always a pleasure. He seemed really interested in the work that was going on. I'm sure not just the conservation work, but the archival work as well. Since I grew up in Michigan and he was from Michigan, there was also this little kind of kismet thing going on, I'm sure as well. Frank Burke was just an Acting Archivist. He wasn't an official Archivist, but I remember him as just really being an amazing presence and being a great spokesperson for the National Archives. And again, just interested in everything that was going on. I remember John Carlin because he was the Archivist under whom we went to Baghdad and I guess he had to sign off on that [laughter], and he was also very supportive with the Charters project. And, one of the nice things about David Ferriero is that he has a long history of being actively involved and interested in conservation. So, it always makes you feel good when the person at the top of the agency is supportive and interested." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Can you talk about any particular challenges you have faced over the course of your career?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Hmm. Oh, gosh. I mean, we all have our ups and downs. I'm not really thinking of any great negative challenges. I feel like I've always been given a lot of support and a lot of opportunities. The staff has been great. I'm really going to miss the place and the people and the records." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I was going to ask what you were going to miss most? Sounds like all of it." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Well, there's another aspect for me, and that's I met my husband at the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I was going to ask that because you're one of the many Archives couples!" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "And it's always kind of confusing when you don't share the same last name because people just don't know how you're connected. I would say one of the good things is that Greg Bradsher, my husband, and I have never actually worked too closely together. And I think that's probably a good thing." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And did you meet him here?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yes. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "How did that happen? Can you talk a little bit about that?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "You know, it's hard to remember...oh, he was editing a book on managing archives. And he came and talked to Norvell Jones and me about writing a chapter on preservation and conservation. So, that was when I first knew that he existed and began to kind of interact with him a bit on that book project. So, the rest is history." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And you say he's not retiring?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "No, he doesn't have any plans to retire." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "You talked a little bit about some challenges that you went through. What do you think your biggest success would be here?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Oh, gosh. I would say kind of a capstone in terms of my career is the ability to work on the Charters project. I mean, that's pretty amazing. Not that many conservators get to work on such fabulous documents. And the team of people that worked on that. I mean, I learned a lot. I was given a lot of trust, and that's always a pleasure to do so." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And do you think that you will have a career post Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "I have so many things I'm interested in. I do a lot of dog rescue work and we have three dogs at home, so that could expand. That's one thing. I love to write. I like writing. And so I've got some projects that I might start to think about a little bit. There's always the possibility that I could do some private conservation work, but for a little while I want to just kind of figure things out and lie low and see what happens next." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "OK, you did mention that you worked for the SAA. I just want to ask a little bit about your relationship with SAA and your work with them. Did you continue to work with them after you joined the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yeah, well, when I came to the Archives, I had completed my tenure as director of two NEH funded projects, and each of those had a book as part of the product that was completed. So, since I came to the Archives and I had authored those publications, I was given permission on my own time to do the revisions. So, the conservation book has gone through three and the managing photo collections has gone through a couple of revisions. So, at this point those projects are done. And I don't think that I will continue doing anything for SAA. But that was nice, too." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And can you talk a little bit about the publications that you have?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "The two books are probably the biggest things. One is Preserving Archives and Manuscripts, I’m muddling up the titles. You have my resume." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I do. Do you want to consult it?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "What does it say? All these names kind of run together?" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah, I can imagine. _Preserving archives and Manuscripts._" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yes, that was the first book, the first NEH project, and I was the solo author for that. And that was revised in 1993, I think. And then in 2006? Maybe 2010? Something like that. Yeah. And then the photo book, the first set of co-authors that I worked with Gerry Munoff and Margery Long, and then it was basically redone with Diane Vogt-o'connor and some other authors." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And were you able to work on those publications alongside your official duties at the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "No, I did them as a separate project. So, I had to go through the process of getting permission to do that outside work. And I don't know how I did it because it was crazy. You know, tight deadlines and a busy job. So, it was hard." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "You mentioned that you don't work on the bench any longer. Do you miss handling documents?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "I do. But, you know, I'm still involved in discussing approaches and projects. And we're doing a lot to continue to support exhibition programs and loans, and also the great expansion of digitization initiatives. So, we're always thinking about new ways of doing things in ways that are efficient and fit for purpose, and are good for the records. So there's a lot of collaboration that covers those kinds of topics." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "As you know, the digitization effort is part of the strategic plan. A big focus for us. Do you think that Conservation is going to have a bigger role in having to digitize everything? How do you see Conservation's role in that?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Well, I think the role that we have been playing for a number of years is a good one. We are involved with the archival staff in reviewing the records to think about what their format is and the condition, whether or not they need any treatment to get them safely to the camera, whether or not there's information or text that's obscured. So, we're involved in doing the initial assessment. Sometimes with a partner project, if there's a lot of work that needs to be done, the Archives has gone the route of asking the partner to provide funding, whether it's for archival prep staff or conservation staff, just to kind of help support the projects. We do training of the camera operators. We do treatment of records that need to be stabilized before they can be safely imaged. So I think that will continue. I think there's support for that. And the end product is records that complete information can be revealed and shared. So that's important. And if you want to talk to somebody about this, Amy Lubick is the person." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "The National Archives in College Park is the main conservation base for an entire National Archives. Do you see the Archives getting more conservators around the country?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "There is a preservation lab in St. Louis that's managed by Marta O'Neill and they work on a lot of the burn files that they are still kind of reassembling and trying to deal with that data. There was a conservation lab for a number of years in San Bruno, and that was our first kind of regional lab. It lasted for, I don't know, I can't remember, 5-10 years, probably. The staff was part of Conservation. And we had people work in DC for us before they went out to the field archives. And they did treatment for not only the San Bruno repository, but other West Coast archives. So, you know, I would say there's a possibility that something like that could happen. It's expensive, of course, to staff and build a lab. So, I don't know whether that model would ever be continued. We do bring records in from the regional archives and the presidential libraries for treatment and for preparing for exhibition. There could be more of that." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "You have a sort of a more unique career at the Archives as you stayed in one unit your entire career." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Were you untouched during the various reorganizations that came with every Archivist, or were you basically thrown into a different unit? I know I'm asking you to reach very far back into your memory, since 1985. But can you talk a little bit about how things have changed with regard to the various transformations you've been through?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "You know, the lab pretty much stayed the same. I mean, I think our reporting maybe changed over the years, but we were always part of—at least while I was here—part of what was a major holdings unit, NN, NW, R, so as the archival side of those offices changed, I think our relationships probably changed a little bit with the archival units in terms of what they were part of and, you know, who they were evolving with. So, I don't know that they ultimately had that big of a change or impact on us other than there are big, big shifts in terms of different times when overall priorities are altered for everybody and that affects what you're doing. So, I would say getting ready for the move was probably one of the big, big changes. We essentially stopped doing treatment for a couple of years to prepare records. Probably another big game changer is the emphasis on digitization and the fact that that's a really big driver and just juggling resources, making sure that you can meet those goals, get things to the camera in the timetable that they need. Meet exhibit and loan goals, meet the needs of people who come on site to work in the research rooms, and support processing. So, there are a lot of streams to work with." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "You mentioned that the Conservation staff has grown over the years that you've been here. Do you feel like the staff is adequately staffed now or do you think that we can devote more resources?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "I think given the size of our holdings and some of the goals, there certainly could be more staff. We have been getting a lot of support in the last few years, so that's really great. We have two new conservators coming on in the summer. Actually, next week is the first one." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Just in time!" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Really! But, you know, there's always more that could be done. And we get pulled in a lot of other directions in terms of doing training, and tons and tons of tours, and things that make the Archives show well, which we want to do. But, you know, they are a drain from people working at the bench and working with records. We also do a lot of custom housing for units across NARA. So, dealing with archival stuff all over what they're boxing needs are and shipping out boxes, box blanks that are made." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Well, I know you want to catch the shuttle, so I'm just going to ask if there's anything you want to add before we wrap up?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "I think it's really fabulous that you're doing this oral history project. And I hope that you get a lot of my buddies that have really also played key roles in the work that the Archives has done over the years. There's no other place like it. It's pretty amazing. When I first came to the Archives my mom was so excited. So, that's kind of a nice little link to my past." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Well, you have lived history. You were, as we mentioned this morning, the last person to touch the Declaration." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Well, Kitty Nicholson and I, I don't know, you know, we didn't time it, but the two of us were the last two people to actually handle it. So, yeah. And before that it had been the 1940s, 1942." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Pretty exciting." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yes, it is an honor." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Probably the crowning moment. Yes, it's always impressive to be at the National Archives and be able to say, oh, I've touched a Jefferson message. Right?" }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Well, you have touched some amazing things—all of the imaging that you were doing in the legislative vault. That made a really big difference. And you also have special insights into digitizing, and the time it takes and all of that." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I am very aware." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yeah. Yeah. Is that going on still?" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I believe so. I'm not there anymore so I don't really know." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yeah, I hope so." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah, I hope so too. I know that they are short-staffed." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I don't know what time it is. Oh, you still have a few minutes but we can just wrap up." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "OK. OK. Well, if you think of anything else that you want to ask I will be around, or you can go through Greg, and you've got my home email." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah. Great! Thank you so much." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yeah. Thank you, Jessie." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I can’t wait to see the piece that's coming out on _[Prologue](https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/fall/declaration)_ about the Declaration." }, { "speaker": "Mary Lynn", "text": "Yeah, something else to finish. [](https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/fall/declaration) _((_ \\ ### ~~~~~~ +- ~" } ]

[ { "speaker": "Anna Smallwood", "text": "OK, my name is Anna Smallwood. Today is March 17, 2020. We are here at Archives II in College Park, Maryland. Can you please state your name and current position?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel Rodriguez", "text": "Daniel Rodriguez. I'm an archivist now with the NDC [National Declassification Center], formerly with the Nixon Library." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "Can you start off by briefly explaining your career path here at NARA [National Archives and Records Administration]?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "So in 2010, I came here as an archives specialist, and my job was to do quality control on the fifth \"Chron\" [Chronological Release] of the Nixon tapes. So the Nixon tapes originally, due to lawsuits, et cetera, were released in Chrons one through five, and then the fifth Chron had parts one, two, three, four, and five. And so the one I was working on was Chron five, part five. And so this would have been the culmination of basically 40 years of work to finish them. Then, the work was done on CDs, so our audio editors would edit the conversations and take out anything that needed to be redacted. And then I would listen to the tapes. My job was to listen to every second of every conversation and every second of every room noise segment just to ensure that the beginnings and ends of conversations were correctly edited and that the sections that needed to be redacted were correctly redacted. And that was all done—I would give them the paperwork, basically, like, “Okay, this needs to be redone. This needs to be fixed.” Or I would pass it on to be finalized where we would make a number of copies for public access. So that's what I started out doing. That was my main job. I also worked on the finding aids. I forget––our finding aids are something like 50,000 pages or something like that. So we were modernizing them by taking out certain formatting and then tabbing them so that, later, they could be put into XML or some more digital format and that, you know, they would be kind of preparing them for future use by someone else. I would be adding in or taking out sections that needed to be taken out. For instance, if something used to be redacted in the 80s, but then was able to be released, I would add in what the reviewers said, kind of what they wanted added in, and I would remove the redaction stuff. So those are the main jobs. I also created an online exhibit for the Library based on the Christmas bombings of 1972. So that was one of the things that they used to sort of help me gain knowledge of the collection and the subject matter." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "Are you still working with the Nixon Project?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "Yes. Once we finished that release, we lost a few archivists, and I eventually moved up to an archivist and was in on the planning, which started in 2013, of how to take the tapes from basically analog to a more digital format and how to increase public access as much as possible. Because at that point, only the fourth and fifth Chrons were available online. The rest of it was sort of available, but they would be like six-or seven-hour-long segments that were difficult for people to find what they wanted. And we wanted to break that down into conversations to make it easier for researchers to find what they needed." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "So if someone had a topic, they wanted to listen to some of the tapes, how would they go about doing that now?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "The first step is always like either reverse engineering from, let's say, a history book. Let's say you're reading something, and then they mentioned something that was on the tapes, so, like, using a footnote to figure out what conversation they're talking about. If you wanted to listen to the segment that they're talking about in that book, and you would try to find it online, if it isn't available online, you could request it through the Library. More often than not, people are trying to find something new. And so the way to do that would be to use our finding aid. And you can either search by subject matter—we try as much as possible. It's difficult, because there's been archivists working on this basically from the late 70s till now. People use different phrases and keywords, et cetera. So we've been trying to standardize all of that, but there's only so much you can do. So we're hopefully moving forward. Things will be more standardized. But you could use keywords if you wanted to. You can use dates, and you can use people who are part of the conversation, and you can use locations. So you could technically look for conversations with Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office, let's say in April, if you knew there was an event that happened and you could tie that in with a keyword. Or now what we're trying to do is create more flexibility. So, like on the website, we're trying to put participants in conversations. So if you click on that person's name, it'll list all the conversations that are available online with that person. And we're hopeful, because we have the metadata to expand that to keywords and subject matter. So you could look up, you know, the War on Drugs or busing, and you could get all the conversations that contain that subject matter. So right now, the easiest way is probably going through the finding aids and narrowing things down based on—you know, doing your research first and then looking up based on dates or subject matter and trying to hone in on the conversations you want. We're hopeful, in the future, you'll be able to do a lot of that online more naturally instead of searching through the finding aid. You would, in that situation, use the finding aid to help you listen to the conversation and less as like a finding aid." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "Before you came to NARA, what was your background?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "So I went to art school in 1998 and 1999, and I studied computer animation and editing and all that. And then the dot-com bubble happened, so nothing really came of that. [LAUGHS] I thought it was like wasted time. I joined the Marine Corps and then, after that, I went to school at UNLV [University of Nevada, Las Vegas] and got a bachelor's [degree] in history. And then I went to St. John's in New York and got a master's. Then I went to work for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and I worked with the senior historian at the time doing research and writing. And then I also worked with visitors, talking to school groups, leading tours and things like that. Then I came here in 2010, and I've been here since then." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "Can you describe some of the difficulties you faced while working on the project?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "Well, the biggest difficulty initially is that the tapes are incredibly difficult to listen to, just the sound quality, because let's say in the Oval Office, there are microphones in the desk. So if he's writing on his legal pad or if he's signing stuff, you can hear the pen as he's writing. If he's tapping his fingers, you can hear that. You can hear other people in the room writing. If they're bringing in glasses, you can hear the tinking of the trays and whatnot. So your brain automatically goes to those sounds. And so the biggest hurdle is just getting your brain to listen to what you need it to listen to and not, like, the interruptions. So the first, probably month, I felt completely lost, like I wasn't going to be able to do this. And I think I'm just going to fail at this, because it was just so difficult. And then one day, it just clicks in your brain. It's just able to, like, start filtering out the sounds and hear the conversations. So that was probably one of the bigger hurdles. The other stuff is more about the actual methods of doing the job. We were a small unit here in the Archives, AII, and our main Library was in California. So we're 3,000 miles away. The Library became a federal institution and actual Presidential Library in 2007. So for the most part, they were concentrating on that, and we got lost in the shuffle. So it was hard for us to get support from the main Library. And then when we lost people, it was difficult for us to hire people because, I guess it was 2014-2015, somewhere around there, and that's when things were really starting to get tight and the current political climate was starting to intensify. And then we had the sequestration. So, actually having enough personnel to do the job was—we didn't have anyone for maybe four years. So to properly complete a tape, you need two reviewers to do it. Those reviewers need to be archivists at a certain GS level, because there's still the possibility that someone can sue us— the family or someone else. And the archivist is responsible for making decisions—not so much with national security, because that gets made by the agencies, but what we call the \"G Personal Returnables.\" 1 So those are things that were deeded to us by the family when the Library became a Presidential Library. So these conversations, which used to be withheld, were conversations where the President wasn't acting as the President, so if he was talking to his family or if he was acting as the head of the Republican Party or was talking to the doctors, et cetera. So it's personal stuff like his health and his finances and his conversations with his family. The problem with that is that that leaves plenty of gray areas. So, for instance, when Tricia gets married in the White House, Nixon is coming up with the guest list with her and telling her which people to invite based on people who've been either writing good press for the administration or who've been loyal to the administration. So at that point, you know, you have to make the decision whether that conversation meets the standard of being redacted. So those kinds of decisions are being made by archivists. And in the sense that since we could get sued potentially, we want someone with a high enough level and that's getting paid commensurate with the kind of the decisions that they're making. Sorry, all of that goes to why we need two archivists to review a tape, because then we need a consensus of two people who say, \"Yes, this is something that we can release.\" If we don't have that, then we can't release the tape. I could do, you know, 300 tapes on my own, but they would just sit there and wouldn't be able to be released because there wouldn't be someone else. So for years, we were just kind of bottlenecked where we were, unable to do any work or, we were able to work, but there was no kind of results that people could see. So a lot of times, 1 From the finding aid, Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act (PRMPA) categories: “All presidential conversations had to be reviewed by NARA under PRMPA guidelines and segments found to have restricted content were separated into their proper PRMPA categories. The PRMPA guidelines define eight restriction categories: A: Violate a Federal statute or agency policy; B: Reveal national security information; C: Violate an individual’s rights (pending); D: Constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy; E: Disclose trade secrets or confidential commercial or financial information; F: Disclose investigatory/law enforcement information; G: Disclose purely private and personal information, as defined by the PRMPA; H: Disclose non-historical material.” you know, when that happens, the Library or whoever is like, \"Well, you guys aren't really accomplishing anything. Do you really need people?\" And so sometimes it's hard to explain why, because it's such a specific and different method of review than a lot of things in the Archives which are textual-based. So sometimes it's hard for people to wrap their heads around why you need extra people. The other problem we were dealing with at that time was the ins and outs of digitization. There really hadn't been something done at this scale, you know. We have an AV [audiovisual] lab that will digitize some audio here, digitize a little bit of, you know, video or film, et cetera, but we were doing 4,022, I think it is, reels of 1/4-inch tape that needed to be ingested into a computer in real time and edited. And then we had to find all the national security segments and then get them reviewed by agencies. And so it was just a massive project. And since there were only like four of us working on it and only like really two of us who were really trying to plot out the entire spectrum of everything from beginning to end, you know, it was slow going because there weren't a ton of people to lean on. And we had to kind of feel our way out because, like I said before, everything and most things in the Archives here are textual-based. So finding the right path is a little difficult when there's really nowhere to go to ask for advice, you know, specifically, like, how do you do this X, Y, Z? People just could give you hints, but nobody had really done it before. So it was really breaking new ground and trying to feel our way through every aspect of it." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "Did you work on the first and second review, or did you do the review after the tapes had been edited or both?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "You mean after the digital or ... ?" }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "Okay. So when we started digitizing, basically, I was like the QC [quality control] person. We had a secure server in our SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility], and our audio people would digitize the tape and send it to me, and I would ensure that the entire tape has been digitized. An entire tape can be anywhere from a few minutes to seven hours long. And so each tape, though, is broken down into reels. So a tape can be one to six—[THINKING OUT LOUD] seven, eight, six—one to six reels. So what I would have to do is I'd have to check every reel to make sure that there was a beginning and an end. And we call those tops and tails so that it starts with silence, the tape begins, the tape ends, and it goes into silence. So we ensure that we've captured the entire tape. We also have a time code that has been embedded in the tapes, which allows us to find our conversations and withdrawals on the tapes. So I would make sure that both the audio is captured and the time code [is captured] for every reel. And then again, doing a similar thing I did before CDs, I would send it back if something is incorrect. And since we wanted a flat transfer, like of preservation quality, we didn't want to boost the audio or change it or anything like that. So if we couldn't get it, usually the problem was time code, because there was like some degradation in the tapes. So time code was something that we would boost because it wouldn't affect the audio, and you can't hear it. But we didn't do that. We try to capture that itself without boosting it. So that was my first thing would be getting ahead and trying to get the QC done on these tapes. And I probably did 90 to 95 percent of the QC on those. And then the next step was creating the montage, and a montage is basically like an onion skin that allows us to cut tapes or edit them together or do different things to them without actually affecting the file. So after that, I would create the montages, which are basically I'd be stitching together the reels. So we had a seamless full one-, two-, six-hour tape and then laying down the markers for the beginnings and ends of conversations and the beginnings and ends of withdrawals. And then after that, I helped start, like, we kind of knew how a review was done before in the 80s, so we had a sense that they didn't really have SOPs [standard operating procedures] that were written down. So we kind of reverse engineered it a little bit and then created SOPs for how to do the first and second review. So I kind of did that. And then I also helped create the process for how we do review with the agencies. We had tried to do it via CDs, like it had been done before. Some agencies lost our stuff. Some didn't do it. So we realized that we needed to find a new way going forward. CDs are expensive, and we knew that people wouldn't want to give us money to do, you know, pay for thousands of CDs to send to agencies only to have them sometimes get lost. So we decided that we would bring agencies into our SCIF and have them listen to the segments on MP3 players, which allowed us to just create playlists for each agency that they could go through that would allow us to wipe it and then re-reset it for another agency. So that process took a while to figure out, because most of that information we had taken from forms and put into spreadsheets. And to properly do this, we had to get that information out of spreadsheets and put it back into paper form. So we had to create our own kind of withdrawal sheets for agencies that let them know kind of here's the segment you're listening to. Here's the subject matter. Here's where it begins and ends. And here's where you either say you wanna redact it, you want to hold it, or you want to hold it all or release it in full. So we had to create those forms. And then I figured out how to do a mail merge so that instead of filling out each form manually, we could harness our spreadsheets and automatically fill out all these forms. So that was interesting. And kind of another roadblock is figuring out all this stuff because, you know, we're slowly figuring out how to take a tape from analog to digital. And then every time we get a little bit, you know, there's either a roadblock or another complication where it's like we have to branch off and start a new kind of offshoot, like a new method, because it just wasn't a straight line. So basically that was part of it all from the beginning of planning out the whole thing all the way to the end. And now basically, you know, I've trained a number of people and kind of make sure that the project stays on task by handing out assignments of, “Okay, these are the tapes we're going to concentrate on. This is what we're going to release. This is what I want people to work on.” And then I kind of help if people have questions about what is being said or, for instance, right now we're working on some of the “A” withdrawals. And so I've kind of set the template for how we're going to go forward, how we're going to take these segments which generally can deal with the Secret Service or maybe grand jury information. They're like statutes, how we're going to go forward in figuring out what to do with those segments. So I'm still trying to stay ahead and find problems and smooth them out before the other people get there and then kind of help them see the logic of what we're trying to do. So I hope that answers it." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "And so the process of digitization, are you taking the original tapes, the archival copies that were made when they came here? What's the one you're using?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "So right now—or we used the “P” copies, which aren't the originals but were copies that were made. There were preservation copies that were made in, I think, late 80s-90s. And these are ones that had time code inserted because, you know, that's the only way we can accurately find our way through the tapes. And all the work is premised around everything that's been done. So, everything that's been done for the last 30-plus years has been premised on that, like the time code has been at the beginning and ending of any conversations, et cetera. We didn't want to throw away all that, so we used the “P” copies. And the problem with those was that, at that point in time, there was a legal battle. I think they were under a court injunction, so they couldn't actually listen to the tapes as they were transferring them. They had to just use the dials and make sure that the volume was high enough so that it was registering on the needles. So, it isn't a perfect copy, but I mean, it's probably nothing that would be perfect. But there would have been something better if they could have listened to it or they could have gotten a little better of a transfer, but they were under their own, you know, they had their own problems that kept them from being able to do that. So, yeah, ours was the copy made from the originals. I don't know if the originals have been taken out, so I don't know what shape they're in or anything like that. But I do know that the copies we used were starting to degrade, and some of them had sticky shed, which is like the beginnings of vinegar syndrome. So we got in at the right time." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "The newer Chrons that were done and the research copy was made on CDs, did you have to go back and do those again or which segments were you specifically working on in the digitization project?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "So we're doing the copies that were there from the fourth and fifth chron. We're going to replace [them] with the newly digitized ones. As far as the review goes, we're reviewing the first through fourth Chrons, because they came before the deed of gift. So those ones have lots of “G” segments that can be released now, because they deal with politics. And so we need to review those segments and release them. And so the first and third Chrons–there's really nothing online for them right now—so that'll be like a net benefit for everybody, all the researchers when it's done, because all those conversations that weren't there will now be available online. The fourth Chron, those will be replaced with the new segments of the new “G's” that we'll be able to release and then the fifth Chron, because that was done after the deed of gift. Those have already had all the segments reviewed. So when we come upon a “G” now that was reviewed, if the reviewer then said that it had to be withheld, then we have to abide by that decision because it's already been reviewed. So we can't listen to it again and be like, “Oh, I think they made a mistake.” Like once it's reviewed after 2007 and those choices are made, then that's kind of it, because in theory, these segments have to be given back to the family and then destroyed. So that will be another complication for another day, once we reach the end of this. But yeah, so the fifth Chron ones now are really easy to do because, basically, all we got to do is to re-review national security segments. Well, the first through fourth Chrons are taking a little bit longer, because those ones have longer national security segments, because there's a lot of head-of-state stuff that would be hours long. And then there's a lot of political stuff, because it's dealing with a lot of midterm elections and the reelection campaign. So there's a lot of stuff on there that needs to be reviewed." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "What insights did you gain of the President by listening to these tapes?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "I mean, I think one of the things is listening to this gives you a sense of the wide breadth of knowledge that people need to have in this position. So you can see how a typical day can be spent let's say meeting with diplomats and then talking about bills that are coming through Congress and then dealing with maybe something that flared up somewhere in the world while also dealing with the Vietnam War and just kind of the things that were happening, you know, understanding the economy and just everything that comes with just being a world leader. So you sort of get a sense of how you have to be able to, like, not micromanage, how you have to be able to swing from one subject matter to the other and hopefully understand it. One of the other things is like it really demystifies the Presidency for you because, you know, you're a fly on the wall and you get to hear all the coarse conversations and the jokes and any of the slurs or anything that comes along with it. So in one sense, you have all of this Presidential stuff where, you know, he's talking about how to open up China and the net benefit for the United States if we can play China against the Soviet Union and Vietnam. And then in the next, you know, 20 minutes later, they could be joking or they could be talking about something that they don't like in very frank terms. So you sort of stop thinking of these people as kind of great men in a sense and just start thinking of them as kind of what they are– people, politicians who found a way to reach the peak of their field. So you lose respect in a sense. And then you also have a lot of respect for the job and what it entails. Nixon, I think, one of the things that you come away with is that he was really cagey and seeing kind of these trends that we're still dealing with and also understanding kind of how to work diplomatically and how to thread the needle sometimes with these crises like India-Pakistan and stuff. So he had a good sense of how to work some of this with these countries. But then he'd do wild things like talk about, you know, \"Hey, maybe if they just think I'm going to drop a nuclear bomb, they'll just do what I want,\" which kind of referred to the madman theory. And the way he's caricatured throughout, you know, since then, whether it's Futurama or any of the pop culture stuff that's come about, you kind of get a sense of this one side of him that's like conniving and kind of hungry for power or whatever. And while a lot of that's true, when you listen to the conversations with his wife or his daughter, you really get the sense he really did love his kids and like he really wanted the best for them. But then, you know, he also was conniving. So you get a full sense of who he is as a person and you kind of get some grudging respect. But then, you know everything. You can never have him for too long because then in the next breath, something he said, something crazy or something, just, you know, completely racist, and you're like, \"Oh, yeah, this is that guy that has been, you know, made famous in popular culture.\"" }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "What difference of the place the tape was made at, what difference did that have on your ability to hear or the kind of background noises that you would get? Did that have any effect on your work?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "Yeah, I mean, it has an effect on the work, and it has an effect on how we talk to researchers and new listeners. We try to steer them towards the phones, because the phone conversations are really clear. So a lot of times you don't have to deal with background noises. You can just hear the two people talking. And that will, if you're a new user, that helps your ear get attuned to the quality. The Oval Office would be the next best because there are a number of microphones, so you get a clearer—that's probably the best room because you get a nice, clear recording and the background noises and stuff aren't as abrupt. And then from there, you go to the EOB [Executive Office Building], which is pretty rough because I believe there's only a couple microphones. So there are sections where you can't really hear people, because they've moved to a corner. They moved to another spot in the office. And unlike the Oval Office, which had microphones all over the Office, the EOB only had a couple. And so the quality is worse, and there’s more background noise. And Camp David only had small amounts of microphones, too. I think they had one. And then the Cabinet Room only had one microphone, and it was right at where the President sat. So anybody that was on either end of the table, it was difficult to hear what they’re saying unless they were giving a presentation. And there was just a lot of noise because there’s cameras, there’s, you know, if the press is in there. And then people oftentimes devolved into a number of conversations around the table. So there was a lot of muddle in it. So it affects how you kind of talk to researchers about it, and it affects the work, because when you're dealing with these conversations where there's lots of noise and it's a “G” or it's a national security segment, then it's harder for the agencies to listen to those segments. And it takes them longer to come to a decision, because they're listening to it over and over and over again. And then we do the same thing where, you know, you want to try to catch as much as possible to help researchers. And so these segments where there's lots of background noise or they're hard to hear, we generally have to listen to them a lot. We have some audio tools within the program that we can use to try to take out the background noises and kind of pick up the vocals. But at the end of the day, you know, there's just two people working on these tapes and we have hundreds of hours to review and, you know, all these tapes to get through. So we try to limit ourselves to not spending too much time on these. The kind of formula I've talked to people about is if the segment is, let's say, eight minutes long, you only want to spend probably, at the most, double the time on it. So that allows you to kind of listen to it twice and then move on. So it really does have a large effect since so many of the conversations are hard to hear, that it really can bog down the work." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "What records or secondary sources assisted you in your work, if any?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "So we use the Presidential Daily Diary a lot. So we have those on our server, and that tracks where he was every day for conversations with people, what time it was at phone calls, whether it was incoming and outgoing. And so it can give you a list of, you know, if you're not sure who's in a meeting, you can look at the Presidential Daily Diary and it'll tell you all the people that are in the meeting. What we find most useful for it is that if he tells his daughters, \"Hey, let's go have dinner at ...\" sometimes it's like 21 Club in New York and then, you know, go to X, Y, Z show. That could be seen as a private thing between the President and his family. But if it's on the Presidential Daily Diary, then it's public, so then we can release those conversations. It's really helpful that we also have the schedules for the daughters and his wife, so we can use those to see when they talk about going to certain places, whether it's a campaign event or not, or whether it was a public event, you know. And that allows us to release it since their schedules are public also. We also use a number of books, whether it's monographs about Vietnam or his biography. And we use historical newspapers. We have what's called under PRMPA [Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act] “D's,” which are privacy segments. And those are different from “G's” because the privacy is dealing with a secondary person, so not the President. Whoever he's talking about or who he's talking with, you know, the person might be saying, \"Oh, yeah. I had a heart attack last year, and I found it difficult to ramp back up to my usual schedule.\" Well, that would have been a \"D,\" and it would have been withheld. But now we use newspapers and we can see, you know, [by an] easy Google search, is the person alive or dead. If the person is dead, then they no longer have privacy rights. So then we can release those. So, we kind of use anything that we can to either help us gain a grasp of the situation. So, like, I use an almanac a lot. Sometimes he'll say, \"Call the Ambassador of France.\" I don't know who that person is so I can pull out the, let's say, 1971 almanac and I can see who the Ambassador of France is. So for things like that, almanacs are helpful. Atlases are helpful. I mean, we'll use anything that we can that will help us really pack in information that'll be useful to the public and kind of help elucidate whether something should be released or not." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "Do you work with researchers often?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "Sometimes. Not as much now as before. A lot of the requests now kind of go to the Nixon Library, and then they'll contact us if they need help. Now, mostly we deal with people who want to request tapes that aren't released yet. And so we've kind of created another workflow for how to accept these special requests and how to insert them into our pipeline and get them released for researchers, you know, hopefully within three or four months. So not as much now as we used to. And now it's mostly just, like I said, [special] requests." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "Is there anything else that you wanted to add at this point?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "I think that's probably mostly it." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "Okay. The last question I have is what would you consider the lasting legacy of this project to be?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "I mean, there's a couple of things. Like one is, you know, I would say the importance of civil servants. This is a multi-generational project. You know, everything that we've done is kind of building on what has been done before us by other archivists. So it's since the late 70s to now, you know, everything we have has been done by other people. And so we're building upon that and hopefully we're leaving it to the next generation to improve on. And we're kind of trying to think constantly about what is new technology that is coming out or how is the best way to leave this so that people can just pick it up and move forward and not try to figure out why we made decisions. So we're trying to be very transparent and very open about why we did things and then also leaving it in a better place than we found it so that the next generation can kind of improve on it. And then I think the other important thing is just that this is one of the most unique collections in the world and definitely probably [one of the] most unique at NARA. A little bit of bias there, but there's really nothing like it. There are other Presidential recordings, but nothing as unfiltered as this, because he was such a technophobe. They created a system that worked basically by voice activation. So we hear everything from everyone from that time period. And it's an insight into both how the Presidency, the Office is wielded, how power is projected nationally and internationally, and also kind of how power corrupts. Sometimes we get asked, \"Is it okay? Will there be problems if we release ...\" X, Y, Z, because he says a racial slur or because this happened or that happened? And our response is that we literally have a President committing felonies on tape. That's the worst thing, you know, not to belittle or minimize that other stuff. But we have a President on tape trying to subvert the institutions of democracy. And that's everything that kind of—that's our tradition for hundreds of years. That's everything that's important to our country. And so it's a lesson for people in kind of like, you know, people in power are not—absolute power corrupts absolutely that whole adage. And even if he didn't have absolute power– because people did oppose him and they wouldn't accept his orders. There's a number of times where people were ordered to do things, and they want to do it. But it shows you kind of how having that power can corrupt a person who some would say was already kind of corrupt. But it pushes you to try to form and pervert those institutions to your own ends. And I think it's important for people to understand that. These people in power are there to serve us and the public, not vice versa. And I think the tapes or their legacy will be, hopefully, in providing people a cautionary tale of what can happen when someone who isn't on the level has the power of the State in their hands and how they can subvert democracy. And it can help people learn things that they can carry forward, you know, throughout their life as a citizen in a democracy and things to be aware of." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "Great! Thank you." }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "No problem." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "That was all I had. Is there anything else that you had that you wanted to add or talk about?" }, { "speaker": "Daniel", "text": "I think I'm good. I think that's everything." }, { "speaker": "Anna", "text": "Great! Thank you again." } ]

[ { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "This is Rebecca Brenner, an intern in the National Archives History Office, and I'm here at Archives I about to conduct an oral history of Rodney Ross. We are in room 400 in Archives I and today's date is July 30, 2015. Mr. Ross, could you please provide a brief overview of your background and education that led you to the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Okay, I was born in Illinois in 1943. Two years later, my family moved to Batavia, Illinois, and I went through the entire public school system from kindergarten to senior year of high school; went to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois for a Master's degree. Then on to the University of Chicago and left with, well, the Bachelor’s degree was from Knox College, the Master’s degree was from the University of Chicago. I left only with a Master’s degree, taught at Wilberforce University, in Wilberforce Ohio, a black college, for two years. Went back to the University of Chicago, finished up everything except for the dissertation. Got married, my wife, Claire, and I moved to Washington, DC. I had a dissertation fellowship that first year, and then got a job with a Congressman elect, Tim L. Hall. I served as a legislative assistant, and during that time finished my PhD. Tim was not re-elected, and in September of 1977 I joined the staff for the Office of Presidential Libraries here in the National Archives Building." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "What was your PhD in?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "American History." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "And what was your dissertation?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Dissertation was Black Americans and Haiti, Virgin Islands, Ethiopia, and Liberia, 1929-1936. Essentially, it was a seminar paper; it started as a seminar with Akira Iriye." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] That's so interesting." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "And then became the all the discarded seminar paper topics, so John Hope Franklin was my real mentor at the University of Chicago. But Akira Iriye was the first reader and John the second." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "So what positions have you held here at the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "For a while, I was moving seemingly every two or three years. And for the last 20 years, I've been in place, so I started out as an office gopher, a GS-6 in the Office of Presidential Libraries. After a year, got an appointment to the Nixon Presidential Materials project as an archivist, went through the training regimen there with the Center for Legislative Archives in terms of rotational assignments, spent time there with the Nixon project, especially listening to the Watergate tapes. Got a position and served for the last two years of Ronald Reagan's first term in a White House liaison office that the National Archives had. That office was on the verge of closing down, in part because of jurisdictional pursuits, and fortuitously I had gotten a job with a motion to GS-12 with the accession and disposal branch and the Washington National Records Center in Suitland. So, I was there for about two years, and then I was basically recruited to the head of something called the Archives and Printed Archives Branch here at the National Archives that had Record Group 287 as its set of responsibilities, Publication of the U.S. Government. So, this was a set of materials that, in 1972, Bert Rhodes, the Archivist of the United States had reached a public printer to transfer what was sometimes called the Public Documents Library to the National Archives. Initially, Fred Coker from North Carolina was the supervisor for that collection. A few years later I took over, it turned out that I really wasn't a good fit to be a supervisor. The opportunity came up to go to Center for Legislative Archives to work on the House guide that was being put together for the bicentennial of Congress, so I served with what later became, perhaps was already, the Center for Legislative Archives, went off for an archival fellowship for a month in Ann Arbor, came back, and by that time basically the collection had moved from Library and Printed Archives Branch to the Center for Legislative Archives, and I moved along with it and changed responsibilities from being a project head to being on the reference staff. So for a good long time, I've been here at the Center for Legislative Archives, probably from 1979 or so to the present." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Wow, I'm definitely going to ask all of those things that you just mentioned, but first" }, { "speaker": "I want to know", "text": "when you first came to NARA, what training did you receive?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Now, when I first came I was a GS-6 technician in the Office of Presidential Libraries, and in some ways that was the high point of my career because, you know, I had my University of Chicago PhD; I wasn't treated as an office gopher but rather as a junior member of the staff and was rubbing shoulders with all the top people in the agency. So there was no formal training as the Archives technician, but once I started my work as an archivist, there was a formal training regimen, and with the Office of Presidential Libraries there were two key factors that possibly were somewhat unique for the agency. One was Dan Reed, the Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries, who had come from the Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress, had arranged for archivists to gain exposure to the manuscript division, so I followed up Adrianne Thomas and doing an accretion to a collection of Franklin McVeigh papers. McVeigh was a wholesale grocer in Chicago who served as Secretary of the Treasury during William Howard Taft's administration, and I found that collection fascinating in part because the stationery at the time for produce, canned goods, and all would often have two-thirds of the top of the page would be artwork and being some of a Streator, a professional Illinoisan, the fact that McVeigh was from Illinois was enriching for me. So there was that collection that I worked with, the other key thing that Dan Reed did was ensure that people with the Office of Presidential Libraries did training with Sara Jackson. So, Sara was an African American who for the longest time did not have an archivist standing. When she first came here during World War II, she had, I think, the education but not the time and grade; by the time she had the time and grade, the education level had been upped and was only when one of the archivists basically said, “This is ridiculous; we have this person who’s regularly being cited in publications as knowing more about military records as anyone else at the agency and she's not an archivist.” So, Sara at the end of her career did become an archivist. She was a researcher for the National Historical Publications Records Commission." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Would you say that these individuals served as mentors to you? And, if so, do you have any other mentors, too?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Well, Sara, definitely my key mentor at the National Archives, just as John Hope Franklin and Akira Iriye were in graduate school. Basically, the key people that I worked with in various places; Nadine Daniels, who's now the archivist at the National Gallery, was my direct supervisor when I was at the Office of Presidential Libraries. She was a mentor at various times in my career has interacted that of Trudy Peterson, who went on to serve as acting archivist of the United States. Less a personal involvement with Trudy; definitely my opportunities to both be an unofficial historian for the National Archives as well as undertaking oral history projects was really because of Trudy. And then it really is various places I went. At the Record Center, people like Greg Bradsher were senior to what I was doing and gave me counsel. I've always really been in parts of the agency that were really being the periphery of the main focus of the National Archives mission—if one accepts basically civilian—archival custodianship of civilian records—the key focus of the agency. So first I was with the Office of Presidential Libraries, then I was with Printed Archives, that a lot of archivists look down on because they think if something's important it's the unprinted material, and now for the last twenty-something years I've been with the Center for Legislative Archives that as the legislative branch representative, is not in the mainstream for an executive agencies. When I first joined the Center, Ed Shamel was the senior person working on the House guide, so I gained some knowledge from him. Ironically, Lewis Bellardo had come on board as head of the Center for Legislative Archives, and some minor things that I learned, one minor thing that I learned from Lew was writing box locations on boxes so that they could get back to the proper place, and there were people who've been less senior than me. Currently on the staff, Matt Fulghum, and Kris Wilhelm, Kate Mollan and others. I once held a senior position and now am learning from those who have less seniority that have developed expertise—" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] Sounds like a real team player. But I was wondering—you mentioned your experience on the Hill in the legislative branch. How was that experience influences your expertise in the Center for Legislative Archives." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Well, I really feel, and the word is, blessed to have had the opportunity to be here at the National Archives, so I've been able to use my background in American history, my PhD from the University of Chicago, with my experience working in a members office during the 94th Congress, and sort of knowing from the inside how Congress operates, and basically the Center has committee records. So, no, I had been a liaison for Tim Hall for the Space Science and Astronautics Committee. And it's been rewarding seeing both sides. As in terms of teaching, oddly, being an archivist also is a form a teaching, since working with researchers you need to help share how they can find information in the records that an archivist works with. So knowing something about government publications opens a wonderful set of opportunities for researchers, and the fact that Congress is involved with everything the Federal government is involved with is a kind of broad job, broad area for potential interests. In talking about mentors, oddly, the interchange with researchers also has been a rewarding experience for me, since I've learned from those researchers their particular topics, and it's been a two-way street in some of the researchers have become friends." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "You mentioned early on, I think you used the word “gopher” to describe a little bit of the culture of the reference room, and I was wondering if you could speak to your first impressions of the reference room when you started working there." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Well, I did not use the term regarding the reference room, I used the term regarding the office staff of the Office of Presidential Libraries, the main administrative area. So, no, I would not have thought to use the term for the records room." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Okay. I was just trying to draw on something you had said, but could you speak to the culture of it when you first arrived, what were your first impressions of that part of the agency?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "You mean the research room? I think my first impressions were when I was a graduate student on the other side and finding out that it just doesn't work giving your exact dissertation topic and ask to have the records brought to you. One needs to understand the organization aspects of the records if you have any hope of finding things. One thing that I've been impressed with in terms of past history for those who staff the research room is how some people have started there and went on to wonderful careers with the National Archives. Thinking of Sam Anthony with the Archivists Office and Rick Peuser in Archives II as two key examples of people who worked behind the desk, went and brought carts of material to researchers. It may be a low status position but it's certainly one of the major actions for individuals of this agency with at least a segment of the general public, mainly the researcher segment." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "What are some of the more interesting research topics that you've aided?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "I haven't put together a listing of such, I think that probably not so much topics as people. So no, Mordecai Lee at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee does interesting things with agencies, in effect lobbying Congress, and how those public relations offices developed. I've been taken with a number of people who do research relating to antislavery petitions and I'm keenly interested in how the 14th Amendment came about and how it has effectively changed our nation. Sort of currently at this moment at 17 minutes after 3 in the research room is Kate Masur who has a book on basically African Americans in the District of Columbia and the move for political equality and then with the end of the home rule with the fall of Boss Shepard an end to that sense of political equality. Not only for blacks, but for whites in the District. There is Claire Rodriguez who was working with census materials and basically minorities in 2000. I put together a panel for the Organization of American Historians, “Census Day 2000: Observations of Race in the Census.” And Claire was on that panel, as was a young fellow from France who had been dealing with the census, and since when I first came to the agency I had a special interest in Charles E. Hall, who was an African American who went and retired and was the highest ranking black in the Commerce Department. So, Charles Hall was born in my hometown of Batavia, Illinois and received his elementary education there. So people who have interacted with the census, I've provided them with my hall materials. So there's a fellow by the name of Eric Yellin who did a book on black civil service holders from the Civil War through the Wilson administration." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "What aspects of your work do you most enjoy?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "The interchange with researchers." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Yeah, I can tell. Can you describe a typical day in your unit?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Well, I do a major share of the email monitoring for requests that come in legislative.archvies@nara.gov as well as meeting researchers. So, the staff of the Center for Legislative Archives is maybe 20 people or so with five or six basically doing two people a day on reference assistance to take telephone calls to work with walk-ins, so generally it's working on email requests, answering telephone requests, and working with researchers who come. Oddly, the topics that I get the most interest in are often those that people would say, \"What?\" So these days I'm maybe two or three times a week I get requests for certified copies of House Joint Resolution 192, and basically Congress renumbers the bills and resolutions with every new two-year Congress, so it took me a while that people were talking about House Joint Resolution 192 from the 73rd Congress that can be found in U.S. Statutes Large Volume 48, pages 112-113. That basically took the U.S. off the gold standard. So why people want certified copy of those two pages probably has something to do with payments, but I've never gotten a clear answer. I answer probably the major share of prisoner letters and prisoners seem to have a keen interest in how HR 31-90 from the 80th Congress that re-codified Title XVIII of the U.S. Code got enacted. And now the 80th Congress is when Republicans came back into power in Congress, with the Republicans having a rocky relationship with Harry Truman, and Justice Kennedy once had a throwaway phrase about that particular statute being enacted in an odd fashion. A friend who works with the Congressional Research Service has assured me that by the time it left the Hill to go to the President for its signature all was kosher. But there are up teen people who would like to overturn the provision in the U.S. Code about Federal courts so that 60 years of convictions could be thrown out. There's documentation on how that law came about that a number of people are interested in." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "That's interesting. What would you say are the major successes of your time at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "You know, in a minor, minor way, the fact that the legislative archives as a separate color code, not blue or not orange since when—" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] But what do those colors mean?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Well, I think blue means east side, so when we were talking about the staff who man the research room, I think it's military records have blue and civilian records have orange so that the staff can readily tell which place to put the records are being pulled, and the Center was initially part of one or the other and I basically said, no, we should have our own color. So that's in a very, very minor way. I have an article on using the Congressional Serial Set for the Study of Western History. And in effect that article is something that I pass out periodically to researchers, because if you can understand how the Serial Set can be used for the study of Western history you can understand how the serial set can be used for the study of any aspect of American history, and although in this current day and age, since it was written before computers became the widespread phenomena that they are today, knowing how to use the volume-finding aids was important, and oddly it's still important because, sure, you can Google terms, but if you don’t know what the sum universe is of what there is out there, it's not as good as simply Googling to see what is out here." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "If you don’t mind, that transitions perfectly into my next question, which is, Can you speak to technological changes over time?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "The computer is clearly the main change. You know, I once remember hearing a discussion, Mel with somebody else. You know, Mel was head of diplomatic records and you know he basically said the day will come when everyone will have a computer on their desk, and somebody else thought that was outrageously fantastic thinking, whereas now the great majority of the people in the agency carry their own computer with them in the form of their telephone." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "And how does that influence your daily activities?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Increasingly, being able to find locations through the computer-based location guide becomes increasingly important, and being able to basically Google internal information about particular kinds of records to see what might show up really opens a whole new area. You know the whole notion of Googling is just so phenomenal that today somebody sent an email saying, “I'd like to have the transcripts of Senator Irvin’s Watergate records, and so basically what he was asking for was the 25 or so books of printed hearings that the Irving committee in 1973 or ‘74 held and were published. The organization known as the HathiTrust has put all those volumes online, so it's incredible that I can send an email with a link to the HathiTrust site and say, “Here it is.”" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "More broadly speaking, what other changes have you experienced over time at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Well, I think partly in that same focus, there's an effort to do more with less so that subject experts, and to some extent I would classify myself as such, are increasingly less valued in the agency, because the focus is on everyone being their own archivist, online access, direct online access to archival materials, and given the sometimes arcane way that the records are organized, one really needs to understand the preliminary inventories. And George Scaboo was Robert Warner's deputy and his object was a kind of “have gun will travel” approach for archivists. There should be finding aids available for archivists and anyone should be able to use the finding aids. And that may work in theory, but it has limitations in practice." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Can you evaluate the impact of the transition from more specialized experts to everyone being their own archivist?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Well, good and bad. Good in the sense that the technological revolution opens wonderful possibilities, and good in the sense that, if there's basically less money to do more, it's a way that, outwardly, work can be accomplished. I'm not alone in thinking about whether the quality of exchange suffers, but you can't have everything." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Could you speak to your interactions with other Federal agencies through the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "I suppose. So, the main Federal entity that the Center for Legislative Archives interacts with is Congress, and I'm not directly involved with a lone program, so for Federal executive branch agencies. Those agencies sign legal documents with the National Archives transferring legal control of their materials to the National Archives—that never happens with House and Senate records. It just is House and Senate, Congress have exempted themselves from Freedom of Information Act and other Federal provisions. Legal control of the House and Senate records remains with Congress and so we abide by the rules of access that Congress establishes, that the House and Senate establish for their records. The office has a very active loan program so that we serve as a kind of warehouse for off-site storage of committee records, and very often will have requests for particular records returned. As I say, I mostly don't, am not very much involved, you know, occasionally take telephone requests if the proper person isn't around. We get requests from congressional offices about arcane matters, and sometimes they're within our bailiwick and sometimes they're really meant for the Congressional Affairs office. Earlier in the week, there was a call from someone in the General Counsel's office with the National Guard and they were after a commission that looked into the Air Force, and this was a commission that went out of existence a year or so ago, and in their defunct website it says, “Contact the National Archives for follow-up,” so I get this call because the report went to the Center for Legislative Archives. So, one of the things that I generally do is take on the responsibility for myself if it’s someone or something that the person has gotten bounced back hither and yon, to see where he needs to get to the right bounce. So I talked with a friend who works in the appraisal unit, got the name of the archivist who does appraisal work for the military; that fellow didn’t have the answer but I was able to give him the telephone number so that the fellow in the National Guard can talk to somebody knowledgeable. My favorite story for a bounce around was just after the film Lincoln came out, and someone from—" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] Was it like November 2012?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Was it that short time ago? So somebody from Mississippi had said, a friend of mine was saying that Mississippi never ratified the 13tth Amendment, is that right? And it turns out that the Mississippi legislature in the 1980s, I believe, did ratify the 13th Amendment, but the paperwork never quite got finished, so I was able to put him in touch with the people at the National Archives and then he was able to get in touch with the Secretary of State's office in Mississippi, so Mississippi finally ratified officially for recognition permission is now ratified, the 13th amendment." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "That's amazing. So what challenges have you experienced doing the work that you do?" }, { "speaker": "RROD ROSS", "text": "Well, one of the major challenges has to do with providing access, so oftentimes records needs to be screened for, so the Center routinely screens records not only to make sure the national security classifications aren't prematurely released but also the IRS is very, very sensitive about release of tax information, tax returns, and there are tax returns that are scattered throughout the records, so these need to be taken out, grand jury testimony is closed, sensitive information about individuals needs to have special scrutiny, so it's not just saying, okay, if a record is 50 years old it can be served. So basically, the screening question is a major challenge, sometimes just trying to come up with the answer to what someone wants since there’s some requests that are nearly impossible to work with somebody trying to enunciate clearly, I want everything on the Civil War. Or something equivalent, sort of, have I made myself clear? And the records sometimes aren't organized in the way that that one can find information without excruciating research." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "We're a little bit more than halfway through, so I want to go back to the specific projects that you mentioned early on when I asked you about what you had done at the National Archives and before the National Archives. So first, could you speak to your involvement with the Richard Nixon project? Or papers?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Yeah. So, I grew up in the 1950s. I well remember the 1960 election that Richard Nixon lost, so basically Richard Nixon is not a distant historical figure but rather almost a contemporary, and I find it a little bit ironic that I've not only worked with the materials that were seized, the Presidential recording, the Nixon tapes were about to be returned to President Nixon and Congress stepped in and said, no, these will be seized by the Federal Government, so I worked with that collection, primarily with the tapes." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "When did you work with them?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "If I started in 1977, this would probably be ‘78/’79, so the tapes went through several renderings of what could be released—primarily if it was personal information it was not; and if Nixon is speaking as head of the Republican party, is that a private consideration as opposed to his speaking as president of the United States? So, I find it a little bit ironic that I've ended up working with the White House materials as well as the Congressional materials that it involved the investigation so—" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] What was it like to work with those tapes? What were they like?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "It was exhilarating. About that same time the National Archives had listening stations that were set up in room 204 for public hearing of those tapes that had been played in general conversation, those court-related instances." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Now are those tapes transferred to the Nixon library now or are they still here?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "There is still a Nixon tapes project here, but the great bulk of the tapes have now been released to the general public, and I'm not sure whether they're downloadable audio, I'm not as knowledgeable as I should be for the access form of the great bulk of the recordings. One of the highlights of sorts, at least in meeting celebrities, was working ever so briefly with John Dean. You're too young to remember John Dean." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "I don't remember him, but I can picture him. I know who John Dean is." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Okay. So, I get this call one day, “This is John Dean.” The John Dean. There was a lawsuit that he was involved with, furnished some records that he reviewed in the central search room. I remember a colleague basically coming just so that she could pretend to be doing something else just so that she could see who John Dean was. So, I'm not sure whether that answers your questions of working with Nixon-related materials." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "I guess I want to know more specifically about that transition from the Nixon tapes being government property and private to them becoming essentially public domain." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Well the legislation basically that seized the materials said that it would be the property of the Federal Government, so shortly, some years later, there was the Presidential Materials Act. So Presidential materials from George Washington until that Nixon episode were always considered the private property of the particular President, so the whole notion of Presidential Libraries comes from FDR saying, under the right circumstances, “I donate to people all of these records and things” and that was the beginning of the FDR library, of the Presidential Library system, as Truman was leaving the White House. No, I guess it was as Eisenhower leaving the White House. There was legislation to set up an Office of Presidential Libraries, and it was thought there would be the Truman Library and there would be the Eisenhower Library, and then Herbert Hoover took advantage of the provision to have his Presidential library. So, the Nixon materials were here in Washington. Eventually the Federal Government, the National Archives, reached an agreement with the Nixon foundation that had a research facility and museum in southern California not terribly far from Disneyworld." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "[interposing] Disneyland." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Yeah, Disneyland. Actually, I visited it a couple of years ago with my younger sister and her husband, so basically that entity came under the domain of National Archives, although the Foundation and the Archives continued to have an unsteady relationship, so basically the tapes were seized and the Federal Government opened up the seized materials." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Okay. You mentioned a jurisdiction dispute when you were a White House liaison during the Reagan administration. Can you explain what that was?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Well, that had two aspects. One, the National Archives had a responsibility to advise the White House what was what. But the White House wanted the National Archives office to report through the Office of Central Files, so it was sort of like having the chicken report to the fox in terms of how the chicken coop was being run. So the Archives wasn't happy with that, so then a fellow by the name of John Rodgers, who had an administrative position, wanted to have Federal agencies that had presence in the Old Executive Office Building start paying basically upkeep, and the Archives wasn't keen about that. And so basically the Archives said it was closing down its liaison office. It still had a presence relating to the receipt and packing transfer, temporary storage of gifts, especially out of state gifts that came to the president, but for a time period the office did close down." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Okay. You also mentioned your work with the bicentennial project. What was that like?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "That was an excellent chance for me to gain an understanding of the records of Congress. So I had as my responsibility, so there were two coffee table-like books that were guide that were put out. I authored chapters on the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House, and on the Space Science and Astronautics Committee. You know, having worked on the other side, on, I forget whether the District of Columbia Committee. So, I had a chance to write on things that I had a special interest in and I had a chance to go through the records and see how they were organized and give examples of key and interesting things in those records. So that was really an excellent overview for how the Center operated and what the Center did in terms of my education as an archivist with the Center for Legislative Archives." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "That leads perfectly into my next question, which I guess is sort of my main question, which is, Could you tell me about the beginning of the Center for Legislative Archives and how did it evolve over time?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "See, I'm smiling when you say that, because I'm tempted to say the whole reason for the Center was to correct the gross inequality that the heads of Presidential Libraries would be a higher position than the person with responsibility for congressional records. So there was legislation that, and I'm blanking now whether this was simply a part of other legislation or whether it was a standalone thing, but one of the things that by law got changed was the creation of the Center for Legislative Archives with somebody who had a grade level equivalent to Presidential Library Directors. When the Center was established, there was an Advisory Committee that was also established, and the _Advisory_ Committee subsequently took on ongoing status, so the center really had evolved as a dynamic part of the National Archives, its education outreach program is first rate. The former Director of the Center, Mike Gillette, in some ways was responsible for the National Archives Foundation coming into being." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "How did that work?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Mike spent a lot of time on the telephone and he cultivated people, so I'm not the best of people to tell you how the National Archives Foundation came into existence. All I can say is, without Mike Gillette, it would not have evolved into what it did and probably not as rapidly as it did." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Do you feel that you have made a significant contribution to the National Archives or to the historic preservation field? If so, what is it?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "You know, I was gratified when a colleague last year had nominated me for a lifetime service award, the service award basically was inspiring a generation of archivists and with the mission of making access happen, and I really do think that I take a different spin on making access happen. So, oftentimes there'll be chance telephone calls and our office answers the phone, and there was once an instance where I was directing somebody to particular records that were at Archives II—but the records weren't really at Archives II they were in Kansas—and I put together a field trip to visit, a year or two years ago the Truman-Eisenhower libraries and I was going to be in Kansas so I half-volunteered to see what was what on a Saturday, but instead the archivist in Kansas was basically able to provide the law person in Atlanta with the information the law person was after. So I was thinking, yes, that really is an instance of making access happen. So, I've not really been involved with historic preservation, but I think I have been involved with fulfilling the mission of the agency to make the records available and meaningful to American people." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "How do you view your time overall at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "I'm very glad that I've had the opportunity to have the career that I have had. As I said, it was the ability to use training in American history with interesting teaching and working with wonderfully intrinsic materials to have an enrichment for myself in terms of fulfillment of my potential, and I do believe in making a contribution both to the people that I’ve worked with and through them, through the greater community. So I realize you’re close to ending, though ironically one of those fortuitous events involved the TV personality Cokie Roberts. So notwithstanding her position, she had simply come into the finding aids room to ask if an archivist with legislative records could come by to talk with her, and I was the one who ambled down—" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] I love her books." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Well, subsequently I was able to put her in touch with other people, the Lincoln project, Kathy Jacob at Radford, Keith Melder, who had done a key paper on one of the women who she later used in her _Capital Dames._" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Great book." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "So, I was taken with her acknowledgment and taken with the acknowledgment of my sister­ in-law’s mother, who's a Holocaust survivor who in the preface to her self-published memoir, a promise kept other women in the concentration camp: one of us needs to survive to tell our story. So, in her introduction, in her acknowledgments, you know, Joyce Wagner credited me with doing the first oral history interview that she did in basically opening the floodgates in remembrance." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "You've mentioned a few, including that one, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any other interesting or useful anecdotes that may have not come up in my questions." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "I think that since I don't have a list of anecdotes, undoubtedly after this tape is over I'll think, Oh yeah, there was the time that—" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing} You can always email me, and thank you for sharing the ones that you did. My last question is, what words of wisdom do you have from your time at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Seize the moment. Don’t be afraid of saying the outrageous or thinking the outrageous because oftentimes the unconventional, I realize is cliché to say “thinking outside the box,” is what gets people to have wonderful opportunities." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Well, thank you again for your time. I'll turn off the recording. [END PART I RECORDING] [START PART II RECORDING]" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "This is Rebecca Brenner from the National Archives History Office interviewing Rod Ross, part II. Today's date is August 6, 2015, and we are in room 400 at Archives I. So, could you speak to your involvement with the Oral History Project?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "The Oral History Project, actually, we could either talk about my involvement with the National Archives leading up to the Oral History Project." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Whichever starting point you think is best." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Yeah, it puts it in context. So, I was with the Nixon Presidential Materials project and I had the brilliant idea for an SAA session to have an update about where things stood. And it turns out that, as the GS-6 in the office, I really wasn't the appropriate person to speak and they already had that idea covered. But Trudy Peterson, who was on the program committee on the SAA that was going to have a program about founding fathers of the archival profession, basically came to me and said, “Oh, you were interested in doing something for a program. How would you like to do a paper on Ernst Posner?” And since I needed, I guess I was already in a kind of the equivalent of the CIDS program, you know the archival training program and I needed a paper, Maygene Daniels, who was my supervisor basically said, “Why don’t we substitute the SAA paper that you'll do, or did, for the required archival paper?” So back in 1981 I gave the SAA presentation and then it got published in the _American Archivist._ Then went on to do something on Leland and it too was published in the _American Archivist_ and then a spinoff of that was a American Historical Association presentation that I gave that Bert Rhoads had organized on Waldo Gifford Leland and the preservation of documentary resources. So with those as background, I was asked to do an article for the 1984 issue of _Prologue_ that was for the 50th anniversary of the National Archives. And that P _rologue_ article then was republished in a handout that the Archives gave away for a good number of years, _Guardian of Heritage._ So, just as Trudy Peterson had been involved with my getting into the writing field, she had been an assistant to George Scaboo, Deputy Archivist under Robert Warner, and this was about the time, in the mid-1980s, that the National Archives was successful in getting legislative re-establishment of itself out of GSA as an independent agency. And basically the Archivist Robert Warner wanted to have oral history interviews done with those people with the National Archives that had been most active in the quest for independence, so there was a feature, an entry in the staff information bulletin, and oddly both Jessie Kratz and myself have searched in vain for what I definitely remember there in 1984, announcing that I would be head of National Archives oral history program, and that was how I learned about the program and my appointment. So I was working at the Records Center in Suitland at the time and in effect I could have lots of time release, I could have lots of cassette tapes, and I was pretty much on my own. Since the discussion, the marching orders were, do basically the people on this list and retirees. And I expanded that just a little bit. So the first, who was a technician at the Washington National Records Center since I wanted to have something of an overview of the staff. Last week, when I signed the legal agreement giving rights for presumably this presentation as well as last week's, it was a form that I'd be interested in having tiny bit of a discussion on how you came up with the text of the form, because I came up with my own form for these close to oral history-­" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "General Counsel Chris Runkel came up with my form." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "That's what I should have done also. Kudos to you." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "I didn't do that, Jessie did." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Well, kudos to Jessie, if it could have been well aware that I basically had moderated a form that Presidential Libraries used for oral history interviews. And I should have run it by the General Counsel's Office and did not. So my hat is off to you on that score." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Actually, the only reason I know that is when I handed the form to Chris Runkel when I interviewed him, he said, “Oh, I made this.”" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Oh, so you think that Jessie asked him?" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Jessie sent me all the information that I needed. Maybe it was someone who asked him originally, I'm not sure, but it's that one in the oral history file in the Y drive. I just printed several of the form to use." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Excellent." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "When you signed it last week does it becomes public domain?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Right, so the way the current form is read, one really wants to be careful of what one says if one is a current employee. So of the people that I interviewed, oddly, there is a kind of relevance for today. You know, recently you may have heard also the Archivist of the U.S. at the last town hall meeting giving an update on what was what. And one of the what was what is it appears there will be yet another attempt to legislate out of existence the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. And in doing one of the initial oral history interviews, it was with Charlene Bickford, who has a role as the with the First Federal Congress project as an editor. But she was one of the key people in the lobbying efforts to retain funding for NHPRC. So I'm not sure how much is her oral history interview, others who also similarly were influential. Page Putnam Miller was one of the people that I interviewed who was the liaison for basically lobbying activities for the Society of American Archivists. So of the people that were on the list, Mary Ann Chaffee—so this is by memory so I might not have things exactly right. Mary Ann Chaffee, Stephen Daniels, Stanley Falk, Edward Gleiman, Page Putnam Miller, Marion Morris, Tom Persky, and Ira Shapiro. And these were people who either worked in congressional offices as staff people or were agency historians, or in one way or another played a role for the National Archives independent movement. And basically the project sort of just petered out. You know, there were archivists like Gerry Haines who I interviewed, John Porter Bloom who I interviewed, but there was an immense number of former archivists or even current archivists that were on tap. You know, I expanded my purview to interview a fellow with IRS and a fellow with Justice Department because both had been prominent, not always in a complementary way, for the National Archives in the way the independent legislation got created." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "If I might ask, when you were managing the Oral History Project, what was your process of identifying people to interview?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Good question, and I don't have a good answer. So, there was the initial listing of people that were initial memo and then just using my own judgment. So one of the things that I did was grandfather into that collection an interview that I had done. My wife and I had been at Sara Dunlap Jackson's apartment and I done an interview with her two years earlier in 1982. So, basically I grandmothered that interview into the collection. But in some ways my beginning with the National Archives was a high point in my career. Because I was basically the GS-6 office gopher in the Office of Presidential Libraries, and as such was rubbing shoulders with the top people in the agency, so I had some idea who the key people were. And just having an interest in history, there were people like Jimmy Walker, who was the key African American genealogist, and in effect the key genealogical expert for the National Archives; so I wanted to include him. Harold Pinkett in the founding generation of archivists and the key African American Archivist of the initial years of the agency, so I wanted to include him and the opportunity came up to do a second follow-up interview to the one Phil Brooks Sr. had done with Bob Bahmer, the fourth Archivist of the United States. Bob Bahmer and Wayne Grover having brought on Bert Rhoads as basically their successor. And I interviewed Bert Rhoads the former Archivist, and that was the one that George Scaboo had said, “Oh, there's lots of unused secretarial help in the National Archives, getting transcriptions won’t be any problem.” And in point of fact his secretary did the transcription for the Bert Rhoads interview. But for the other ones, my hat is off to you, Rebecca—" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] That's what interns are for." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "For not only taking on this project but doing transcripts as well. So I was basically collecting cassette tapes, and cassette tapes sitting on the shelf are of little or no use, so I took advantage of two interns. And they created transcripts by disguise, so multipage basically summary what was spoken of so that one could basically follow in order, so then if one wanted to then hear the actual text basically to make one's own transcript that at least became a doable project. So eventually I stopped and nobody seemed to notice, and that was the end of the project. So if that seems like if my career at the National Archives if we're simply focusing, when we had a brief discussion. Yes, we will focus on that, we will not focus on my Black History Month presentations and arrangements with the Illinois State Society, other than those that were filmed by C-SPAN. And we won't talk about things like through the Illinois State Society putting on the program and the Lithuanian embassy after going on a Jewish heritage tour of sorts to Lithuania in 2012. But rounding out the National Archives picture I came back to the Oral History Project in a sense. A year or two ago I had applied to membership in a club here in Washington, the Cosmos Club, and Meyer Fishbein in his late 90s was my second sponsor. So there was a kind of direct link that Ernst Posner had been Ira's sponsor and Ernst Posner, you know the esteemed German refugee that I had first done my publication on. It sort of all tied in together, so in re-listening to the Meyer Fishbein interview I arranged with Jessie Kratz to basically do a program at Archives II that became a National Archives YouTube, “ [Meyer Fishbein Remembers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5AEMak62qQ) ,” so it was a very warm, not too many people in the main theater there of the National Archives but a very warm time for Meyer speaking to a whole new generation of archivists. __ [](https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2013/08/26/death-takes-no-holiday-full-military-honors-at-arlington-in-2014/) There are two other sort of National Archives-related things that in very, very recent years I've done. One was a 2013 _Prologue, Pieces of History_ bit, “ [Death Takes No Holiday: Full Military Honors at](https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2013/08/26/death-takes-no-holiday-full-military-honors-at-arlington-in-2014/) [Arlington in 2014](https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2013/08/26/death-takes-no-holiday-full-military-honors-at-arlington-in-2014/) .” And that really highlighted the work of Bill Seibert, chief of archival operations at the National Archives in Saint Louis. A fellow in my building had died, Odis Quick, I learned about it in kind of a roundabout way and found that his body was still, months later, in an Arlington funeral home. And I ended up signing off on the papers for the cremation. And through Bill Seibert got paperwork that would allow burial in the columbarium at Arlington—" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "[interposing] That's like straight off a West Wing episode." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Well, sometimes if only one person hears you, that's all you need. And the one person who heard me was Claire Kluskens, who's the genealogy expert here at the National Archives, and she took it really upon herself to locate the heirs of Odis Quick, and by golly she did. And, you know, so there were two sisters who were nieces of Odis Quick. One in Colorado, and one in California, plus there was a cousin of theirs who had converted to Islam and was living in Mali. So the two sisters here in the United States basically came to Washington. They took care of disposing of the apartment, the co-op apartment, and some months later they decided they were not going to opt for an Arlington Cemetery ceremony and instead quietly did a dispersal of ashes. So if anyone is curious to the follow-up that _Prologue_ article, the Arlington Military Honors never came to be. So there was one more fairly recent sort of National Archives military-related thing I was associated with and that was being a YouTube for Memorial Day, Memorial, say 2015." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Before we get to YouTube, there was one more publication I wanted to ask about, didn't you write something of use on congressional records for Western History?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Could you speak to that for a second?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Okay, so let's go back, because I wasn't sure whether we wanted continue, since I'd done a little bit of speaking at the last interview on my career with the Center for Legislative Archives. But I'm delighted you raised that topic, because I in fact at one time did want to talk about that. So if we talk about publications that I've been associated with at the Center for Legislative Archives; if we start out with the Guide to the Records to the House of Representatives, that the National Archives published, that guide in 1989 for the Bicentennial Congress, and then a companion work that Bob Coren was pretty much the sole editor and compiler for the Senate equivalent. So I was working with the Library and Printed Archives Branch and decided I wanted to leave. I had talked to Trudy Peterson, who sort of serves as my guardian angel, while she ended up her career at the Archives as an Acting Archivist of the United States, and wrote a support letter for the Cosmos Club application for me. So, I went to Trudy and basically said, I think I want out. And, by an odd coincidence, the day before somebody associated with the Center for Legislative Archives to-be, had told her that they needed more assistance for writing chapters for the House guide, so I went on initially a detail, I served as author for the chapters on the District of Columbia Committee, on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on the Space Science and Astronautics Committee, and for the last committee I found it gratifying because during my two-year career as a legislative assistant, in the 94th Congress to a one term Democrat from Illinois, Tim L. Hall, I was his liaison for that committee, so I had a chance to sort of see things from both sides. So my first publication of sorts with the National Archives relating to the Center was that guide. The second one was my publication in the Journal of Western History in the Serial Set “A Source for Western History,” which was my excuse to explain what the serial set was and its wonders. So that I still continue to think of that as, if I'm going to cite one single publication, that would be the one that I would think would be the greatest contribution, period. So there was a follow-up publication, so the Serial Set article was in 1994, the follow-up publication was in 1999 in the Journal of Government History, and that was basically a discussion of the Su-Docs. The Superintendent of Documents Library Classification System, since I had been working with Record Group 287, Publications of the U.S. Government, and then in 1988 that record group's responsibilities were folded into the newly created Center for Legislative Archives and I basically moved along with it. So I moved from being on detail with the Center to going off for a month to Ann Arbor having a Bentley fellowship and having my topic on Early Administrative Histories in the Age of Computers that actually got published in India. So when I came back, I was sort of now a part of the Center for Legislative Archives, and I switched from doing projects to basically reference, and that's been my career with the agency ever since. So knowing something about government publication was which was now a part of the responsibilities of the Center for Legislative Archives, I was happy to be available to do that article, it was an issue that I think Kris Wilhelm had an article in that same magazine on legislative materials relating to the creation of what eventually became the Department of Defense, and Richard McCauley, the historian with the Center, had something about the history of that movement. So that particular article of mine looked at this two-year period between the demise of the War Department and the Navy Department before the creation of the Department of Defense that 1947-48 time period. There was something called the National Military Establishment, because it was a very small entity it was able to talk about the totality of the records, the publications that were associated with that Su-Docs class. So that largely is for publication at the Center. In 1992, I was part of OAH program on Indian-related records and basically talked about the things in the Serial Set as well as this marvelous collection from the mid-1920s; there was a Senate investigating committee that looked into the Indian question in the United States. And half of all Indian-related record the Center has a part of that collection of materials. So the final thing I want to talk about relating to the Center responsibilities was I came up with a paper in 1994 for an Illinois history symposium on records relating to documents in the House and the Senate before the Civil War that highlighted the history of Illinois, and from that I ended up having this as a slide presentation, I ended up giving the slide presentation to the Illinois State Society. Went to a board meeting to explain what I would be doing, essentially never left. So, much of the things I'm most proud of are actually activities I've done with the Illinois State Society. Which you had mentioned that for this interview we could talk about C-SPAN presentations, and I was especially prominent in putting together Black History Month presentations and I soon realized that there would be hardly anyone from the membership who would go to such things, that if I could basically put on presentations for other groups, it would be the other group's activity. So one of the first such things with the National Archives volunteers, and there had been a _Prologue_ article on Ida B. Wells Barnett, who had ended up her career in Illinois, so basically had the _Prologue_ author speak about Ida Wells Barnett and had that open to the Illinois State Society. Then I hit into doing things with the U.S. Capitol Historical Society and especially Matt Wasniewski as House Historian. So, one of the C-SPAN programs that's filmed is my giving an introduction to a historian in the office, Laura Turner O'Hara, in February 2011. That was her talk on Senator Hiram Revels, who had an Illinois education, he went to a kind of preparatory school associated with my college, Knox College, in Galesburg. And then a year later there was a program that I put on John Willis Menard, who had he been seated would have been the first African American in Congress. And Philip Magnus talked about his early career, especially going to Belize and then—you look like you don't want me to finish." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "I'm really interested, but it just occurred to me that I'm not on topic. So, if I could ask you to move on to the Memorial Day Video." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Okay, let me just finish John Willis Menard and say for that C-SPAN program. So there are three things that if you Google C-SPAN and Rodney A. Ross come up, I end up reciting a love poem as a kind of transition between the two persons by Menard. So moving on to the Memorial Day program, which really fits in with this interview series, because Jessie Kratz, the Historian, had talked about doing an oral history interview with me." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "And from what I've heard when you interviewed with her originally you talked about what you were going to do for the Memorial Day project, so if I could ask you what you did for the Memorial Day project?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Well, again, this becomes interesting. So basically, instead of doing the oral history interview, she had arranged for John Heyn, H-E-Y-N, to tape the presentation and she had agreed to let me basically redo, recreate the 1978 text of a talk I gave in my hometown in Batavia on men from Company B of the 124th volunteer regiment and their service in the Civil War, largely using records and especially with guidance from Mike Musick, who was the Civil War expert at one time here in the agency. So it was 18 minutes, it was not terrible, but it was not anything for appropriate for a YouTube presentation, and subsequently John Heyn and I both spent a whole lot of time. Both my re-working the text, my liaison Amy, with the curator at the Batavia Depot Museum for photos from Batavia and the YouTube that we finally, finally ended up with was something entitled \" [Memorial Day 2015: Why it Matters.](https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2015/05/19/national-archives-commemorates-memorial-day-with-video/) \" So it started out with the presentation that I had written for the Archivist, introducing me, indicating that I would highlight one National Archives record, if you Google me, Rod Ross Memorial Day, it's easy to find the YouTube. [](https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2015/05/19/national-archives-commemorates-memorial-day-with-video/)" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "I've watched it." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "And one thing that John wanted to do was do it outside by the G.A.R. monument that is kitty-corner from the National Archives Building. And eventually there was a wonderful spring day, the magnolias were in bloom, we did it outside at noon-time filming. And I'm very, very happy with the result. Since it basically did tie in with my things with the Illinois State Society, since one of the key things I've done with the Illinois State Society is not only bring about a remembrance of John Willis Menard but especially one of the most prominent Americans of the late 19th century, John A. “Black Jack” Logan. So if you listen to one of the verses of the Illinois State Song, it refers to Grant and Logan and Lincoln. So, Logan's key credit is as commander of the Grand Army of the Republic he issued to the general order establishing the end of May for what became Memorial Day, Decorations Day." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "So what exactly was that document that you used?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "The document was a record from the compiled service order—" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "[interposing] What's that?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "So, in terms of military paperwork, especially in this case, Civil War military paperwork, there were hundreds of thousands of soldiers, North and South, in the Civil War, if not millions. I'm not sure whether it would have been the Adjutant General's Office established a way of grouping together paperwork on individuals, and there was one fellow from Company B of the 124th Illinois Volunteer Regiment who was killed at the time of the siege of Vicksburg. So, basically I got the page that had his name and then killed Vicksburg and the date in 1863 and that was the document, was the featured document. So it was sort of like, yes—and there was a picture of the Civil War Monument in Batavia something dedicated in 1918. It had his name. So I don’t have a picture of him and I don't have his signature, but it was like bringing an unknown soldier to life. So yes, and part of the tie-in was the Memorial Day observance, and ended up quoted part of that general order that relates to it being incumbent upon comrades to honor their fallen comrades. “Their soldier lives were a reveille of freedom to a race in chains and their deaths a tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms.” I found it dramatic and I ended my presentation with that dramatic reading." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Are there any other presentations that you want to highlight that you've done that are telling of the National Archives as an agency?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Okay, there's one more that relates to workings of the National Archives, sort of, and that was a presentation last June, a year ago, June 24, 2014. That was a presentation of the Afro-American History Society and that was in Archives II and it was filmed by the society, so it's not a National Archives YouTube, but it has been filmed. A close friend of mine, a neighbor, is Dr. Ezra Naughton, who was born in St. Croix, and his talk entitled \"The 1848 Emancipation of a Slave Population: US Virgin Islands as a Mirror on America.\" So it was a National Archives group that hosted that presentation, you know the National Archives does have a record group for the Virgin Islands, and so I think that counts. There have been a couple of times that I've done introductions of speakers, there was one twice this year, as a matter of fact. William Marvel had a talk here in the theater, \"Lincoln's Autocrat: The Life of Edwin Stanton,\" and then last month in July, Anthony Pitch talked about his book, _Our Crimes were being Jewish_ ." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "I went to that." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "So, you heard me?" }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "And I've read it." }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "So, I've known Tony Pitch for a number of years, and I'd once told him that I wouldn't be able to go to a presentation he was giving because I had put together a field trip for myself to go to the Eisenhower and Truman libraries, which I did. Because I had arranged for my sister-in-law's mother, Joyce Wagner, to speak at the Eisenhower Library on her self-published memoir: \"A Promise Kept.\" So as a Holocaust survivor, survived two years in Auschwitz, she ended up in her book quoting General Eisenhower and his becoming overwhelmed with emotions on seeing those survivors and those who did not survive the death camps, and the ones the Americans liberated were not really the death factories that Auschwitz and other places were." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Did you help Anthony Pitch with finding documents here?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "I was instrumental in his using some quotes from Joyce Wagner. The first time I worked with him was on his War of 1812 book. And for that there was, I think, a House of Representatives investigation into the war and I had provided those to him. So that was the beginning of my assistance to him. I did not work with him on his second major book, that of, _They Killed Poppa Dead_ on the Lincoln assassination." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "I'll end with the same question I ended the last interview. Are there any other anecdotes or words of wisdom that you want to share before we conclude?" }, { "speaker": "ROD ROSS", "text": "Well, I appreciate having the chance to do this follow-up interview. And I guess there is, if I'm talking about oral history interviews, there was one that doesn't count that I'd done for a labor oral history interview project at Roosevelt University in the early ‘70s with one of father's first cousins who left Zarsas, Lithuania in the same emigration group as my paternal grandfather, which does sort of tie into a National Archives record, because subsequently I found the passenger manifest for that emigration group and it's interesting that none of the names jived. So my last name is Ross, and by the time of the 1910 census my male relatives and my direct ancestors were using the name Ross. But the passenger manifest gives the name as Resch, R-E-S-C-H. Now, my grandfather was Louis, he's listed as Laib on the manifest. It helps bring to life an individual story of the story of America. So I was happy with that effort when I worked with the two years in what was a proto- Ronald Reagan Presidential Library’s office, last two years of Reagan's first term, I did a number of oral history interviews with staff members that are findables there at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. So rather than talk about other aspects of my life, I will close and thank you very much." }, { "speaker": "REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "Thank you very much. [END PART II RECORDING]" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. JACK KABREL", "text": "Okay. This is Jack Kabrel. Today is June 8, 2016, at 1:00 p.m. in the afternoon. I'm conducting an oral history interview with Mr. John M. Scroggins, via over the phone audio recording. This interview is part of the National Archives and Records Administration’s History Office Oral History Project. Thank you very much, John, for giving us your time today and then becoming part of history. I’ll ask you the first question and then we'll work it on from there. Will you please provide a brief overview of your life and education before coming to the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JOHN M. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well, I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1942. I lived there until 1948 through Kindergarten. I spent 1948, summer of 1948 through the summer of 1949 in a distant suburb of Minneapolis near Lake Minnetonka and that was where I went to first grade. And then we moved to a suburb, St. Louis Park, just outside Minneapolis. I could see inside Minneapolis from my window and my paper route included both sides of the city line. And I was there until 1961. I spent a year at the University of Minnesota living at home in 1960 to ‘61 and then I went to Jamestown College in North Dakota which is now the University of Jamestown. From 1961 to ‘64 I was a major in history and a minor in political science. Your second question was how did your education influence your decision to work at the Archives. When I was at Jamestown I was looking for a summer job that was relevant to my history major and I applied for a thing that I thought was going to consider me for a Park Historian job but I got letters asking if you would be interested in interviewing for a job with the Archives, a summer job with the Archives. So I said, yes. I had taken some kind of Civil Service Exam for some program that's long gone. But anyway I got this letter from GSA offering me a chance to interview for an Archives-related job and I was interviewed by the PBS manager in Minneapolis. What I didn't put in my notes is that there was a second candidate, Robert Nyes, and we were both selected and the deal was going to be that I worked at the Military Record Center in St. Louis the first summer and the Civilian the second summer and he did the opposite. But he worked in the Civilian Center the first summer and then dropped out. But the deal for the program was you worked until you graduate and then you get a permanent appointment which would be like if you took the Federal Service Entry Exam at the time but you didn't have to do it if you graduated and went through this program. And the National Archives Coordinator for it at the time was Bert Rhoads who later became Archivist. I think that's the answer to your first four questions." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes, it's sort of like an archivist in training almost, right, the program?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Right. Well it was a GSA program and I think they were offering similar jobs in the other services for people with appropriate majors in those services. You have to remember that two-thirds of my career I worked for GSA. If you know what I mean." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "And as we might get to more later on I was probably more closely associated with GSA on the day to day basis than most Archives employees." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes, we’ll be talking about that and about your contributions to then disassociating from GSA. And question, the next question, describe Day One on the job. What was it like on your first day at the job in both St. Louis and Washington?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I went to St. Louis on the train. I had no idea where I was going to live. Stayed in the, in the Railroad Hotel in the train station, long gone. And went out to the Center and I was sent to the Personnel Office and sworn in and then processed in the St. Louis Personnel Office. Remind me to talk with you when we get to independence time about St. Louis Personnel. Then I was taken and introduced to Joseph Schwartzberg who was the Center Director and the three Branch Chiefs. And I can only remember two names: John Gross was the Reference Branch and I think Paul Boyer was the A&D Branch. There was also a Special Projects Branch. The three Branch Chiefs had been the heads of the three military record centers. And then Mr. Gross took me to the Reference Branch Office and introduced me to his immediate staff. They asked me if I had a place to live, I said no. They took me to lunch. And then Larry Cromshaw who was one of the staff members grabbed a paper and drove me around until I found a place to live. You have to remember that this is roughly 18 months after GSA took over the Record Center from the military and what had been three separate military record centers had been merged into one and were not fully integrated yet." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "That's interesting—I didn't know that that was the history of the National Archives coming from the military." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Okay. Then in Washington, I guess we’re going to go back and forth with the time a little. I got to Washington and they sent me to Helen Buselmeier’s office. Helen was an assistant to Walter Robertson who was the long-time Administrative Law Office, Executive Director, Assistant Archivist for whatever and whatever. He had that job basically from 1941 until the mid 70’s I think. But Helen, Helen was—this was when GSA’s administrative work was still very, very centralized. Helen was his liaison with the Personnel Office and with the Budget Office. And rather than make new employees go to the GSA Building, most of them went to Helen and she did all the paperwork and stuff and sent it back and forth to GSA. But … in a real work like classification and stuff GSA sent somebody over. But anyway, I went to Helen for processing. Then she took me to Sherrod East who was the Assistant Archivist for Military Archives. So this was when Military and Civil Archives were separate. Talked to him for a minute or two and then he took me to Mabel Dietrich who was the Director of the Projects Division. She had Gary Ryan with her who was managing the project they assigned me to. And then they took me up to 10 W2 and introduced me to the staff and put me to work on Military Records, Military Command Records, what was then RG 98 but probably got split into four or five separate record groups later." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What is 10 W2?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "The stack area that we worked in." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Well that sounds like a busy day. What were your impressions of the agency at the beginning of your career coming out of a history background, learning history in college?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I had no idea what I was getting into. Except I had a history professor who had done research at the Archives and he told me I would like it, huh." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What kind of training did you initially get within the National Archives? One other individual that I trained with had classes with Schellenberg and I found that to be quite interesting." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I met Schellenberg once but I never had classes with him. He was really gone by then. The resume I sent you had a list of all of the significant training classes I could remember. But most significant probably is when I was in St. Louis they sent me to a Civil Service Orientation for Federal Service Entrance Exam employees which is what most people being hired by the government at the 5 or 7 level were sent to by their agencies at the time. And the top managers in St. Louis at the time were very active in Toastmasters and took me along to their meetings. When I got to Washington, they had no internal training programs so they enrolled me in the Modern Archives Institute that NARA and American University did jointly at the time. And I think I remember John Fawcett went through that at the same time I did. You know John Fawcett?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "No. No, I don't recall him." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "He came out of the Hoover Library about the same time I started in Washington. He was Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries for quite a while. And his ex-wife, Sharon, was Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries later." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Interesting." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Interesting because John Fawcett and I got letters from our Draft Boards about the same time. And I flunked the physical but he passed. And he had connections so when he finished basic training he ended up in the White House as a military aide to the Johnsons. But anyway to wrap up the thing, the most important training, when the Archives finally had a training course for new archivists, I took it, but it was, you know, several years later. Three or four years later. When I was a GSA management intern I went to several classes both GSA and the old Civil Service Commission had for management interns because it was a big government-wide push at that time including some computer classes. And then the Archives sent me to the Federal Executive Institute in 1982. I went in a PBS slot and I think the situation at the time is they were trying to get me out of the building or get rid of me or do something with me. And PBS had given up a slot because the administrator had said something at some staff meeting about what a waste of money the Federal Executive Institute was. So PBS elected to give up a slot and the Archives didn't care if the administrator was upset with them so they sent me." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Hmm." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I didn't think it was a waste of time but …" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Well it seems like you do have a lot of government sponsored training and education and maybe we can draw on some of that, you have a really a nice list of business classes that you seemed to take so I'm sure that helped you along the way as you got further into your career. Moving onto something else. Your first work experiences in the National Archives, can you just describe some of the people and positions and some of the work that you did?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well the first year I was an Archivist GS-5 working on the Army Command Records which, as I said, was Record Group 98 that got split up later. And Gary Ryan was the project leader and Maisie Johnson who died in a year or two was his assistant pretty much and then Elaine Everly and Aloha South who I think were the last two archivists—new archivists to appear in Washington before I did and Patricia Andrews who later became the Librarian for the Archives and somebody named Harry Schwartz who was a lot older than us and there may be a few other archivists I've forgotten and a string of technicians. And the records, the records we had had essentially come from the Army apparently quite some time ago and were in terrible shape. Disarranged, had been in a garage at some time. So it was a major arrangement and description and try to identify stuff problem. But I spent a year doing that. Part of that year Mabel Dietrich had me supervisor laborers moving records around because they were cleaning out a couple of stack areas to turn them into workspace and research room space. Mabel, by the way, was one of the two best bosses I ever had." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So at this point when you talk about what you were doing, you had me read the first eight pages of the Seventh Annual Report of the Archivist of the United States and he described those post World War II records that were kind of in disarray, so is this what you were dealing with at the time?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "No, well that's sort of it. But the real reason I had you read the report comes up later but … that was somewhat descriptive of the situation with Army Records at the time. I don't know how much you or Jessie or anybody knows about Solon Buck and Military Records and Roosevelt. I don't know if you want to cover this as a separate topic or not but at one point the Archives was trying to get the compiled Military Service Records from the military and the Army didn't want to give them up. And Buck made an appeal, a personal appeal to Roosevelt who wrote a note to the Secretary of the Army telling him basically that he ought to give them to the Archivist." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Interesting. No, that's...yeah, that's definitely." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "But you or Jessie or somebody ought to look at … at the relationship between Connor and Roosevelt and Buck and Roosevelt. It wasn’t really close but it was a lot closer than any later Archivist has had with any President. With any sane President." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "It’d be for interesting history. Take us through each of the timelines that you were giving us for each phase of your career." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "We’ll go back to St. Louis then, first summer in St. Louis. Like I said this is about 18 months after GSA took over. And they had not integrated the operations, really. And it was pretty clear that they were part of the GSA, not part of the National Archives, if you will understand the difference. Joseph Wertzberger who was the Center Director who was brought in from outside and I forget his background but he was brought in from outside to supervise the whole thing because they did not want to favor one of the three military centers. He was in charge in St. Louis and his boss was Joe Bosco who was the NARS Regional Commissioner in Kansas City. And Joe was responsible for the Records Management Division in Kansas City and the small Records Management Office in St. Louis and the two centers which were administered separately in St. Louis as well as the center in Kansas City. Joe in turn worked for Holloway whose nickname was June and I can't remember his full first name who was the GSA Region 6 Administrator and later I think he went to GSA Region 10. But it was expressed to me several times that the Record Center was part of GSA and not part of the National Archives even though people from the Archives gave them technical guidance. And I was assigned to the Reference Branch under John Gross and they had me rotate around various reference tasks and spend about half my time doing a cut and paste comparison of the different policies on release of records that the three services had. They didn't all have the same policies and in some cases they were similar and in other cases there were significant differences. For example the Air Force was much more restrictive in what subpoenas they would respond to than the Army and the Navy were. And I did this cut and paste and that was before computers and there was only one Xerox machine in the whole building. So they gave me copies of the manuals and regulations of the various services and a lot of tape and paste [Laughing]." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Did you have individuals within each branch that you could ask questions to, like officers or managers so to speak?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Some. There were some. But I was mainly supposed to work with the paper records unless I really needed to ask somebody." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And at that time and I might as well ask this question right here, when you're dealing with those - - in the military, were they all paper records or were there other types of records?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Paper and microfilm." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Microfilm, okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "There was a lot of microfilm. And, I spent some time but not very much rotating through microfilm of organizational records that were being used even before the fire to reconstruct service records if something was missing. So if they’d get a request in and they thought they couldn't find the record and they thought there should be something, they’d send me or whoever to microfilm of things like Muster Rolls or Morning Reports to see if we could identify the person. And that’s sort of the approach they used for reconstruction after the fire. So there were a lot of microfilm records that weren’t purely Personnel Records but used to supplement them." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And after that you decided to move in the summer of?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well that was the deal. The deal from the beginning was that I’d do one summer in Military and one in Civil and then I’d go to a library. So the second summer I was at the Civilian Building. And mostly it rotates around different reference tasks. They found out that I’d done some drafting in high school and they had me working on a shelving plan for the Vital Records Depository in Neosho, Missouri. I don’t know if you know about that." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "No, I don’t, could you elaborate a little bit on that." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "They had a Federal Records Depository in a cave in Neosho that they had inherited from somebody. And I don’t remember much about it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Did the National Archives at the time identify what a Vital Record was?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes. But I don’t know who, for example, I don’t know who specifically Neosho worked for. Probably for Baskell. But anyway they were expanding and I did shelving layouts for a couple of weeks. And then I wasn't involved but they were microfilming the 1880 Soundex cards, you know, which were very important for servicing the 1880 census before computers. But near the entrance to the Old Civilian Records Building there were rows and rows and rows of cabinets of cards that were the Soundex index to the 1880 census and they were being filmed the summer I was there. Because I went to 1964 expecting to be there permanently to the Truman Library and it didn't work out that way. They had me doing some reference work and reboxing. They sat me down in the Research Room and had me do a bibliography of books about Truman. Apparently they didn’t have anything like that. One of the days that I was working in there on that, Ginger Rogers came through on a tour and Truman took her up to the portrait, his portrait in Masonic regalia and talked for a long time about Masons and Masonic Presidents and, you know, I didn't hear the whole pitch but I could tell what he was talking about. He was very proud of that portrait and of his Masonic background. I spent some time in the Photo Collection with, I think it was Willy Hereford was the guy doing it, who later went to one of the Martin Luther King groups. But trying to identify people in photographs and writing captions. One of the things I did most days was read the obituaries from the _New_ _York_ _Times_ , _Washington_ _Post_ , and the _Kansas_ _City_ _Star_ . And I was doing that when Ladybird and Lyndon Johnson came through. And Dr. Philip Brooks explained why it was important to do that so that he could go solicit the papers from the widows basically." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Hmm. So you named three people there that Truman, Johnson, and even Ginger Rogers. Can you tell us a little bit about meeting them." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well I didn't really, you know, I met Truman. I didn’t really meet the others, I was just in the room or sitting there being talked about while they were there. I got an autographed picture on my birthday from Truman. Truman was there, oh, an average of three days a week, mainly. And you know he did not have Secret Service protection or didn’t you know that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t know when that began for ex-Presidents." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "He did not have Secret Service protection. He had a Kansas City detective who sat in the library most days and my bicycle was stolen out from under the nose of the Kansas City detective. [Chuckling] Which really upset the Independence, err, the Independence detective rather, it really upset the Independence Police Department." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "If I was Harry Truman I might be a little worried myself." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Truman walked some days. And he liked to get there early because he liked to read the hate mail before his secretary censored it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "[Laughing] So Truman was everything that you thought he was when you first met him? Like your impressions of him before you even met him?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Oh, I didn’t have much of an impression before I met him. He used to, once every week or two, he’d have the guards round up everybody in the museum and run them into the auditorium they had and he'd answer questions from school kids. And he’d tell them, he wanted questions from the children, not from the adults. And he was very good at answering the children and if an adult asked him a question he was nasty." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Interesting. He’s just a character—" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "But this is 52 years ago. Anyway … going into August sometime Dr. Brooks told me that he couldn’t keep me. That he was losing a position. And I could make a choice. They were going to take care of me. I could make a choice of whether I wanted to go to Hoover, Eisenhower, or Washington. And I picked Washington." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Why?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Oh, because I think I wanted to go to graduate school which I had thought about doing at the University of Kansas City which is now the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and it looked more doable in Washington than in either of the other two places." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So were you thinking at this time of furthering your education to work within the National Archives or were you thinking of leaving the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Within. By that time I was happy working for the Archives or GSA or whoever." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "One thing that sort of sticks with me is that you know I’d ask questions about things, the way things were done … that seemed a little odd to me and the answer from Brooks frequently was, well, he might do it differently but we did things the way that Herman Kahn had done them at the Roosevelt Library because he was, you know, the Truman Library was still relatively new and he was trying to follow the precedents from the Roosevelt Library." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And was what Kahn saying, was that counter to what you learned?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "No, not necessarily, it's just attitude, sort of, and I don't know—it's hard to put a finger on. It's been too long." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "And I think I mentioned somewhere but we can come back to it later if you want, Brooks’s son worked for me for a short time in the 70’s and he might be somebody worth interviewing. If he’s not on your list already." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes, you mentioned Brooks as one of the three people that you mentioned as being responsible for a lot of furthering the National Archives cause." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well, Brooks stayed with the Archives during the war. And he was one of the people, that’s probably a different conversation or a different part of the conversation, but he was probably one of the people who founded Records Management if you know what I mean." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay, very interesting. And from there you decided to go, can you talk a little bit about your move to DC?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well I came to DC I moved myself and I came to DC. We talked about what I did the first year in DC and I started at American University when I got here that fall." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What type of classes were you taking at American University?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I took public administration and political science classes. I applied both to the History Department and the School of Government and the History Department didn’t seem to want me and the School of Government and Public Administration did seem to want me." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Mm-hmm." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "And probably the History Chairman was sort of ho-hum and talking to the Dean of the School of Government and Public Administration and he wants me to sign up so I did. Mabel Dietrich I guess influenced me on that. She had gotten her PhD in Public Administration. From American University." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And at this time you also continued your day work at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What were some of your projects that you did there during this period?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well that was the Military, the first year that we talked about that. Then the second year when I was in Archival Projects Division and Civil Archives, Bert Rhoads was the Assistant Archivist and he had just gotten that job. And Frank Evans was the Division Director and … they had to … the way it was explained to me, they were realigning the staff and they had to move one position from Military to Civil and Evans had specifically asked for me because I had taken a class from Evans at American University. He taught there part time. Phil Ward was the Project Manager and we were preparing records to go to Suitland so that what was going to become the Archives Branch at the Washington National Records Center. Most of the records in question were in steel trays and had to be boxed. They were essentially unlabeled and poorly described. So we were trying to do a combination of boxing the records, preparing box lists, and drafting preliminary inventory entries. And I came up with a scheme. You know I said, I kept saying there’s got to be a better way of doing this. Phil Ward who was the Senior Archivist on it said, well, go talk to Records Management. He gave me the name of, I think it was Artel Ricks at the time who was high up in Records Management. He said, I think it was Artel he told me to go to. He said go talk to them. So I went and did that. And they basically sent me a bunch of literature on things that could be done to at least semi-automate the process. So I came up with a scheme for using a paper tape automated typewriter to prepare box labels and lists at the same time and I think I got a $50 cash award for the suggestion which wasn’t much but it did bring me to the attention of Walt Robertson." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So you at this time were thinking it seems like a theme that I’ve noticed over the last few years or your career here that we've been going over, a theme of trying to look ahead and look at the big picture so to speak." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yeah, I think so. But during that year I also took the Civil Service Commissions Management Intern Exam and passed. And so every agency was selecting people from that exam and GSA had a couple dozen slots so I ended up with one of the GSA slots. Although I think I had an offer from some other agency, too. And that was a 2-year program but the last part of it was back at the Archives. I rotated around GSA. I, oh, I don’t remember all the assignments. One that was kind of interesting was in what used to be the Utilization and Disposal Service and then the Property Management and Disposal Service or something, I don't know what they call it now, but they had me track down the ownership of lead and zinc companies because they had a national stockpile of lead and zinc they were trying to sell and they wanted more information about the lead and zinc industry. So basically a research assignment." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "That was the assignment. What were some of the training programs that you had within those two years?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Oh. Oh there was some compute stuff. And I think there was some basic personnel stuff. And I forget what all." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So was there any thought among management at this time of thinking about how to bring the National Archives into the present in the sense of possibly, you know, creating more organization and things like that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "You’re a little too early for that." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I think it was during the AHA meeting in 1965, right after Wayne Grover retired as Archivist that he made a speech about how the Archives should get out of GSA. And that started an independence movement that ran from ‘65 to ‘67 or so. I don't remember. I don't know who else you can ask about that but. There was an effort to get the Archives out of GSA during the period right after Grover retired while Bahmer was Archivist. Grover had enlisted Ladybird Johnson’s support. Bahmer was all for it to begin with but I think Bahmer cooled on it near the end because it became clear that if the Archives wanted out of GSA it would have to give up the Records Management Program and he thought that would be a fatal mistake." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So why would that be so? Why would you have to give up the Records Management?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Because that was the way political wins were born. And the Bureau of the Budget finally wrote a recommendation to the White House that said leave them in GSA but give them more money. That Bureau of the Budget report was written by the Deputy Director of the Bureau of the Budget Sam Hughes or Phillip Best Hughes and he becomes important in the later independence movement because later on he said that he was sorry he had done that and he should have gotten us out then. We’ll come back to that at independence time. But anyway. Because of that pretty much, well two things happened. As part of staying in GSA and getting more resources and Bahmer stopping the fight and as part of a separate effort within GSA to somewhat decentralize the very highly centralized administrative processes, two things happened, not exactly at the same time but within a year of each other, I think it was. And as a result some of the centralized stuff got decentralized. For example the person who handled the budget in GSA’s Budget Office was sent to the Archives. You know the services, there was a Budget Branch for each service in the Central Budget Office. And they were sent to the services about that time. If you understand what I’m saying." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "So the Archives got some budgeting and planning and internal records management and other authorities that had previously been completely centralized in the GSA Building." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So this is part of the idea of throwing more money at the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well it was at the same time but it wasn't part of the same idea." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Because there were changes going on in the rest of the GSA, too." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So that’s the origins of us leaving GSA." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "That was the first effort—the failed effort." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And then in 1968 to ‘74 you became a Senior Program Analyst." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well first I was that and then I was Chief of the Planning and Analysis Branch. When the budget people came they made the Budget Branch and the Planning and Analysis Branch. And the budget guy that came from GSA was the Budget Branch and I was the Planning and Analysis Branch. Then he became the Division Director, the budget guy. John Awkward who had been the Archives budget person at GSA and who had been in government since 1939 or something. He was the other best boss I had of two best bosses. Awkward had been with the government since before World War II. He’d never taken a day of sick leave. He had a heart attack about 1973 and he was out for almost 2 years and did it all on sick leave." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Wow. They don’t make them like that anymore. [Chuckling]" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "But then he retired and he had a heart attack and died." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So during this period of Robertson, Williams and Awkward, you have the—" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Interposing] Well you sent me the memo that Robertson wrote in December ‘67—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "[Interposing] Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "—that even though I was reassigned on paper I stayed in the Publication and Sales Branch on a day to day basis until probably March of '68 because that was when they finally found a replacement who was Betty Hill. And I don’t know if I mentioned Howard Greenberg or you want to get into that at all but my assistant in the Publication and Sales was Rose Greenberg. And her husband Howard had been Commissioner of the Utilization and Disposal Service in GSA. And LBJ appointed him Administrator of Small Business. And LBJ tended to appoint careerists to agency head positions unlike virtually every other President. So he took Howard Greenberg out of GSA and he made him Administrator of Small Business. Lawson Knott who was Administrator of GSA had been Commissioner of the Public Building Service and had worked his way up. And I think that LBJ did that in other agencies, too. He basically promoted or reassigned career employees. Anyway once I got to work for Robertson and Williams was my immediate supervisor, before Awkward, as part of the “give them more money” I did the study that resulted in the Regional Archives and another study that resulted in spending a lot of money on preservation including basically redoing the Paper Preservation Lab and drastically expanding the reproduction of microfilm and motion pictures and some recordings." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And we can reference here the material that you had from your file, “Microfilm Publics and Archival Records a Cost Effective Study.”" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes. And there was a similar study on preservation but I don’t remember the title or have a copy of it. The preservation one, the preservation one is interesting because you opened the cover and we had a picture of nitrate film exploding. And that’s what they sent up on the Hill with their budget request is this picture of nitrate film exploding and why we needed money to copy it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So the goal was to get more money from Congress, that's what this report really was aiming at?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And that was to do more microfilm or was it part of the regional push for Regional Archives—" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Interposing] Well the whole package was the regions and microfilm and copying movies and sound recordings. And it was not successful." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So what was your idea? What was your push for having Regional Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well Bahmer, the Seventh Annual Report basically suggests the idea. And Bahmer wanted it done on his way out the door. And Herb Angel because—when Bahmer retired, Rhoads became Archivist. Herb Angel became Deputy Archivist. And Herb Angel was the one who wrote this other thing, “The Report of the Archivist.” So it was sort of put to me as carrying out this vision that they’d had for decades and never been able to do …" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Is one of the reasons why to develop a Regional Archives is because there’s permanent records in the field?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yeah. Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Is it also because of the availability of microfilm in other regions and not having to go to DC to actually view the—" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Interposing] Yes. Yes yes, and yes, and also to build a presence in the rest of the country. Build a constituency. And I think that’s the notion that's sort of gotten lost. We can come to that later if you want. You need to read the Manifesto for that." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And, okay. And the Manifesto, I will track it down and it will be part of your folder. But the question I think I’ll just ask right now, do you feel that that was a success in your term up until you left in ‘98? The Regional Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Thoughtful pause] Well let’s put it this way as an answer to that question. I don’t think I accomplished everything with the Regional Archives that I envisioned them doing. And I don’t think some of what I accomplished has endured." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Would you like to speak about that now? About what your vision for that or would you like?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "No, let’s go through your questions and come back to that." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. Let’s proceed through the ‘68 to ‘74 Senior Program Analyst." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "So one of the things I did there was write the...it was only a year and a half or two years after the Freedom of Information Act was originally passed. And so I drafted the regulations. We didn’t have any lawyers. You know we weren’t allowed to have lawyers. Bert Rhoads had written a memo to GSA about what the Archives thought should be open and not open which was probably more open than the Archives’ current philosophy is. I worked with Julius Silverstein who was the GSA lawyer assigned to us on drafting regulations. And I think both Julius and Bert were more open than the current management is but I can’t tell you that for sure because I’ve been gone for too many years." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Was this post-Watergate or is this pre-Watergate?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Pre-Watergate. 1968." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So the Freedom of Information Act was before we realized that there may be an actual real need for it out of Watergate, right? Well what do you think was the impetus for implementing regulations?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well the bill was passed and every agency was required to draft regulations. The bill was passed in ‘66. The Justice Department required agencies to write implementing regulations. GSA wrote the set of implementing regulations that basically applied to the rest of GSA but they recognized that the Archives was different. It's just like back in … back in the very earliest days of GSA and somewhere around RG 64 you can find this exchange. GSA sent out a directive that all Congressional communications had to be handled through GSA’s Office of, whatever, Congressional Affairs or whatever. And nobody was allowed to talk to Congress. And Grover sent the Administrator a letter saying surely these kinds of things can be an exception with a list of, you know, samples of reference letters and stuff to Congress. The Administrator wrote back something like, yes indeed, thank you. But you know we weren't in the GSA Building. We were in a different building. The rest of GSA was centralized in one building. We’re in a different building. And GSA would have come up with all these rules and regulations and stuff that didn’t work very well either because of the physical separation or because of the nature of what the Archives did which was Grover’s idea for independence in the first place and the later argument for the successful independence." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yeah it seems like over the last few years of your career that we’re going through here, is simply that is a common theme of GSA being more of a hindrance than an help and it seemed to kind of get the ball rolling into eventual independence." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "So I did the FOIA and then I’d done the regional study. And then a bunch of organizational decisions were made basically at the beginning of ‘69 I think. Lawson Knott quit as Administrator after the election I think it was. After the ‘68 election. Among the last things he did was approve the reorganizations to set up the Regional Archives. And the reorganization to cut the number of NARS Regional Commissioners from 10 to 5. The way it was told to me, I'm not sure it's 100% accurate, but what Robertson told me was that they had a conference call, Knott's last act was a conference call where he told the heads of the various GSA Services that he was leaving and by the way he'd cut the number of NARS regions in half and you can ask the Archivist which …" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So can you explain that further? Because I think our audience may not understand the actual setup of the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "There was a National Archives Regional Commissioner in each of the 10 GSA Regions. And the Regional Commissioner worked for the GSA Regional Administrator. And under the Regional Commissioner there was a Records Management Division and one or more Record Centers. But they worked for the GSA Regional Administrator, not for the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And so what Knott did was he cut it down from 1 in each region to 5 overall." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Right. But he also approved setting up an Archives Branch in each Record Center." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So his thought process was to cut from 10 to 5 but expand on regions. Is that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well … [Chuckling]. Bert Rhoads’s plan was to cut from 10 to 5 and he got Knott to approve it. Exactly why he wanted to go from 10 to 5, I don't know, but I know … I think that they wanted to be rid of a couple of them for reasons that I don’t fully understand. I guess I shouldn’t say because I don’t really know for a fact." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Can you recall where those 10 regions were?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Boston was combined with New York. Let’s see. Seattle was combined with San Francisco. But Paul Cole in Seattle was supposed to go to San Francisco and elected to retire rather than go. Chicago and Kansas City were combined. Let’s see. We had New York, Chicago, Kansas City, Fort Worth remained. I think Denver and Fort Worth were combined. We ended up with San Francisco, Fort Worth, New York, Atlanta, and Kansas City." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And in these regions were Federal Record Centers and Record Management personnel?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well what … restate that." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I’m trying to get an idea of what, of the National Archives, what presence we actually had in each one of these 5 regions." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Okay, so take the Kansas City Region and you end up with Joe Bosco is the NARS Regional Commissioner in Kansas City. And under him was a Records Management Division in Kansas City and a Records Management Division in Chicago, a Records Center in Chicago, and a Records Center in Kansas City. And by that time I think we had taken the St. Louis away from GSA and transferred it to the Central Office so it was about that time. I forget exactly when that happened. You probably need to find out if you don’t know, check on when the National Personnel Records Center was transferred from the Region to the Central Office because I don’t remember. You're asking me about stuff that’s 50 years ago. [Laughing]." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Well I think you have a better idea of it than I do [Laughing]. [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yeah, but I don’t have access to the records or to anybody to go to research on records for me. And it’s been 40-some years since I’ve been in RG 64, so." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Well you’re doing pretty good. Thank you. I appreciate it." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "So it was still continuing during the ‘68 to ‘74 time period, that’s when _Prologue_ began and the National Audiovisual Center began. And I did or supervised most of the work to set up the formal organizations for those and worked with the budget people on the budget requests. And that’s when we recombined the Office of the National Archives, then Military and Civil. I don’t know if you know about the split of the Office of the National Archives back in the 60’s before my time." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Well what happened there?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well. There was an Office of the National Archives and Schellenberg was the Assistant Archivist. And I think … this is sort of hearsay now. But I think they wanted to ruin Schellenberg because I think Schellenberg had tried to replace Grover. Now there's some politics there that I was never fully aware of. There’s probably something in other oral history, older oral history that might talk about this. But about the time that happened … probably … ‘61 maybe, somewhere in there, I think the GSA Inspector General did a very critical report on description in the National Archives and said that they were not meeting the goals that they claimed to want for description. And so what was the Office of the National Archives was split into three pieces: an Office of Civil Archives under Herman Kahn to begin with and later Bert Rhoads; an Office of Military Archives under Sherrod East; and then an Office of Records Appraisals under Schellenberg. And Schellenberg got the Appraisal function and Military and Civil ended up with a reference—each with a Reference Division and a Projects Division. A Projects Division to do arrangement and description and the Reference Division to answer the mail and stuff." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Thank you very interesting. I didn’t know that." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Hmm. Well you or Jessie or somebody ought to get into that but that’s beyond the scope of this, I think, unless you want to come back to it another—see that split happened before my time." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Well it gives a good context of what we’re facing with now, here in ‘68 to ‘74—still trying to deal with this." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well, well yeah, we’re—see I never really liked it but I don’t like a lot of stuff so. [Chuckling]. I was never really happy with the Reference Projects Division either but … And I was never happy with the machine-readable records the way it was set up. Anyway, during this whole time period I probably went through most of 1964. Looking at the history of records management and the history of the Trust Fund and related legislation. And that’s either a later call or something. Because I probably can give you some kind of an overview of how the Records Management Program came to be." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I would like to do that. Would that be something you’d want to do now or you would want to possibly revisit at another time?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "No, let’s continue the main line of your questions and you can write that down as something else to get into." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. And you also mentioned it on the last part of your questions, in question number 20 as something you wanted to revisit." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Okay. During this time period the Privacy Act was passed. And the original bill for the Privacy Act would have killed us. And so Claudine Weiher who was my assistant at the time and who was the second person to replace me in the Publication Sales Branch, Claudine ran a sort of sub-rosa lobbying effort to get out from under the Privacy Act. Because, for example, the Privacy Act as originally drafted required separate notices to the subject of every record about being in that record without any conditions or restrictions. And we concluded that to comply with that bill, we would have to send out I don’t know how many thousand letters to George Washington in Mount Vernon, Virginia. Separate letters. Do you like that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes. I do, that’s quite interesting." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "And remember this is before computers and before reasonable computers, before GSA allowed anybody other than GSA’s Centralized Services to have computers. So we figured that as a minimum if we could just send a postcard to people saying we had a record about them, we’d have to hire 200 and some typists to work for two years to do it, just to type addresses on form postcards. So Claudine got on the phone and lobbied a lot of people and we had a lot of support from the genealogical community and the AHA was probably more harmful than helpful on that. AHA wrote a letter to Congress that went on for pages and pages and pages of oh, hemming and hawing and, well maybe this is a good thing. But nothing to help us. It’s one of the things that turned me against the AHA. Then Nancy Allard who was also on my staff then wrote the implementing regulations after the Privacy Act was passed with the exceptions we had. Then Claudine did the study that led to the NARS A-1 system which she was working for me. Or the proposal for the NARS A-1 system. And during that time I was probably the main liaison with GSA on legal issues and internal records management activities and planning activities. So I had more contact with GSA than almost anybody except the very top management and the budget people. Remember we didn't have a lawyer. We weren’t allowed to have a lawyer. So I was the one who dealt with the lawyers on a routine basis. If it was a high policy matter than Robertson or Rhoads or Angel did it but on the routine day to day stuff I did it. Do you want to get into exactly what NARS A-1 system is or would you rather do that in ‘74 to ‘79?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Let’s do that more later in the next section." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. So did you want to mention anything about the record management activities here?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "We’d never done a real schedule of NARS records. You know? And we had a bunch of stuff at RG 64 but there was no real schedule. There was no handbook or anything for records. In theory under the very highly centralized GSA scheme that should have been done by somebody over in the GSA office. That's something I inherited when GSA decentralized some of the administrative stuff. So … I ended up with somebody who was supposed to do that and under my supervision and he, that didn’t work out very well. I finally, you know, we got started but getting the routine day to day stuff written and stuff wasn’t working very well and so I worked out a deal with, I think it was Jack L. Martin, who was the GSA Records Officer to send a guy over to GSA to do it under their supervision. And he ended up staying there." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So at this point the National Archives didn’t want a records schedule." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Were GSA requiring all agencies at this time to have a records schedule?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yet it failed to have one for the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well most of the rest of GSA didn’t have one either. And I gather, I’m not sure, but I rather gathered that the Records Management Office, you know, which was Ed Aldridge at the time I guess, was critical of the main part of the agency for not having a schedule. What Robertson had, a 3-drawer file cabinet next to his desk or on the wall by his desk. And on it he had a stack, probably 3 feet high, of file folders with projects that he wanted done some day. That was one of them but once I started in that ‘68 to ‘74 period, every time I asked for more work or somebody was free, he’d pull another folder off the pile and say, well, here’s another project for you. Records management was one of them or record schedule was one. Improving the Forms Program was one." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So slowly but surely Record Management was getting or closing into the National Archives at some point." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "You know and in some ways the Archives never really had a good Records Management Program until Ren Cahoon who put Richard Marcus on it which was much later." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I’ll mention that when I do my interview with Richard Marcus who is still around." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "He was one of the good guys." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yeah, he is. He’s a really good man. So this, well, yeah, in 1974 to 1979, just for pacing’s sake, John, how about if it’s okay with you, we're going to be coming up at 2:30 to an hour here. I mean do you want to continue on to the end or would you rather break it up at some point and maybe schedule another time to finish the second half of this?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well let’s just go through ‘74 to ‘79 and then see where we stand." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. We can do that. Let’s talk about the coordination of the Staff Office of the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "New staff and … oh, there were a couple of reasons. One, they were getting flack again over not having records described and NARS A-1 was seen as a way of getting it done. Partly because I think I wanted out of the Office of what was the new Office of the Executive Director because that’s about the time Walt Robertson was going to retire and it was clear that Jack Landers was going to replace him and I didn’t want to work for Jack. Now I’m not sure I want that on the record. Is anybody interviewing Jack?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "No, I don’t know. I haven’t actually heard the name until you just mentioned it." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "John J. Landers, he was a GSA Management intern two years before I was. He ended up in the Archives. He became the Assistant Archivist before he became the Executive Director or Assistant Archivist head or whatever. When he was in that job Claudine Weiher was his assistant. When the Records Management was taken away from the Archives he went with the Records Management Program. That’s in the next ‘80-’81 period." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. And at this time between ‘74 and ‘79 he was going to be your supervisor and you decided against having him as a supervisor." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yeah. I told the Archivist that I would rather work in the Office of the National Archives than work for Jack." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. We don’t have to get into personalities on that one. Could you briefly just describe what NARS A-1 is?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well, what it ended up being was a way to automate the description of records and to draft descriptions of the records and put them into an online database, or, no, an electronic database. We weren’t allowed to have computers. Only GSA could have computers. But Claudine’s study came up with a proposal and GSA sort of approved it but it was pretty clear they weren’t going to implement it in any way that was going to work out for us. You know we were going to have to do punch cards or something and send them to the regional office building for somebody else to code and Alan Kownees who worked for me went and looked at equipment we could use for data input other than keypunch machines. If you understand what I’m saying. You know we had these automated paper tape typewriters that I had started with on the Suitland move. And there was clearly better technology by then. So Alan went and started, who was working for me, started investigating better technology for data input that we could send to GSA, in theory. He came up with a recommendation of equipment and I can’t think of the name of it now but maybe it’ll come back to me. But it was equipment with terminals that saved information to large disks. And did no processing. But the only difference between this company’s data input machine that we bought and a small limited but useful minicomputer was one $2,500 circuit board or $2,400 circuit board. And so we weren’t allowed to buy the circuit board." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So they didn’t want to spend the money to buy a circuit board so therefore you had to send everything into—" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Interposing] No, it wasn’t that they didn't want us to spend the money, we weren’t allowed to have computers. Only GSA, GSA Centralized Computer Services. They happened to be in the region at that time but GSA had centralized computer services, individual services were not allowed to have computers. You see why we didn’t like being in GSA. What would you think if they told you that you can save something to a disk but you can save the data on a spreadsheet to a disk but you can't sort it except by sending it to Washington and having somebody sort it for you and send you a printout back?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yeah, same thing." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "That’s sort of like copying, you know where we had centralize copying services at first and you had to fill out a chit and send stuff to the regional office building if you wanted it copied. And we got around that by having the trust fund by copying machines for reference." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yeah, these examples are good for when we talk about the moving away, independence from GSA." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "But anyway. Alan figured out that this and nobody paid much attention to the equipment that the Silent Studio bought for processing silent records and stuff so we had them buy the circuit card and put it in. So we were able to do description and do some processing of it that way. And started working on a lot of things including RG 21 and it was RG 21 I think that set off the blast between Trudy and me." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. And you’re referencing at correspondent email that would be in your folder." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Do you want to get into the pushing out by O’Neill, Reed, and Peterson of you after Rhoads and Dietrich retired?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well, let me talk a little more about leading up to that because during this time and probably I think it was ‘73 when the government changed fiscal years, they changed the beginning of the fiscal year there was what they called an interim quarter. And the way the budget worked out we had a lot of money, the agency had a lot of money for a quarter that it didn't know how to spend. And so Claudine and I came up with a plan for buying shelving to put in areas that had never had shelving and there were like 43 stack areas that were never shelved originally. That either had prison industry shelving in them or steel trays piled up on the floor or, you know, stuff every which way. So we bought that shelving, I think it was ‘73, it might have been ‘72. After Mabel Dietrich became the Assistant Archivist, in effect, became in effect, her Number Two. Al Eisinger was reassigned. He’d been the Deputy Assistant Archivist under Ned Campbell. When Mabel retired, Mabel had retired about the same time Bert Rhoads retired. And O’Neill l took over as Acting Archivist and Dan Reed came out of retirement, he was a pre-employed annuitant, to replace Mabel. And Trudy, he wanted Trudy as his right hand. So I was invited to leave." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Do you want to get into...I’ll just say that you say whatever you feel comfortable saying about this incident if there's anything more you’d like to tell me." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I don’t think O'Neill or Reed had the confidence in me that Rhoads and Dietrich had. And it was clear that they did not want me to stay in that position." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Was it personal or professional? The things that you think it was based on." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "You’d have to ask them. I don’t know if anybody’s interviewed Trudy." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "No, she’s on my list though." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "O’Neill's dead, I don’t know what the status of Reed is. He’s probably dead ‘cause he was a lot older. I don’t think Trudy and I were ever really friends. So you’d have to ask Trudy why she thinks I left. But the way it played out is Forrest Williams who had been my boss part of the time in the Office of the Executive Director, and who was one of the worst bosses I ever had, came in and suggested to me that I might be happier in the Office of Records Management. And I went and told Reed that and he and Trudy sat down with me and said if, if Williams made you an offer you'd better take it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "How did you feel about the move personally?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I was very unhappy. But I didn't see that I could object or fight it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Did you at that time have a feeling that maybe Record Management would be a strength of yours which eventually it became?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I was under the impression at the time that Frosty was just—Frosty wasn’t—everybody called him Frosty was destroying the Office of Records Management. Like I said, I didn’t want to go, I didn’t see as I had much choice. I … seriously looked at other employment at the time. But it didn’t work out." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And you felt that that was kind of like an exile for you into Record Management?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes. And I don’t think the position and division they put me in were even necessary." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Is there anything else you’d like to say about this moment of you being pushed out of that position?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Thoughtful pause]. No, but backing up a little to that time from ‘74 to ‘79 I supervised Charles Halt who was then the Regional Archives Coordinator. And one of the things we did during that period was dramatically increase the size of the Regional Archives staff. I sort of skipped over that. Roots came out during that time and the workload increased several fold. You know the reference workload." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "And we dramatically increased the Regional Archive staff and if you’d asked me 15 years ago I probably could have given you numbers but I don’t remember now. But when I left the Office of the National Archives, the staff in the Regional Archives Program was probably close to twice the size it was when I went back into the Regional Archives Program five years later. So during the time I was not involved in the Regional Archives Program, it got cut dramatically." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And do you think that _Roots_ in some ways helped to fortify the Regional Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "In an interview from somebody that had given an interview in the past two years, his name is David Kepley, he had mentioned that _Roots_ had helped to increase the amount of traffic through the National Archives by at least tenfold. ]" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "That’s probably about right. I could have given you numbers, like I said, if I remembered them years ago but … it was almost overnight. And it was both in Washington and in all the regions. You interviewed David’s wife?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "No, I haven’t. And you recommend she be interviewed?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well I … yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I know she’s on my list but I’ll make sure I get in contact with her. Do you think at this point revisiting some of the Regional Archives work that you did during this period, do you think that there were forces within the National Archives that were working against the Regional Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Why would you think that that would be the case?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well there were some people who didn’t believe in the Regional Archives at all. And some people who thought we shouldn’t be sending records to the regions but we ought to be keeping them all in Washington. And people that were of the opinion that the only thing they have worthwhile is microfilm and that’s not professional so you don’t, you know, you’re just a reading room. I was getting a lot of description work out of the regions in terms of NARS A-1. You know input for NARS A-1 inventories, but they were routine stuff, repetitive stuff. Like in RG 21 where everybody has the same kind of records but they were turning out a lot of stuff. Most of which got trashed eventually. When NARS A-1 got trashed." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So you think that the regions were actually collecting lots of regional permanent records?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well they weren’t getting as many permanent records, the big fight was over sending records from Washington to the regions. And there were space problems. You know this is before Archives II, this is before Archives II was really even much of a dream. And it was clear that if we didn’t get another building in Washington more things had to go to the regions because there just wasn’t room in Washington in the National Archives Building. At one point we moved records to the Lansburgh Department Store but that didn’t work out very well." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "That was in downtown DC?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Was a part of it, I gather, a big part of it was financial." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes. And there was talk even in the 70’s about another building and where to put another building and the dream at one time was to build across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Archives. Basically in the block where the Navy Memorial and stuff is between 7 th and 9 th and between D Street and say F Street. Apparently there had been talk back in the 50’s or 60’s about building on the other side of Independence Avenue where the skating rink is. That was not doable from an engineering standpoint. So there was talk about building across Pennsylvania Avenue which would have been next door or across the street from the FBI Building. And from what the GSA people who worked on the FBI Building said that probably would have been an engineering nightmare also. It was a water problem. The Archives Building is built on a creek. Did you know that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "No, I didn’t." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "It’s built on Tiber Creek. And in some ways it floats on a huge saucer. And one of the GSA people told me when they build the FBI Building, they had to get 5 floors built before they stopped pumping water out of the basement. You know there are sub basements and apparently it kept popping up or wanting to pop up because of the water table. And almost to the top floor before they had enough weight to hold it in without pumping water out. The Federal Triangle is basically a swamp." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "[Chuckling]. Nice to know." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well it’s been flooded, too. The fancy theater they built after I retired where the moat was and stuff that flooded after—you know I haven’t been in the building since it flooded but it flooded at some point." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "We can talk about the Regional Archives a little bit more here if you like before we either move onto the next one or maybe break for the day?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Let’s continue up until the time I came back from the Federal Executive Institute and then go onto the Regional Archives. So this at the end of the ‘79-’80 period. At that point the GSA decided that they took the Office of Records Management away from the Archives. So the Office of Records Management that had been part of what came out of the Federal Records Act, that’s another discussion I guess, but the Records Management Program was transferred out of the Archives to somewhere else in GSA. And Jack Landers became the Office head ‘cause Forrest Williams retired. At that time there was also a major RIF and I think 17% of the Archives staff got cut. And they tried to get rid of me." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "May I ask who they are?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Maybe in another interview." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "All right. Don't say anything that you don’t—" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Interposing] Well I still have Claudine Weiher’s knives in my back." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "[Chuckling]" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "You know I … I don't want to talk about that now, maybe in a later call." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "But anyway I got a RIF letter and they concluded that I was not qualified to bump anybody in the program analysis, management analyst, or archivist series. So they were going to send me either out on the street or somewhere else in GSA. Because they had reassigned me to be the Deputy Assistant Archivist for Records Management without telling me. I only found that out when somebody in Personnel snuck me the paperwork. And then they abolished that job after they put me in it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So that was done, in your opinion, purposely." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes. And it turns out or it turned out that I had more friends in the Administrator's Office than the Archivist or Claudine." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So can you say who saved your job?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Jerry Fox. Jerry Fox was an Assistant to the Administrator or Assistant to the Deputy Administrator. And two people on his immediate staff at the time where John Hawsell who had worked for me in the ‘74 to ‘79 period and later became the Chief of the Archives Budget Branch but he was in GSA by then. And Peggy Neustadt or Margaret Neustadt. I guess she’s been a GSA Management Intern but she spent half a year working for me. They took my case to Jerry Fox who was on the Administrator’s staff and I’m not sure what happened but Claudine called me and said, okay, they were going to take care of me and don’t think Jerry Fox told her what to do. [Laughing]. And I said oh? [Laughter] So they assigned me to Special Assistant or Executive Assistant to the Assistant Archivist for the National Archives and gave me a desk and a secretary without a telephone. 15W1 I think it was. And I sat there probably for a year and a half until they sent me to the Federal Executive Institute. When I came back from the Federal Executive Institute I guess the view of my value had changed. I ended up in Room 100 where the Assistant Archivist for the National Archives had the 100 Suite, and 100 and I think the Assistant Archivist was in the other room. But then when I came back from Charlottesville on the 9 th Street side, there was a partition. I don’t know if there still is. Dick Jacobs was on one side of it and they put me on the other side of it. Dick was starting to work on independence stuff. And so Dick kept giving me stuff to do and then we can quit there and I’ll talk about independence later." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. And that takes us up to 1980." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "That takes us up to about 1982, spring of 1982." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. So would you like to begin there?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Probably mid April or a little later. I think my son’s birthday was when I was in Charlottesville. So probably late April, early May 1982. Now you want to talk more about the regions before we quit and come back to independence next time?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Sure. We’ll begin in spring of 1982 the next time and we’ll talk about the regions at this point." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Okay. What do you want to know about the regions? [Laughing]." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What I want to know is it began in 1969, and that was born out of exactly what documents? Did you help to create? And what were the reasons for the Regional Archives in ‘69? Can you take us up to maybe the funding in the regions and its importance?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Like I said I think you can find the idea for the Regional Archives Program on page 6 of the Seventh Annual Report of the Archivist." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. And that is in the records as John’s told me." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yeah. Well that’s one of the things I told you to get." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "And I don’t have a copy of that on my screen in front of me so." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Well, what they said in that document just for the record was that records in the regions were worth as much as the records in DC so it gave an importance to the regions as having records, as many records as in the DC area." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "The one thing that I didn’t talk about and I don’t know a whole lot about, the WPA Historical Records Survey had its offices in the National Archives Building during the Depression. And so the people that were running the Archives in 1939 to the beginning of the war period were probably pretty familiar with what records were scattered around the country that ought to be kept permanently either in the National Archives or somewhere else." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So I’m assuming that those WPA Records stayed in that building when they left." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I don't know. I never got into the WPA Records really. But you know when I was in RG64 I kept finding references to it. But you know it’s probably been 43 years since I went through RG 64, so. Maybe you should have done this 25 years ago [Laughing]. Anyway, the issue came up from time to time in the records after that. And I think the original setup of the Records Centers long before my time in the 50’s, I think the original people in the Records Centers were archive oriented in some ways than the later ones. For example the first Records Center head in San Francisco was Philip Brooks who had been in the Archives from the beginning and then after he left San Francisco he went to Independence to be the Truman Library head. And his father got a Congressman, he’d been his father’s secretary when his father was a Congressman." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So what you’re saying is the Federal Records Centers had a basis in archival studies." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Some of them at least. Well but the whole Records Management Program was that way because the Records Management Program as it really got started was Herb Angel in charge and Ed Aldridge was his Deputy. Both of them had worked for the Archives before World War II and both of them were involved in the Navy Records Program during the war. And Grover and Bahmer were involved in the Army Records Program during the war. Sherrod East, who was my Assistant Archivist when I was in Military Archives, had been one of the equivalents of the Museum on the records side. You know, I went around trying to find the records at the end of the war." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So they’re all based in archival—" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Interposing] Yeah, and he had worked at the Archives before the war. So the Military Records Management Programs during the war were pretty much founded and run by people from the National Archives many of whom came back to the National Archives after the war. But there was Brooks or somebody drafted a bill in the mid 40’s that was very similar to what became the Federal Records Act of 1950. That’s a different conversation though I guess. Getting back to the regions. The kinds of people that were running the Records Management Program at the beginning had a foundation in the Archives and an understanding of you know that they’re permanent records in the Archives. You know? Now that never got translated into an organization or any formal accessioning or anything until I did the study in ‘68 and ‘69. There was an understanding that there were probably what should be archives in the Records Centers all along." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And that was a basic understanding. You know I’m sure that there were those that disagreed with that." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yeah, but that’s pretty much during the time period before my time so, you know … I don't know." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "When the regions were created and ‘69 was upon us and what was the decision of each of the regional facilities. Why in Boston or why in Fort Worth or why in Atlanta?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well, the plan was to put one in each Records Center. Or each of the regular Regional Federal Records Centers. Not St. Louis but not Suitland but Suitland already had an Archives Branch. But one in each Regional Records Center and Dan Goggin was going to be the Coordinator in the Central Office and these people were going to be Branch Chiefs within the Records Centers so there would be an Accession and Disposal Branch Chief in the Records Center and a Reference Branch Chief and an Archives Branch Chief in each Records Center. And at the time they worked for the Center Director who worked for the Regional Commissioner who worked for the Regional Administrator. They were supposed to get technical advice or supervision from Dan Goggin who was the first Regional Archives Coordinator who went onto something else and was replaced by Charles South but the time I became responsible for it again in 1974." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "But was there a Record Management present in all of these regional facilities?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Each region had a Records Management Division. Only in a couple of cases were they located in the same building as the Records Center. In San Francisco, for example, there was a Regional Commissioner, downtown San Francisco; and a Records Management Division that sat in the same suite of offices; but the Records Center in San Rio was physically separate. And that was the same situation in almost all the regions. I think Seattle may have had the Records Management Division in the Records Center at one time." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And did Records Management work with Archives? And vice versa?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Generally no." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. Because it would seem a natural fit to work with one another to secure records into the Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "The Records Management Divisions basically were going and encouraging … well that’s hard to say. The only direct contact I had with Regional Records Management people was the 1979-80 period when all they were doing was management consulting work in effect. And not much of the kind of training they had done previously." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Do you think that there was any animosity between the Archives moving in in ‘69 and the Federal Records Centers?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Thoughtful pause]. I need to think about that. Yeah, that was during a period when I had contact with the Regional Commissioners more than the Center Directors. Because one of the things I did in that time period from ‘68 to ‘74 was whenever they’d have a meeting of the Regional Commissioners, you know when the Archives would get the Regional Commissioners together for a meeting, I would be the sort of the staff secretary. And so I dealt with the Regional Commissioners but I didn’t really deal with the Center Directors." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. Where were the differences between a Center Director, that would be the Federal Records Center Director, and what would be considered a Regional Administrator types for the regions?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "There was a NARS Regional Commissioner. And then there was a Records Management Division and a Federal Records Center. And in most cases there wasn’t a whole lot of contact, I don’t think, between the Records Management Divisions and the Records Centers but I couldn’t swear to that." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I know in one of the interviews I had done in the interview I had done with Jim Owens he said that he didn’t have contact with the Record Management staff and there were three individuals, and they were located within Boston per se so kind of—" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Interposing] Well Jim would know better how that worked on a day to day basis than I would. And you ought to find, if you can track down some of his colleagues, it would be interesting to see what they told you. Have you talked to any of the other former Regional Archives people?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "No, they were recently identified with the photographs that Jim had given me and your input and some other individuals in the National Archives. I’ve identified some of them. Some of them I know I’m going—" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Interposing] Well let me go down some of them real quick." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Sure." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Starting in Boston there was Jim Owens. New York was Joel Buchwald who was an absolute loser followed by Bob Morris and they’re both dead and I don’t know who came after Morris. Philadelphia was Bob Plowman and he may still be around and he might be a good person to talk to but Philadelphia was not typical. Atlanta there was Ed Weldon was the first Regional Archive head, he later became the Deputy Archivist. He was followed by Gail Peters and they both would be good people for you to interview if they’re still available. Chicago was Peter Bunce and he’d be another good one to talk to. Kansas City was Reed Whitaker and that’s another knife sticking out of my back but I don’t know if you want to put that in the record. But Reed was pretty savvy. Reed, I thought Reed was my friend but he wasn’t. He would be a good person to talk to. He might have a better view of the whole picture than Jim would have. Fort Worth, Kent Carter and Meg probably could tell you how to get a hold of him. In Denver, Bob Svenningsen was the first Regional Archives guy and he later became the Center Director. And … San Francisco, Joann Williamson who later came to Washington. You know I’m trying to think of people who were there during the GSA years as opposed to the more recent period. Seattle, Phil Lothyan. I mean if she’s still available Sue Karren, if she’s still there, could probably tell you how to find Phil." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Sue Karren is still here, yep." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "So Sue Karren I think is the last Regional Archives person I had physical contact with and that was probably a dozen years ago. I was in Seattle visiting a cousin who was doing genealogical research and was afraid to go to the Archives’'cause she didn’t know what to do so I called up Sue and took her over and introduced her and gave her a tour." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "[Chuckling]." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "But that’s the last Regional Archive facility I was in and like I said it’s probably been a dozen years. Except I was in St. Louis last year but …" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "[Interposing] And Alaska wasn't in Archives back then?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "No. Alaska 1990." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "1990. Okay. Okay. Is there anything you’d like to mention, John, before about the Regional Archives, I can’t think of anything else." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well I’ve got a lot more to say about it but let’s do that when we get to the second round in the Regional Archive before the ‘92 period." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. We’ll pick that up in the spring of 1982." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Now let me look at a couple of things and see if there’s … there were a couple of things I thought of but I didn’t write down." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Well we can revisit that too with our next interview." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Hmm. I'm trying to think of-do you have a quick list of who you’re talking to or shouldn’t I ask you that or?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I can send that to you." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "See if anybody occurs to me that you don’t have." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. I’ll get that list out to you, a list of both the people that we do have and the ones that I have on my wish list." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Okay, I was surprised to see the thing you sent me from Judy Koucky. I never had a whole lot of contact with her." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "There’s a lot of people actually in the National Archives that speak very highly of you. My colleague Marvin Kabakoff retired recently and I had done an oral history for him and he’d been around since I think somewhere in the 1970’s and Marvin said that he had limited dealings with you and knew a lot about you and it was all very positive." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well … I wish the management thought as kindly of me as some of the people did. Well I had a good relationship with limited time but good relationship with Bahmer when he was Archivist and with Bert Rhoads when he was Archivist. I don’t think O’Neill wanted to get rid of me. Bob Warner was very cool to me but warmed up at the end. Frank Burke—he was Acting for a while and then on opposite sides of numerous issues over the years but he treated me very well when he was Acting Archivist. Even though we’d been opposed to each other on a lot of things. Trudy and I were never friends." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Right. It seems like she had a different idea of the Regional Archives than you did." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Ah. I think Trudy and the Carlins and other people had a different idea. Right. If you can’t find the Manifesto then I’ll go into my philosophy on the Regional Archives at length but not until we do the second round." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. I know Meg was on vacation and she said she’s still looking for it but she didn’t know if she could find it." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well, if she doesn't have it, Sue might. I don’t know." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. I'll reach out to Sue again and see. By the way, I won't be because I won't be in DC but John Carlin and his wife will be coming in for an interview on July 13 at Archives I and I believe Jessie is going to be interviewing." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Did you see the citation I sent you for the _Washington_ _Post_ on December 19, 1997?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes. [Chuckling] Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Maybe we can cover this more, off the record. We had a big meeting on December 17, 1997." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "That was the Archivist and all the office heads and the budget people and Steve Hannestad and I facilitated it about what to do about reimbursable services for Records Centers especially with regard to the courts. And a lot of decisions got made in that meeting. But in the middle of that meeting Carlin got called out by his secretary and he came back and Lew went out, Lew Bellardo." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "And when they came back, the whole tone of the meeting just froze. And we later found out that what happened when they were called out was for the _Post_ reporter to tell them what she was going to write." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Interesting." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "But there had been a lot of gossip about the triangle for a long time. And all the people currently employed in the Archives, if you want somebody to tell you about that, Debra Wall is the person who knows ‘cause she was, I think, she was to some extent Lynn’s confidant." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I don't know how much of that wants to be on the record." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Laughing] Well I don’t think you want that one on the record." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Deb is a very much more effervescent and I think she has a much more positive outlook. I don’t know if she wants to get into that. [Laughing]. [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "That’s very funny. Yeah. Carlin gave me a list of people, Lew Bellardo was on there. Ren Cahoon. Tom Mayer and a few others that I should interview. Lew Bellardo hasn’t responded to three emails that I sent so I don’t know." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Is Michael Kurtz on your list?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "He had an interview, I believe, I didn’t do it but he was interviewed." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well, I told you Frosty Williams was probably my worst boss. I think probably like Kurtz is next to the worst." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Oh, really? Yeah. I hear good and bad things about Kurtz." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I think I also have a Kurtz knife in my back." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "You’ve got a lot of knives in your back." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Laughing]." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "But I don’t view that and this is just my opinion, I don’t view that as a bad thing. I mean it may have ended up being a bad thing that happened to you but I think it's kind of a badge of honor to be able to not be beloved by your superiors and be well liked by your peers. And I think that that’s pretty important." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well I think I had a management vision that differs from many of the people who’ve been my bosses over the years. And we can talk about that more when we talk about the second Archives period but I haven’t really paid any attention to the Archives or how it’s managed for the last decade because I don't think it’s going in the direction I think it should have." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Well there’s a big concern that the Regional Archives are being eliminated eventually. And it’s unfortunate but that seems to be how they’re viewing it and the people in the regions are worried about that. And why do I say that? Well it seems like outreach has dissipated at some of the regions to a point where they’re told not to perform any more outreach programs and things like that seem to be a big issue." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well, we need to talk about outreach on my watch then. And we also need to talk about genealogists." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Genealogists vote, historians don’t." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Very true. [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "If it weren’t for genealogists we’d still be in GSA." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Historians were little help. Genealogists were great help and the Archives has turned its back on the genealogical community. That’s the next conversation though probably." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Well, send me a list of names and chew over what I sent you a little bit and then let’s not set another time yet but wait a day or two." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. And I’ll correspond and get that information to you. All right, thank you John." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Okay, thank you." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "All right." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Bye-bye." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Bye-bye. [PART 1 END RECORDING] [PART 2 START RECORDING]" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "This is Jack Kabrel, K-A-B-R-E-L. Today is June 22, 2016, at 1 p.m. I am conducting an oral history interview with Mr. John M. Scroggins via over the phone audio recording. This is Part Two of a two-part interview for the National Archives and Records Administration History Office, Oral History Project. Thank you Mr. Scroggins for agreeing to a second part of this interview. The first one was extremely engaging and we only got about halfway through your career up until this moment here. Just to briefly go over what we had we started out from you being born in Minneapolis in 1942, working for the National Archives in the summer of ‘62, and working your way up through various positions of archivist, archives for the archival projects division, management intern for the GSA, Senior Program Analyst, now we are here in 1980, if you can follow along on our resume, as we've been doing very well following along on our timeline that you were so kind to give us. We’re looking at the 1980 to 1984 tumultuous era and we’re about at the spring of 1982 or so. My first question would be do you want to start us in from 1980 in that era that you felt was a tumultuous era for you?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Basically I’d been in exile for a couple of years, and then because they tried to riff me and failed and didn't have anything they wanted me to do. Then they sent me off to the Federal Executive Institute in, I think it was the spring of 1982. It was a PBS slot, but the administrator had made nasty comments about the Federal Executive Institute, from what I hear, and PBS had decided not to send anybody and it offered other services the slot and the Warner or Deputy Ed Weldon decided that was a good place to put me and get me out of the building for a few weeks. I was gone to Charlottesville for the Federal Executive Institute for seven weeks." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Can you tell me what PBS is and what the Federal Executive Institute is?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "PBS is the Public Building Service in GSA. The Federal Executive Institute is a training center for federal executives run by what was then the Civil Service Commission and is now the Office of Personnel Management. It's in Charlottesville, Virginia, and their programs have changed over the years, but at the time I was there they had a seven week residential program for 15s and SES people; in theory for SES people and 15s who were being considered for SES positions. I was a 15 and at that point I don’t think the archives was considering me for an SES position but they sent me." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Did you get anything out of your seven weeks there?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes, it was very interesting and it was helpful to me in a number of ways. One thing that was interesting is they put you in, at least at that time, they put you in seven student groups they called Executive Learning Teams and each group had an advisor. It turns out that my advisor was a very good friend and former classmate, I guess, of Bob Warner, who was then the archivist. One of my classmates who had the room next to me in the dormitory was the Town Clerk of Belfast, meaning city manager but his title was Town Clerk of Belfast, Northern Ireland because they took a foreign student or two for each class and I’ve stayed in touch with him ever since. A guy by the name of Cecil Ward who apparently was the Town Clerk for over 20 years and the Belfast City Administration Building is now named after him. Anyway, when I came back from Charlottesville, which probably would have been late April, early May 1982, they were just starting to work more on trying to get out of GSA. I wasn’t really given any assignment formally as such. I was still sitting there but I was sitting on the other side of a partition from Dick Jacobs who was very active on that so Dick started giving me stuff to do." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "When you came back from Charlotte you didn’t have any assignments whatsoever? Who was your supervisor?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I was still on paper an Executive Assistant to the Assistant Archivist for the National Archives which is what I’d been since they found out they couldn’t get rid of me. But before I went to Charlottesville I had been sitting in a stack area without a phone. You hear about people being put in closets ‘cause they can’t be fired or something. That was me. Anyway, I ended up in Room 100 on the other side of the partition from Dick and he started giving me things to don and I started doing stuff, and one thing led to another and I started getting assigned just odd jobs related to it. I spent a lot of time on the phone with John Parisi who was on the House Oversight Committee staff talking about language or bills or arguments for bills and the archivist set up a committee. I forget what it was called, but it was Trudy Peterson, Adrienne Thomas, Maygene Daniels, and me, to go around, and I think our charter was to explore alternative arrangements if we couldn’t get onto GSA, like what other agencies might have more independence from their mother agency than we had and to sell the idea that we wanted out. We asked who was in charge and we were told nobody was in charge, so it was the four of us as a committee to pretty much work out our own charter and do what we wanted to do. One of the places we went was to the Energy Information Administration and I don’t know what the story is with that now, but the Energy Information Administration was within the Department of Energy but had statutory independence in many ways that we did not have independence from GSA if you know what I mean or not, maybe you don’t." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes, I do." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "GSA had all the authority legally with a couple exceptions but the Energy Information Administration or the administrator had substantial statutory authority independent of the Secretary of Energy. Another place we went was to the Smithsonian where we had a long discussion with Phillip S. Hughes, Sam Hughes, who was then the Undersecretary of the Smithsonian. Hughes had been the official Deputy Director of the Bureau of the Budget who had written the Bureau of the Budget position paper about 1968 saying leave them in GSA, but give them more money, or something like that. Hughes admitted to us, and was willing to do so on the record, that he was probably wrong when he did that, and he supported independence now in the eighties. That was fairly significant because Hughes had all the contacts in the Public Administration community and I think he talked up the idea within the Public Administration community. I can’t remember all the things that happened at that time but one of the things I went to was a hearing that Glen English had. I'm going to go back to the group, that committee. You had Trudy and she doesn’t want to talk to you, you said. Adrienne Thomas, who later became Deputy Archivist—is Adrienne on your list?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "And Maygene Daniels?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Maygene left the Archives after that and went to the National Gallery of Art as an Archivist but at independence time her husband was the Staff Director for House Oversight Committee and officially recused himself from the thing, but anyway Maygene lived close to Trudy; I don't know if it was next door or in the same block, but she was Trudy’s neighbor. Maygene also graduated from college with one of my sisters." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Did this group that was formulated come out with a report?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes, there was a report and I don’t remember what it was called. It was probably in ‘83 but I don’t remember for sure." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "This report suggested up backing it up with information from Hughes from—" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Interposing] It had backup information and it talked about some possible alternatives I think. It’s been over 30 years." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "That’s my job to pull the information from you." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "You need to find somebody to go find the report." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "John **,** what was significant and how did the whole politics of independence work on Capitol Hill and who and what was significant and who are significant as far as getting that independence?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I don’t know how it all worked on Capitol Hill. Like I said, I talked a lot to John Parisi who is on the house staff who worked for Maygene Daniels' husband. I know Dick Jacobs did a lot of talking on the phone and doing the same kind of thing with senate staff but there are a lot of other people in the Archives talking to a lot of other politicians. I went to a hearing that was held by Glen English, who was Chairman of the Oversight Committee, and his wife was a personal friend of the librarian at the time. I don’t remember; the archives librarian at the time and I don't remember her name but I believe English’s wife was a personal friend of the librarian. But we had this hearing and English asked a lot of questions with some interesting answers like ‘you didn't get this budget request’ or ‘Mr. Archivist, you didn’t ask for more money. Well why didn’t you ask for more money.’ Because the administrator—first he asked the Administrator why didn’t you give the Archivist more money. This is sort of a paraphrase; and the Administrator said because the Archivist didn’t ask me for more money. Then he asked the archivist why didn't you ask him for more money; because he told me not to." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Circles." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Glen English called as a witness Jess Larson who had been English’s father’s or grandfather’s law partner. Jess Larson was the first Administrator of GSA. He said something to the effect that if he’d known how the GSA-Archives relationship was going to turn out he wouldn’t have accepted it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "That testimony right there I guess helped push towards independence?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes, but you should be able to find that testimony somewhere in the Congressional Records. I couldn’t give you a citation. Probably ‘83." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Then I guess it was the summer of ‘84 there was a lot of back and forth and maybe a couple of false starts and some fear that it wasn't going to pass. First we would be confident and then we weren't so confident but it did pass, I think in what, October of ‘84." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What did it mean when it passed?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Congress passed a bill to establish the National Archives and Records Administration to be effective, I guess, April 1, 1985. I couldn’t give you the bill number anymore or the title. We had a law that was passed, so what do we do now? About that time then probably at the beginning of November, but maybe not, I wrote a long memo to the Archivist that basically said do it now, and spelled out what I believed were the Administrator's authorities that could be delegated to the Archivist to effectively make the Archives independent. It could have been done all along but Administrators wouldn't do it. My argument was that now that it’s passed and going to be effective April 1 why don't you go ask them to do it now. I think the way that played out is Ray Kline who had been the Deputy Administrator was Acting Administrator and I think Ray Kline was sympathetic and when I went to Kline and came back with a delegation of authority to, in effect, operate independently as soon as he could work out the details." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "How did you come about this idea?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I’d been arguing that since early in the game. I said if we get it passed then we ought to just do it. I argued even back in the seventies that the Administrator could delegate more authority to the archivist; he just wouldn't do it. If the Administrator did not delegate a lot of authority to any part of GSA from the beginning." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Just so you can help our audience out, what’s the hierarchy of Administrator and Archivist? Who is the Administrator compared to the Archivist and how come he is able to put duties onto the Archivist?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Under the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949 that set up GSA, the Administrator got all the authority of his agency with a couple of exceptions that related to the Archives. He was authorized to delegate almost all of the authority he got under that law and administrators chose not to do so. The Archivist retained the authority to be Chairman of the Trust Fund Board, Chairman of the NHPRC, and part of the disposal authority. Other than that all the authority within GSA rested in the Administrator. The Administrator was authorized to delegate to people and chose not to do so, so therefore all of the central services were centralized. I talked before about how we didn’t have a lawyer because GSA insisted on retaining all the legal services. GSA had a centralized personnel department. One of the first things that happened after they reached agreement on the do it now memo was that we took over personnel from GSA because the Administrator delegated the personnel authority for NARS to the Archivist. Am I clear?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "No, that’s a great explanation. Thank you, John. Do it now had a lot of legs and you were able to get the Administrator to give more power to the Archivist." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Right. We got a lot of authority and more than we could use at the moment but we got the delegation, so we had a transition team that was set up to figure out how we’re going to manage the transition and I think maybe Claudine was the head of that, I forget for sure, but I was on it and I forget who all the members were. I was responsible for figuring out how to handle the field transition and part of personnel. In personnel GSA had had a fairly large personnel office in St. Louis since the GSA took over the record center in 1961 so there was a GSA personnel office in the St. Louis Record Center building that worked for the GSA Region Six personnel officer. It’s that St. Louis personnel office where I was sworn in in 1962. The people in St. Louis were very happy with that personnel office, NARA was probably 90% of their workload. They did some work for PBS or federal supply things in St. Louis but the record center in St. Louis accounted for 90% or more of their workload. Part of my argument was let’s just ask for the whole St. Louis personnel office, which we got. That's why we have a personnel office in St. Louis now." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Would you say that the transition was a rather smooth transition?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I think it went more smoothly than a lot of people expected. One of my responsibilities on the transition too was property inventory. We had to do an inventory of all of the property that we were transferring from whoever was the GSA property officer to whoever was going to be the NARA property officer. I came up with a scheme for bar coding all of the property and then scanning it to do the inventory." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "It seems like every time we speak that your knowledge of technology always seems to help whatever situation you’re in." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "That probably was true up until a few years ago. Anyway, we did the transition and it worked—I guess from my perspective it worked better than I would have thought but some people didn't think it worked quite as well but I think it worked out pretty well. Then at independence time before he retired, Warner handed out a bunch of awards to people that worked on independence. I guess that was the act that officially rehabilitated me. I got a $7,500 cash award for working on independence, which I believe was the smallest award of any of the people that worked on it. But it was a demonstration that I was back in management’s good graces and not banished to a closet." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Is that due to your work or is that also due to the fact that people change and administrations change and sometimes that also plays a role in somebody’s life?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I think probably more my work than administration’s changing. I think my going into the closet in the first place was more due to administrations changing and then Warner just accepting the status quo. I was in effect banished after Rhoads left while O’Neill was Acting Archivist. I was in the doghouse when Warner came in and I think he just maintained the status quo until the end of independence time and I think he had Ed Weldon or—is Ed Weldon on your list?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Ed Weldon was the first head of the archives branch in Atlanta. He was later the Georgia State Archivist and the New York State Archivist and he was Deputy Archivist of the U.S. He might be a worthwhile person." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "At this time John, independence has now officially taken place, we are an independent organization. How did you get to your next duty of Director of the Field Archives that you had for eight years, from ‘84 to ‘92." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "In the last few days of the transition when it became clear that I was probably going to be rehabilitated the question was what do we do with him. I think it was Frank Burke who decided that if we were going to run the regions ourselves rather than through the GSA apparatus, and if they were going to take my suggestion that the regional archives be organizationally separate from the record centers and the regional archives work for the Assistant Archivist for the National Archives rather than work for the Record Center Director who worked for the Assistant Archivist for Federal Record Centers. If that’s how we were going to organize then Burke thought I was the best candidate to do it, to run the region or field archives program or whatever we called it at the time. They assigned me to do that. I think it was a combination of what are we going to do with him and he’s probably the person that knows the most about this." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "This is also based upon your reports that you said I believe was ‘68 microfilm?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yeah, but the Regional Archives Coordinator had worked for me during the seventies too when I was in the Office of the National Archives. When I was in the Office of the Executive Director I also did staff work when that had a meeting of the NARA Regional Directors. The regional directors worked for the GSA regional administrators but the archivist would meet with them every year or two and for four or five years there I was the person who did the staff work, the arrangements for the meetings and stuff or my staff did. I did it a couple times and people working for me did it a couple times. We’re going to independence and we have a field archives division which I have taken over and inherited Roseanne Butler who was the Regional Archives Coordinator which they didn’t even consider a management job I don’t think." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Roseanne Butler would be considered your assistant?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes, and we made her Deputy Director. She was better at some things than I was by far. She’s a better communicator. More sympathetic. I had a vision for the regions that I’d had all along and Frank pretty much was willing to go along with that, Frank Burke, because now was Acting Archivist then after Warner left for a while." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I’d like to get clear on who was who. Frank Burke at this point was the Acting Archivist?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "He was Acting Assistant Archivist for the National Archives for a while and then the Acting Archivist for a while. I’m not sure how official all that was because the White House didn’t do anything when Warner left." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Could you describe your vision for the regions and if that is also part of the manifesto maybe you can go into that a little bit?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I saw the regional archives as being depositories for the vast quantity of records that were probably somewhere outside Washington, and I think there were a lot more records outside Washington that should have been in the archives than were. I saw it, as with the microfilm, as a way to make the records in Washington more available by putting more of the microfilm there. I saw the regional archives as a way to build a national constituency for the National Archives. It was genealogists outside Washington who supported us strongly when it looked like the Privacy Act was going to be a problem and it was genealogists outside Washington who supported us strongly in the independence fight, made calls to congressman and did things, and I saw the regional archives as an opportunity to build a national constituency among the genealogists and other people and state archivists and historians and I think Burke went along with that and I think Trudy did not, but Burke was the boss at the time." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What was the argument against it?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I don’t think there was an argument against it. What’s the argument against it now? That discussion is probably not part of the interview but if you want to discuss the current role of the regional archives we can do it after the interview." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I thought we could build a national constituency, I think we needed a stronger presence and I’m an anomaly in my family. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs in many ways and I more or less thought we ought to try to build an entrepreneurial spirit among the regional archives people and tell them generally what we wanted but let them run things without asking every day what I have to do today. We had some pretty strict guidelines on some things and some pretty strict work plans but I didn't care in many ways exactly how things got done if you know what I mean. There were goals for arrangement, description, and for re-boxing. I wanted to see the results but we didn’t tell which employees were going to work on which things on which days. We required some kind of outreach. You need to talk to all your state archives people and let us know you need to keep in touch with state historical people. We wanted them to keep in touch with the district offices of their congress people which gave some people in Washington the willies I think, but it paid off in some ways. I put in a weekly reporting requirement; I want a weekly narrative report. It was not a new idea but I want a weekly narrative report and in turn Roseanne wrote a weekly newspaper that was pretty much based on the weekly reports plus what was happening in Washington and we sent a weekly newsletter out to them. What we did was not a whole lot different from what Herb Angel and Ed Aldridge did when they first set up the Office of Records Management in 1950. They had reports coming in from the Field Record Management divisions and they sent out a Friday memo to them every week. Then we set up a daily telephone message; everybody called it ‘dial-a-prayer.’ Remember, this was before email and computers and stuff. Roseanne would record a daily telephone message with anything they should know. At Trudy’s staff meeting today we did this or this or don’t forget this report is due or whatever and we told them to call the dial-a-prayer every day in the afternoon. Roseanne pretty much handled all those communications. We did some nationwide outreach things. Roseanne worked with the History Committee of the Federal Judiciary and we did a big thing on the bicentennial of the Judiciary Act where we had an exhibit—each regional archive had a copy of an exhibit to rotate around courthouses in their region. Working with the Federal Office Exhibits and Publications people we did a series of short radio scripts about the history of the Judiciary Act and the regional archives people were given copies of this and told to sell it to as many radio stations as they could. You heard any of this before?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I have never heard any of this, no. I’m very excited and happy that we’re getting this on the record because I don’t think a lot of people who are in our audience may have heard of this before. I think it’s very interesting and each of the things you’re mentioning seems to be that the main ideas seem to be outreach and genealogy." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "It wasn’t just genealogy. Bicentennial and the court system is not genealogy. We did a slideshow on the field archive branches. Nancy Malon did a slide show that we sent all over the place and that ought to be somewhere in audio/visual. Nancy did a number of traveling exhibits. We worked with other people on exhibits. Carroll O’Connor's wife, you know Carroll O’Connor, Archie Bunker?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "His wife was something like the granddaughter of an Indian agent who had a large collection of photographs, so we arranged with her to have an exhibit of these photographs of Indian reservations in Montana on exhibit in the Seattle branch for an extended period. Got a lot of publicity in Seattle over that. One of the congressmen, I can’t remember his name, Tom [Lantos] somebody-or-other, was a congressman in the San Bruno area. San Bruno people worked with his district staff to do a number of things that were jointly sponsored by the San Bruno branch and the congressman’s staff. We did that in some other places. We pushed them to do naturalization ceremonies in the regional archives. Interesting because Kent Carter in Fort Worth did one, it was a big one and he managed to get Jim Wright, who was then the Speaker of the House, to come because it was in Wright’s district. The way Kent reported on it Wright sat in the back of the room bored. He made a brief speech but sat in the back of the room looking like he was bored silly, and then at the end of the ceremony whoever was the master of ceremonies or mistress of ceremonies got up and said there were tables for voter registration in the back of the room now that you were citizens and Wright broke into a big smile and got up and started pressing the flesh." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "At this time John, what I find to be really interesting is that you felt that the regions should have an entrepreneurial spirit, an independence of sorts, and I find that to be very interesting considering I think the climate that I have known over the last decade or so seems to be a bit of a maybe misconception that DC has of what the regions do, what their functions are, and how much work they actually do. I think their view is more of trying to get everybody on the same page instead of having independents within each of these regions. What do you say about that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I think that’s true but it’s not just the last few years. I think that's why I ceased to be head of the regions in 1992 because that was not viewed as favorably as it had been." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "There was a distrust from DC about exactly what the regional archives do." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I don’t know; I wish you could talk to Trudy because if Trudy were honest with you she would probably tell you more. You might see what you can get out of Michael Kurtz on that. He was Trudy’s Deputy at the time." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "A question I wanted to ask you before we move on from this area to the next section—" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Interposing] Let me talk a little more about the regions because we wanted a strong volunteer program and I think that the high point we probably had over 400 volunteers. We wanted extended hours and we required at least one evening and a Saturday a month but we allowed them to do more if they wanted to do more. We encouraged them to do training mainly genealogical training, but training in how to do research in the records. A lot of them would have a Saturday morning session where they would get people in and show them how to search the microfilm. We weren't too specific about some of that but you had to do something. But you know what I mean." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Also outreach to schools too as well?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yeah, we had a lot of schools to work. We encouraged some … You ought to interview Roseanne. I have not talked to Roseanne for more than 15 years." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "The outreach really in many ways, that outreach was a key component of the regions." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes, it was a key component. That’s a fair way to put it. I have not seen Roseanne probably since 1999. I think I saw her husband once after that. I understand that she was a uniformed tour guide in Williamsburg but I simply haven’t heard from them." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I’ll definitely reach out to Roseanne. You had said earlier on in the last interview that we had done you said that outreach in genealogy without it we’d still be in GSA. What did you mean by that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I think that the biggest push for independence came from genealogists. The historians were not particularly helpful. The AHA was in favor but you didn’t have history professors calling their congressman and saying do it, if you know what I mean." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I think the current Archivist has probably turned his back on the genealogical community but maybe that’s not part of this interview." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "We can talk more about that at the end when we talk about the current state of archive—" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Interposing] I guess I’m willing to talk about some things at the end that I don’t want in the oral history interview because they aren’t history, if you know what I mean." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "We can always talk off the record. I can stop and we can speak about that. One question I wanted to ask you before we leave here is what missed opportunities do you think we had then or what opportunities do you think we missed during this time of independence and us moving forward. Did we have a chance to do things differently? Did we have a chance to gain something that maybe we never have within the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I’m not sure how to describe it but many of the locations were terrible. For example we moved out of Bayonne [New Jersey] to downtown New York and Philadelphia moved downtown. Not all the downtown moves were good, not all were bad. I think we missed opportunities to move to better facilities in some places or to build joint ventures with other facilities in some places. I think we missed the opportunity to really look closely at where there were significant federal records being created that we weren’t getting. Maybe there should have been more regional or maybe there should be more regional archives; maybe not. I don’t know. I was very much involved in the Alaska project. The archivist basically said that he promised Senator Stevens this would be done and it was up to me to get it done and he wrote a letter to GSA saying that I had full authority to speak for him in dealing with the GSA people in San Francisco and Anchorage. I did what needed to be done and I concluded early on that the building they had planned was too small for the records that were likely to come out of the woodwork if we had a facility there and had some bitter arguments with Claudine about size but ended up building a bigger building than was originally conceived, but for no additional money and we got the project done on time and on budget, and made Senator Stevens very happy and got the records moved without a problem. Do you know Sue Karran?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes, I know her through the internal collaboration network (ICN) that we have. She’s been giving me a lot of information regarding you and comments that you had made." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Sue was the assistant head of the Archives branch in Seattle under Phil Lothyan. I told Sue that it was her project to get the records that were going from Seattle to Anchorage and she was going with them and she couldn't go home until they were all shelved properly. She exceeded my expectations." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I hope she got an Archive Achievement Award for it." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes. She did an excellent job. But anyway what happened in Anchorage recently is beyond the scope of this conversation I guess." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yeah, well different era, different time." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "We can talk about that off the record when we talk about non-historical things." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I don’t know if this question applies; I’m going to mention it here because I just wanted to mention because a lot of the things that a lot of my colleagues talk about is that the National Archives, and I want to see your take on this, doesn’t seem to have authority or power to secure permanent records from regional facilities. Meaning that we’re out here in the regions and such-and-such agency has historical records and if they don’t want to give it to us we can’t get them to give it to us. Was there ever an opportunity during the course of your career that you saw where we could have actually had enforcement powers to secure permanent records into our facility?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "In my opinion, and I’m not a lawyer, but in my opinion, which I stated many, many, many, many, many times over the years the Administrator and then the Archivist had the legal authority to require any agency to send to him any record more than 30 years old. Originally it was 50 years but the Archives went and got the law changed to 30 years and if you go look in Title 40, Chapter 21 to Title 44, read it for yourself and see if you think the archivist can ask for records. Every archivist has chosen not to enforce that to any great extent. Originally it said 50 years and when they pushed to make it 30 years I pooh-poohed it because I said you’re not willing to ask them after 50 years so why are you asking for a law so you can do it after 30 if you’re not willing to follow up. I haven’t looked at that law for 15 years or more but maybe I’ll look at it tonight. I think the Archivist of the United States has far more authority than he is willing to exercise or attempt to exercise. It may be that he’ll exercise it and get slapped down but one of the reasons we wanted the regions to build better ties to the agencies that was part of the outreach was get involved in the local federal executive groups. There used to be, I don’t know if there still is, but there were Federal Executive Boards or something owned by Civil Service Commissions and we told them if you’re not a member of the Federal Executive Board at least get on the Records Committee or whatever but ingratiate yourself with the agencies and when we set up Anchorage one of the things that I did as we were building the building was took Tom Wiltsey who was going to be the head and we went around and visited agency people telling them that we were coming to Anchorage and we’d have a place where they could retire their records that did not involve sending it to someplace thousands of miles away. I expected the regional archive people to be in touch with agencies which probably would have made it easier to get records, but in my opinion the archivist has authority he’s never exercised. You need to see if you can have somebody find a record of Buck’s conversation with Roosevelt. Buck wanted the military service records and the military wouldn’t give them to them. I think the Civil War era stuff. I don’t remember the details because it’s been 40 years probably since I read the correspondence in the file. Buck had a meeting with Roosevelt and asked for it and as a result Roosevelt sent a note to the Secretary of War saying Buck makes a good case; send him the records." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I’m going to look that up. Interesting." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I think Buck is the last Archivist who had a personal relationship with a sitting President and it wasn’t a close one but Buck did see Roosevelt. Of course, that was the time the Roosevelt Library was being set up." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Let’s move on to 1992 to 1995. Tell us about how you transitioned from the Director of Field Archives Division, Regional Archives to the Director of the Non-textual Archive Division. How did that work out?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I was called into the Archivist's office and I was told I was being reassigned. I objected. In the meeting I considered it a demotion and that there wasn’t much I can do about it but I was not happy." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What were the politics behind it? If you don’t mind telling us." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "In ways that’s a Trudy Peterson or Michael Kurtz question and to some extent Claudine Wieher was probably involved but Claudine’s deceased. There are two women that at one time or other looked at me as their mentor in management matters. Claudine Wieher and Debra Wall. They both became Deputy Archivists. Claudine, as far as I’m concerned, turned to her dark side and Claudine was instrumental in my removal from the Office of the National Archives the first time and my removal from the Regional Archives Program." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Why do you think that was the case, if you don’t mind speculating? If this is an area that you don’t want on the record I understand." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I have never understood. I have really never understood. At the time Claudine retired and sort of at the urging of Debra Wall, believe it or not, I called Claudine to say goodbye, to wish her well, and to tell her maybe we should try to remember the good times rather than the bad times and she did not take that call very kindly and I gather she made fun of it to other people." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Do you think it was something that you had done?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I’m sure I must have done something that turned her but I don’t know. I don’t want to get into that more. I think she had some character flaws. I was assigned to the Non-textual Archives Division, a job I hated. I had less authority there than I had running the Regional Archives Program. I turned 50 very shortly after they did that and could have retired if they’d been willing to make it an adverse action like riff me or something, but Don Wilson and Claudine Wieher were not willing to make it an adverse action that would allow me to retire at that time, so I ran the division for about three years and did not like it. During that time though, Debra Wall and Jennifer Nelson, worked for me and both expressed an interest in learning more about management so I spent some time with them." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Can you describe some of what you did? What was your job at that time from ‘92 to ‘95?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I was over the Still Picture, Motion Picture, and Cartographic branches. I put some stuff in the 1998 resume I sent you that I don’t remember anymore. It was not a good time and I was not a happy camper." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about during that period?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Let me think for a minute or two." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Non-textual Archives Division this was a period in ‘92 to ‘95 where computers were becoming more prevalent and technology was changing. What technical advances were happening or what opportunities did you see for the National Archives to advance during this period?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "We had a card catalogue and we talked about digitizing it. I don’t think we got very far on that. Actually Debra would be a better person to talk about that project. I spent some time trying to improve the services by looking at how we did things. I oversaw moving cartographic records from the National Archives, the Pickett Street buildings, to Archives II. Then I did some stuff that was not related to that job because we had another taskforce. I was on taskforces all the time on reinventing government, responding to Gore’s performance review. That was a strategic planning team, and I don’t remember all that stuff. That wasn’t just them. All through my career, when I was in favor, if there was a committee on this management thing or that, I tended to be on it. Like independence." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Maybe a third of my time while I was in that job was doing stuff that was not directly related to that job." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Was this also when the Bledsoe Group report came about and can you describe that a little bit." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I think that's about the time the Bledsoe Group came about. I don’t remember exactly. Ralph Bledsoe, do you know about Ralph Bledsoe?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "No, no. What was the Bledsoe Report and Group?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "First of all do you know about Ralph Bledsoe?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Okay. At that time Ralph was the Director of the Reagan Library, the first Director of the Reagan Library, and they set up a group under him to look at how we were doing things and I forget what the official title was and I forget who all was on it. Lori Lisowski was on it among other things. Barbara Berger who was in the Still Picture Branch. I don’t remember all the people. I remember some things 40 or 50 years ago better than I remember things 20 years ago. Before Ralph was director of the Reagan Library he’d had a number of jobs. He had been head of the Graduate Public Administration Program at the Sacramento Branch of USC, I think it was, when Reagan was the governor. He had been on the faculty of the Federal Executive Institute in Charlottesville, not when I went there though. He had been head of the USC Doctor of Public Administration Program at Washington, and he had been Assistant Domestic Policy Advisor in the White House during the Reagan years. He was the White House staff member who wrote the report in the White House agreeing with the NARS independence bill. When he was the White House Assistant Domestic Policy Advisor he basically wrote the White House decision paper favoring independence, and he was very close to Philip S. Hughes. I told you when we went to see Hughes he talked to other people. Ralph was very active in the Public Administration community. Anyway, when we had this committee he was Director of the Reagan Library." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What did this committee do?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "We wrote a report. I don’t remember what was in the report. We had a meeting out at the Reagan Library along the way. Maybe this was one of the strategic planning things or Gore things." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Like a reinventing initiative of the nineties?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yeah, that kind of thing. We had a meeting at the library and Reagan and Colin Powell were there one of the days at the library and it was interesting because Tom Selleck was there and Barbara Berger who worked for me in Still Pictures at the time chatted up Tom Selleck for a long time because he was interested in Still Pictures research. Shortly after that Ralph was removed from the library and sent to Washington apparently at the request of Mrs. Reagan, and he became an Assistant Archivist and then an Acting Deputy Archivist and I don’t know if he’s still alive or not. He’d be pretty old if he is." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Some of the questions that I might have about this era, and tell me if this is the ‘92-’95 era, about your work on automation and cataloguing, being responsible for getting public access PCs in all research rooms nationwide, and also your views on your time of troubles and a senate report that was critical of NARA in the 1990s. Did that all happen during this period?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yeah, I don’t know if it was exactly this period or not. I know I was blamed in part for the Senate report which I was not involved in, but some people seemed to think that I was feeding them information, which I did not do. We worked on public terminals, I don’t know if that was at the end of the non-textual period or beginning of the next period. During the non-textual period we started trying to automate the Motion Picture card catalog and what we did there, and Debra got involved in that and Jennifer Nelson more or less became the first step of what became the NAIL Program or whatever it was called." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "You’re talking about a time period I prefer to forget." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What did NAIL stand for?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "National Archives Information Locator or something like that. NARA Archival Information Locator, or something like that." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "It's just another form of HMS or something like that." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Right. When Debra got moved out of the non-textual division into whatever it was called at the time, into that kind of planning and automation programs. That’s what she was working on. You need to interview Debra, you know what? It won’t hurt to interview her on her years." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I could definitely do that. You’re right. What do you mean by time of trouble?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Time of troubles was your term, not mine." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "It was a term that was given to me to ask regarding questions about this era." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I never heard it referred to that before you asked me." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What do you think it does refer to?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I don’t know for sure. Which period are you talking about?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Early nineties." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Don Wilson got a lot of flak over—there was a Senate report, there were some scandals in the personnel office, I think. I was out of the loop again. I was blamed for some things I didn’t do. I think that’s about the time that he approved the Constitutional Amendment that was questionable. What is it, the 27 th Amendment, or something? Do you know about that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Oh, yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Oh, let me think about that a minute. You should know about that. [Pause] The 27 th Amendment as I recall prohibited the changes to the salary of Congress until the next term. They couldn’t raise or lower their pay during the current term and it is an amendment that started many, many, many, many years ago and was considered a dead letter I think because it had not been ratified by all the states and a couple states finally ratified it years, maybe 200 years, after it was first proposed and Don Wilson declared it in effect because that’s his job. One of the Archivists’ jobs is to publish the laws." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "In some ways the Archivist decides what the law is, if you know what I mean, and Don Wilson decided to publish the 27 th Amendment as having been ratified and took some flak over it I believe. But I don’t remember the whole story. You ought to be able to track that down." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "That would be considered what it means by time of troubles in ‘92." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "That was one of the things in that time but there was some bad press. Okay, I just called up the last page in the 27 th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States signed by Don W. Wilson. The 18 th day of May, 1992, and certified by Martha Girard who was then Director of the Federal Register or Acting Director of the Federal Register." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay, I can see where there was a lot of contentious issues around this period." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "There was some kind of personnel scandal at the time and I was … Oh, I don’t remember. I just don’t remember." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Let’s get back on track with your life at this point. Do you want to move on to the next section of ‘95 to ‘98 when you were Special Assistant to the Archivist for Human Resources and Information Services?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "That was a lot of our job. I was off in a closet again but I was given things to do, if you know what I mean. I was doing odd staff jobs. I was not in charge of anything or supervising anybody. One of the things I worked on was the reimbursable funding for record centers. Steve Hannestad and I worked on that a lot. Steve worked for Claudine when she did the original NARS A-1 history. Steve was in charge of security for the archives for a while. He was around for a long time and worked for Claudine Weiher and for Adrienne Thomas. Worked for me for a short time. I guess there was something from the Bledsoe report that had to be implemented and I did something on that. I worked on the taskforce that was working on how to do the reimbursable funding for the record centers, and I was on a committee related to space planning for consolidating facilities. At that time I think Carlin was expecting me to recommend closing some of the regional archives. I was on a lot of the teams that reviewed IT contracts and other contracts related to information technology just reviewing the contracts. You had to have teams review the technical aspects of the contracts and stuff." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Did you recommend any regional archives to be closed?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I retired." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I was starting to get asked about that when I retired and then I did not and I did some things immediately postretirement to make that more difficult for the Archivist to do." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Going back to FRC and reimbursable funding, how did that come about the idea of reimbursable funding moving in that direction?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "It had been talked about off and on for years and I’m not sure exactly how it came about because I don’t think I was privy to the decision to go ahead and do something about it but I was assigned to work on how to do it and whether we want the courts to pay as well as the agencies and stuff and we had more than one group working on it. Steve Hannestad and I were working with all of them and we ended up with a report that had recommendations and choices to be made and we had a big powwow on. I think it was December 17, 1997, and that was the day that Carlin and Bellardo were called out to be told about the coming _Post_ story about Mrs. Carlin. At that point, by Christmas of 1997 I was spending most of my time trying to find a job." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Was it because you were tired of the National Archives or was it because you saw the writing on the wall that would—that you were no longer—" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Interposing] I saw the writing on the wall. I became eligible to retire on August 14, 1998. On August 13, 1998, I went and had lunch with Ren Cahoon and I said I am not happy. I want a real job. Here are three possible alternatives that I would be happy with. You are the Archivist, can you recommend something else but I will not stay with the status quo and as soon as I find a job I’m leaving and this is your notice. It took me ‘til March to find a job." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Ren Cahoon was not amenable to you having one of the three options that you—" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Interposing] Ren Cahoon was not amenable to the options that was within his power to grant and the Archivist was not amenable to either of the other options." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Do you want to talk about those options at all?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I’ll mention one. That was to return to the job I had in 1970-74 in planning which they ended up giving to Jerry George and then Lori Lisowski which were reasonable candidates for the job, but that was one of the ones that I said I would be happy with. But I didn’t think they would do it anyway." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. Anything else you want to say at this period before we move on to some general questions that will stand during the course of everything we’ve talked about and then we'll get into what you did right after and at the very end of our interview." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Let me talk about March of 1998 because I kept trying more and I sent out resumes and wrote to people. In March of 1998 Loretta Zooks who had worked for me in the regional archives in Chicago, and had left to go to Ancestry and had earlier co-authored Ancestry’s book about the regional archives program, asked if I was interested in working for Ancestry and I said I could be. She set me up an appointment with the then owners of Ancestry and I flew out to Orem, Utah, and had an interview with the two people that owned Ancestry at that time. That was like the 21, 22 or something of March and they said they’ get back to me by the end of the following week and they called me on the last Friday in March and made an offer, and I said how about I come talk to you about it again and so they set up an appointment to see me first thing Tuesday morning March 31. This is Friday afternoon. I called Steve Hannestad, who was then in charge of security, among other things and said can I clean out my office on Saturday. He said yes and he wrote out a pass for me for the guards to let me take stuff out of the building on Saturday and I went into Ren and said I’m probably leaving. I came in Saturday with my son and we took some of my personal stuff and I boxed up all the stuff that I left for Steve Heeps and I went down to Adrienne Thomas’ office and tried to say goodbye to her but her secretary said she was in a meeting. So I wrote basically a two-line note and gave it to the secretary and said well I’m leaving and I won’t be back. The secretary apparently gave it to her because as I approached the exit to Archives II Adrienne came running down the hall after me. I left a little after 10 in the morning on Monday. I went to BWI and I got a Southwest flight and I had to change planes in St. Louis. Between flights in St. Louis I called personnel in St. Louis and I said I’m probably going to retire tomorrow, can I do it by mail or FedEx, and they told me what to do. I flew out the rest of the way to Utah and I had my second interview and came to terms with Ancestry on Tuesday morning the 31 and I spent Tuesday afternoon filling out the paperwork and faxed a copy to St. Louis and gave FedEx a copy to take and called Ren the next morning and said I don't work for you anymore. I started working for Ancestry." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "How did you feel? I mean it must have in some ways been—was there a bittersweet feeling as well since you did have so much time in with the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Ralph Bledsoe told me when he retired, and he was not treated well the last year or two he was at the Archives, he told me that I would find it a great relief and I found that to be true. I was back in the building maybe a month or so later and Dick Higgins, who you probably don’t know, but Dick worked for Debra Wall at the time, Dick looked at me and said you know you’ve de-aged 20 years. I worked for Ancestry for almost two years. We’re done with my career at the Archives I guess. One thing I did in the immediate month after I retired is I went to meetings in New York and in Philadelphia of people trying to keep the archives from closing those regional archives branches and attended those meetings and said a few words." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "When was this? What period was this?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "It would have been the spring of ‘98." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "In some ways your connection with the regional archives was strong throughout your career. Do you think that if you were to have been kept in that position do you think things in the regions may have been different?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes, I think the regional archives program would be very different." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "In what ways? Or what ways would you like to have seen them be different than they are today?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I think you would have more records and you would be outreach engines that would have built a greater national constituency for the archives that would make it more well-known and probably have enhanced the archivist's authority to go get more records which would have made it more well-known that would have—you know what I mean? It would have gone into a feedback loop that probably would have helped the agency considerably but that's just my opinion, which is not the opinion of then or current management." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Why do you think it wasn’t their opinion?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I don’t know because people are controlling." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Do you think that there’s a disconnect between College Park or Archives I and the regions that there’s a basic misunderstanding or lack of understanding of what the regions do?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I can’t speak to the status quo because I have not—are we off the record or are we still on the record?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "We’re still on the record but we can talk about that when I finish up if you like. I’ll move on to something else and—" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "[Interposing] Let me address that a little bit. I cannot speak to anything after April 1, 1998, other than what I personally did which wasn’t much. The last time I was in a regional archives facility was probably late summer of 2004 when I was in Seattle. I visited a cousin who wanted to do research at the Seattle archives but seemed afraid to go there so I took her and we spent an afternoon with Sue Karran, and the last NARA employee other than you that I spoke to was probably Connie Potter before she retired. That was at the archives exhibit, they had a genealogical meeting, which the archives doesn’t do anymore, and the last contact I had with the archives before that was probably when I had lunch with Debra Wall seven or eight years ago maybe, I forget the date, but I had lunch with Debra. The last time I was in the National Archives Building—well there were three times when I was in the National Archives Building post-retirement. Once was for a memorial service for Mable Dietrichs. They had a memorial service for her in the auditorium in the archives building and I went to that. I spent one day doing research in the 1930 census on contract—I spent one day doing research in the 1930 census selecting some images for a book illustration on contracts for Jake Gearing who then worked for Heritage Quest and had worked with me at Ancestry. Those are the last two times I was in the building to really do anything and then the third time I was in the building was before the whole new exhibit opened. They invited retired employees to come look at it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I think a lot of the questions that I had for you have already been answered during the course of you going through your history so I don't really have too much more to follow up on." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Let me continue on your last question a little bit because I think the management interest in the regions and their existence or their opportunities has changed as Archivists have changed. I think Bahmer and Rhoads had one attitude and O'Neill and Warner probably either had a different attitude or didn’t care and Frank Burke was probably more Bahmer and Rhoads and Don Wilson. I’m not sure about Don Wilson because he listened to Reed Whitaker, they were fraternity brothers, and Reed is one of those people like Claudine that was once a friend and ceased to be. I think Wilson probably had some ideas similar to what I did about end results but different ideas about how to accomplish it and I think Carlin, probably more Mrs. Carlin’s influence than his influence, was the other. I don’t know what to say about the current Archivist or the current Deputy. I heard at one point that the current Deputy archivist had written a paper on the regional archives but I never saw it or have any idea what it said. If she ever discussed the regional archives with me it has not been since the early nineties when she was a trainee. I guess part of the answer to your last question was that the opinion of or the view or opportunity for the regional archives has waxed and waned over the years depending on who’s in charge of the agency." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes. Do you think that the change of Archivists has affected your career?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Yes. I think I was highly regarded by Bahmer and Bert Rhoads and I was not highly regarded by Jim O’Neill when he became the Acting Archivist." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Do you have any regrets within your career? I know it’s a big question considering that it’s a long career." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I thought about that question. I may have some regrets but if you ask me if I would do anything differently the answer if probably not. I have some regrets that Claudine and Reed Whitaker turned on me, but I can’t think of anything I could have done that would make that different. After reading your question I thought a lot about whether I would have done anything different and I don’t think so except maybe get out earlier." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I know that you had said when I asked the question about what you’re most proudest of, what contributions you’re most proud of you said to tell the truth most of the things at which I was most proud of at the time had not endured. One of your contributions was the regions and the regions have endured." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "But they have not endured in the way that I envisioned them or in the way that—the regions are less important in the agency today than they were when I left or when I left the program." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "That may be true but I think due to your commitment to the regions they have at least endured to this moment in 2016." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I think the relations with the genealogical community are important and have been important and I think they have been diminished in recent years. I think that NARS A-1 could have been the foundation for a lot of automated advances that probably were delayed by five to ten years because NARS A-1 effectively got killed." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Can you further explain NARS A-1?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "It started out basically as a way of automating the production of finding aids and if the program had evolved and the data had been migrated we would have been way ahead compared to what happened when they effectively killed the program and tossed the data and started over." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What was the reason why the project was killed?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "You have to ask Trudy Peterson or Virginia Purdy. I got removed. I got sent off to the Office of Records Management and then put on the shelf or put in the closet and a lot of changes were made and nobody asked me my opinion or asked me to explain why things were done the way they were done or told me what they were doing so I don't know for sure. I could say that part of it was people didn’t understand. I could say part of it was people didn’t like me but I don’t know for sure. There may have been valid criticisms of which I am unaware." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Then I will ask those questions of the people that I interview in the future." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I can’t believe that Trudy wouldn’t talk to you." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I think she’s been very busy. I didn’t get an indication of a refusal to answer my questions as much as she seems to be extremely busy, but she did give me contact information for two individuals that I hope to get to." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Dick Jacobs and Jack Landers would probably be very good people to talk to, Dick especially." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I do have numbers for them so I will be reaching out to them. One final question I want to ask you which might be on the mind of a lot of people who are listening here. You left the archives for [Ancestry.com.](https://Ancestry.com) Do you think that Ancestry had a hand in possibly diminishing the importance of the regions?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I think that digitizing records and in effect making microfilm obsolete might have accomplished that but I wouldn’t blame Ancestry for that. I’d blame the changing technology if anything. The fact that Ancestry did it doesn’t mean it's Ancestry’s fault, if you know what I mean. If the church had been ahead of the game or if MyHeritage or FindMyPast or one of Ancestry’s competitors had been first to it it would have been them. It’s the changing technology and partly the inability or unwillingness or whatever of the National Archives and Records Administration to keep up or to I don’t know …" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Private enterprise fills in where government maybe doesn’t have the financial resources to do what Ancestry eventually did." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "That might be part of it but I wouldn’t blame it all on the financial resources. I blame it partly on the motivation or the spirit of innovation or whatever because I think that if—the archives was involved in large-scale microfilming before most anybody else. The National Archives was innovators in distributing records on microfilm but was not an innovator in distributing records in digital form. It was not a private enterprise that innovated distributing records to the public in microform, it was the National Archives followed by the Mormon Church." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Very good point." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I think that the National Archives could have chosen to be the innovator in digitizing records or getting them digitized or finding someone to digitize or finding the resources to digitize them or using the genealogical community to drive demand in such a way that they would get the resources to do it and management basically chose not to do so. Whether that was an active choice or a passive choice I couldn't say. The National Archives in its basically 80-year history has been an innovator during some periods of time and a follower in others and I don’t think it's been an innovator in the last couple decades." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Can you venture a reason why?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "The basic thing is who’s in charge and who they listen to I think. Read the Herb Angel thing. Records Management, that was an innovation that was prompted in part by the war but some of the thinking about it happened in the thirties before the war and you’ll see that more as you read the Angel thing." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "The Herb Angel transcript?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "Right. You had a management with a lot of bright people and let the bright people go do their thing. The microfilm publication program is from the same era and some of the same people. Then both the microfilm program and the records management program got pushes later on that caused more innovation and sometimes it was external things that prompted the pushes but the archives were ahead of the games in a lot of ways. I can't think of ways that it's been ahead of the game for a long time." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "In conclusion is there anything that you’d like to add before we stop the interview?" }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "No but there are a couple of things I’ll add after we stop the interview." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Thank you very much Mr. Scroggins. It’s been wonderful for you to take us back and to add to the history of the National Archives. It’s very important and I think your honesty will be appreciated by generations to come." }, { "speaker": "MR. SCROGGINS", "text": "I guess I should say you’re welcome." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Thank you." } ]

[ { "speaker": "Mr. William Seibert", "text": "Bill Seibert, may I help you?" }, { "speaker": "Ms. Rebecca Watford", "text": "Hi, this is Rebecca Watford." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Oh, hi. How are you?" }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Good, you?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "I'm okay. I'm going to close my office door and put you on speaker phone, is that all right?" }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Yes, sir, and I'm recording the phone call as you do it." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Okay, thank you. Hold on. Hi, can you hear me?" }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Yes, sir." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "I can hear you, let me close the door. Hello everybody [to people outside. Closes door and returns]. Okay." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "All right. Let me do the metadata really quick, and then we can start." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Sure." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Today is Friday, September 22nd, 2017. On the phone is William SAY-bert—" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "[Interposing] SIGH-bert." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "—oh, Seibert, what was it?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Seibert, yes." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Okay. Who is a Senior Archivist and Chief of Archival Operations at the National Archives at St. Louis." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "That's right." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "My name is Rebecca Watford. I am an Intern in the History Office at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. So, Mr. Seibert, what is your background prior to working at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "I came to work at the Archives a few years after I finished my academic work. I returned to St. Louis in 1975 and for a brief time was involved in a number of projects having to do with architectural history here in the St. Louis area. Also spent a year or so in a family business, but then in 1978 I took what was then known as the PACE Exam, which was an examination for the civil service. And at some point after that, I think it was in '77 or '78 that I took that exam, and then in '78 I was contacted by the National Archives and Records Service, as it then was, here in St. Louis and offered a job at the National Personnel Records Center. So since 1978 I have been employed by the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "All right. So what do you do at the National Archives? What is your job?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Well I am the Chief of Archival Operations at the National Archives at St. Louis, which is a field location of the Office of Records Services, as it's currently organized. And we hold the accessioned records of … Basically our collection is unique, in that it's a national collection, it is not as in the other field locations, it is not a regional collection of federal records but it's a national collection. And they really are the personal data records held by the National Archives and created by the Federal government. In other words, records about people rather than about government offices and organizations." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Can you tell me about the programs that you've worked on at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Well, yes, when I started out I was, as I say, I was a CIDS (Career Intern Development System) trainee working for the National Personnel Records Center, and my first position after training was in the Records Reconstruction Branch, which was charged with providing reference on the records that were affected by the disastrous fire that took place at the National Personnel Records Center in 1973 and that destroyed upwards of 16- to 18 million records of individuals who served in the Army and the Army Air Forces and the Air Force between 1912 and 1963—basically, those who served during two World Wars and the Korean War. And what we did, we, again, provided reference on the records that were salvaged from the fire, and we reconstructed individual service histories of those individuals whose records were destroyed in that fire. And I was a Section Chief in the Reconstruction Branch, in one of the Correspondence Sections in that Branch. And I worked there for a number of years, and then I was selected as Assistant Branch Chief in the Air Force Branch of NPRC at that time. The branches were organized by military service—in the military facility, they were organized by military service branch. So there was an Army Branch, a Navy Branch, an Air Force Branch, and then there was the Reconstruction Branch. And when I left the Reconstruction Branch, I went into the Air Force Reference Branch as the Assistant Branch Chief. And then after a few years there, I was selected to work as an Appraisal Archivist, appraising a collection—I think as my CV mentioned, located in the St. Louis Military Records Facility was a collection of about 100,000 cubic feet of records of military field commands. These records were sort of the anomaly in St. Louis. As I said, in St. Louis, the main type of records held here are individual service records of military people and civil servants. The collection that I'm referring to now were records of organizations. They were records about military field organizations, their programmatic records, their administrative records, and so forth. Different type of records from the personnel records. There was a project to appraise all of these 100,000-plus cubic feet of records which were unscheduled. And we worked, there were two of us that worked as Appraisal Archivists systematically examining these records and appraising them for their archival value, separating what were determined to be records of permanent value from the records that were of temporary value and could be disposed. And that project is still going on. It began a few years earlier, about 1976, and it continues on today. But I worked in that project, and then after time I was also appointed as the Chief of the Appraisal and Disposition Section at the Military Records Facility of NPRC. So I sort of had a dual role as Appraisal Archivist and also as the manager of the Appraisal and Disposition Section of the Record Center. And then in 2000, after a decision was made by the Archivist of the United States that the military personnel files were a permanent series that would be accessioned into the National Archives—prior to that time the records were contingent—identified as … their status was basically in limbo. No one had proposed disposing of them, but they had not yet been determined to be of permanent value. They were in what is called a contingent status. But as I said, in April of 1999 the Archivist made the determination that the military personnel records were permanent, and that triggered the establishment of an archival unit in St. Louis. Prior to that the only organization here was the Federal Records Center, the National Personnel Record Center. But in 2000 an archival presence was established here in St. Louis, and the first unit was a Preservation unit that was specifically mandated by Congress to take action to preserve the records that were salvaged from the 1973 fire, what we refer to as the Burned Records. And I was appointed as the Preservation Officer with the task of setting up that unit, staffing it and developing the preservation labs that would be needed to fulfill that function of preserving those records. That was in 2000. In 2004 an archival, full-fledged archival … unit was established in St. Louis that would deal with reference and all the other archival functions other than preservation. And I was appointed as the Chief of that organization, which is what I do today. And we, again, our task was to establish that organization from the ground up. We have a Public Research Room here, obviously, now. And we have a Reference Branch and also a Processing and Access Branch. And then those are sort of the three functional units within the National Archives at St. Louis. And I manage those three operational areas here. So that's what I do." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Okay. What, I'll ask this so I have the complete timeframe, how—" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "[Interposing] Pardon?" }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "—long were you at the Archives in number of years?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "I didn't hear the first part of that." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Oh, I was just asking—I said you've already said when you started, I just need to know when, the number of years you've been doing that—" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "[Interposing] Oh, yeah, well from 1978 to 2017 … is… hmmmmm… that would be 39 years. That plus my military service and accumulated sick leave and so forth means that I've ended up with 43 years, a little over 43 years of creditable federal civil service." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "What did you do in the military?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "I was in the Army. I was drafted during the Vietnam period. I had been in graduate school at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, and, but I was in the Vietnam draft. So then I had to—living overseas, a lot of us that were there had to make the decision as to whether we would stay or go back and participate in a war that we did not believe in. So my sort of—I felt that the long-range thing to do would be to return and to serve. So I was in the Army from 1969 through the spring of 1972. I was part of the—President Nixon after his opening to China began a major reduction in force in the military, and those of us who were due to separate in less than a year were given an early out. So I served all of 2½ years and then was discharged in April of 1972, and fortunately I was able to … the organization that provided the scholarship that I was on at the University of Oxford when I left in '69, they said they would hold my scholarship and I was welcome to return, so in April of '72 I returned to the United Kingdom and continued to study there. Finishing up in 1974, late '74 and returning to my home in St. Louis in 1975." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Do you feel like your military background served you well in working for the Archives in St. Louis?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "[Interposing] Oh, oh, definitely. That really was a fortunate occurrence, because the work that I eventually [Laughing] did in the Army was actually personnel related, and so when I applied to work for the National Archives and especially here in St. Louis, the main holdings are basically personnel records. Of course, I knew the Army records, but I had to learn the records of the other military services and also the records of the civil service, which are a major portion of our holdings here at the National Archives in St. Louis. But it was a great sort of a … a start, because I had worked with a lot of those records when I was actually in the military." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Did you have a background in preservation before you came to the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "No. That was interesting. They felt when they established the Preservation Program in 2000 that they wanted somebody to initially head it up at the beginning who understood the records. And then the way it worked out is I was selected as the Preservation Officer but was able to select two outstanding records conservators to work with me, and actually one of those people succeeded me as the Preservation Officer here, Marta O'Neill, who has an amazing background in preservation as well as in archives. So they wanted somebody who had a deep background in the records and knew the condition of the records and would be able to prioritize the work. And so that's why, I think, why I applied for the job and why I was selected. But my major interest and background, of course, was in archives and in history as opposed to preservation and conservation." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Why did you initially apply to work at the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Well, because my academic background and my greatest interest is in history. I really did not, never desired to be a teacher. So really, the other major way to work in history is to work with the primary sources. And that's of course what archives is, what archivists do. They work to identify and make accessible historical records. So that's what appealed to me about archives and certainly the National Archives. Which is, you know, the professional leader in this country." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Do you think you've learned a lot from being in the archives, for being there for 39 years?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Oh, my goodness, tremendous amount, yeah. You really learn a lot about the history of the United States Government and all of the functions that the government performs, and it's fascinating work, and you learn something every day, really." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "What are some things that you've learned that have surprised you over the years from working at the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Hmm. Well, I would say, understanding the complexity of bureaucracies, both of military and civilian bureaucracies. And how they evolved and developed has been pretty … a pretty amazing learning experience. If you want to know what I think are the most significant activities that I've been involved in over these years, I can name four of them [Laughing] right off the bat. If that would be of interest." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Go ahead, go for it." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Sure. I was, my colleague and I, she no longer works for NARA, but is one of the most … she’s one of the most brilliant archivists I've ever worked with. She was working here at the time. We were named as the, basically, the support people for a task force that was appointed by the Acting Archivist in 1995 to look into the appraisal of the—to deal with—to make a decision as to the ultimate disposition of the military personnel records that were held in St. Louis, the Official Military Personnel Files is what they're actually called. They're the individual service histories of people who have served the United States in the Armed Forces starting— the earliest ones that are out here are from the last third of the 19th century. The prior, the earlier records that have been part of the National Archives in Washington, and are held in the National Archives building, have been among the most heavily accessed record series in NARA's history. So the question is, okay, huh, we have held the early records of those who served in the Armed Forces of the United States beginning in the Revolutionary War, what about the people that served in that capacity from the last third of the 19th century and through the 20th century? And this task force was directed by the Archivist to come up with a decision. The decision that we came up with was that these records were of permanent value for the people of the United States and should be accessioned by the National Archives. And that's what eventually happened, in the year 1999, as I said, the Archivist at that time, John Carlin, issued the decision that the military service records held in St. Louis were permanently valuable records of the United States and would be accessioned into the National Archives. In one fell swoop, the holdings of the National Archives increase by almost, I would say, close to 40 percent. Anyway, it was a major, major decision. And that was followed a few years later by another task force appointed by the Archivist to look at the value, the archival value, of the records of individuals who served the United States government as civil servants. And those records were also held here in St. Louis. And they are held here, and that working group, which I also was on, made the recommendation that records held here, which really date to the beginning of the civil service in the 19th century, that those records up through 1973 should be also brought into the holdings of the National Archives. Records of civil servants who served the government in 1974 and later, their records, basically, are held in electronic form, and so the paper records were deemed not to be of permanent value, the later records. But the records created prior to 1974 were recommended for permanent retention, and that recommendation was accepted and was approved by the Archivist. So that represents about over 200,000 cubic feet of records of civil servants, the people that served the United States in a civil service capacity. So being involved in those two … really … seminal appraisal efforts was really a privilege and I feel, you know, I've served history very well in having been a part of that. I think subsequent years have borne out the correctness of our appraisal decision, because we, here in St. Louis, are—the reference that we perform on those records is—we are—our Public Research Room is the third-busiest in the system after the one in College Park, and I think our level of business that we, number of researchers that come to us here actually surpasses the number that come down to Archives I. So the interest in these records is tremendous. Of course the interest is … a big part of the interest is in their use in family history and genealogy but also especially the records—well, the military and civil service records are increasingly used by historians doing … research in the history of the Federal government and the United States. So, those two activities I think stand out in terms of evaluating the time I spent here. Also, I was pretty much responsible for the reappraisal of the records of the Selective Service that were held in the records centers of the National Archives, basically, the draft records. Which have been used here--I became familiar with those records when I first started working in the Records Reconstruction Branch, 'cause those records are critical to being able to reconstruct individual service histories of people who served in the Army and in the Air Force during the First—well, certainly, during the Second World War and subsequent to that in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. And those records were slated for disposal, for destruction, and when we— when that was brought to my attention I, you know, advocated and was successful in having that disposition changed, and we have subsequently accessioned the records, the draft registration and classification records for millions of American men. I think the question now, I think, has become, will women be subject to the current draft? I don't know if that has been decided yet, but certainly those records that document the people that served in the Second World War and in the Korean War and the Vietnam War are now safely held in the National Archives here in St. Louis and will be available in perpetuity. So that was another major accomplishment. And I think most recently, in recent years, the last eight or nine years, I've been actively involved in bringing in the records of another important series, the records, they're known as the Individual Deceased Personnel Files. These are records created by the Army and that document the circumstances of death of persons who really were in all branches of service. The Army until the mid-1950s had the task of dealing with casualties in all branches. And those records, again, have always been an important group of records for us in reconstructing military service histories but especially important, the people that, you know, made the ultimate sacrifice and were the casualties of war in World Wars and in inter-war periods as well. People that died in service. So those records are in the process of coming into our holdings as well. But … all told, about 15,000 cubic feet of records that go back to—the earliest ones in that group are from 1939 forward through 1976, through the end of the Vietnam War. So anyway, I would say, if I were asked what the highlights of my time working for NARA, those, bringing those four groups of records into the collections of the National Archives and ensuring their permanent retention for the American people is probably, I would say, the most significant activities that I've been involved in." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "How would you say St. Louis has grown in the archival field according to size and in the work you're doing since you've been there?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Well I mean I think it's … in terms of archives, yeah, it's just … you know, it's expanded tremendously. We had the records center operation here, had been in St. Louis since … really since the end of the Second World War, starting with the Army records. But then when our previous building was constructed, the records of Naval personnel, Marines, Coast Guard, and Air Force all came into St. Louis. And at the same time in the early ’50s, the records of the civil service came here. And those records were being accessed and referenced by the Federal Records Center here. But the main issue was, what was their ultimate—what was their ultimate fate? Would they, you know, eventually be destroyed or would they become part of the archives, permanent holdings of the National Archives? And as I say, that's been happening starting in the mid-’90s, those appraisal efforts took place and the decisions were made, and since 2004 when the Archival Division was established here. It's just, it’s grown tremendously, and currently we have outside of—we are the largest facility in the National Archives outside of D.C., and our holdings come very close to … well, I think our holdings exceed the holdings at A-1, and I think right now we have over, close, getting onto 700,000 cubic feet of archival records here. So it's a major, major center for the Archives. And as I say, the reference that takes place here is … is I think second only to what takes place at the archives in College Park. And it's …" }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "What stories do you have from working at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Well. I guess the ones that I talked—told you before about bringing in these major series of records. And then, of course, we, I think we hold now upwards of over 800 individual series of records and over 130 record groups, so it's become just a major center for archival research. In terms of stories … well, it was in about two areas I remember working—but those involved, during the time that I was working in the Military Appraisal and Disposition Project, dealing with the collection of field command records here, we were assisted—a Congressionally mandated investigation of … of extraterrestrial … aircraft, basically? This was in the early ’90s. A Congressman from New Mexico was … basically … directed the Secretary of Defense to have a major records search done on records created by the Air Force during the immediate postwar period in the late ’40s and early ’50s surrounding supposed sightings of unidentified flying objects. It was very interesting. The results of that—I think that study, they sent several teams of historians, Air Force historians out here to work, whom we worked with and helped … access pertinent records that were held here in St. Louis. That went on for the better part of a year. The study they produced, I was looking at it the other day, it's about three inches thick [Laughing]. But the conclusions they came to were, obviously, that other events which at the time were top secret and could not be shared with the public … because the information could not be shared, the result was that legends proliferated about what had occurred. The main place of course—I don't know if you're familiar with Roswell, New Mexico, is where one of the alleged crashes of a spaceship and supposed recovery of alien spaceship crew took place. All of that, of course, was … crazy." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Mm-hmm." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "But it had to be—because of this Congressman's insistence, the work had to be done to basically debunk [the legends] through the documentation that existed. So that was an interesting experience. Another thing that happened somewhat later, there was an allegation of mass killings during World War II at an Army base in Mississippi. And I don't know, it was in the national news for quite a while in a place called Camp Van Dorn in Mississippi. It was alleged that the Army basically responded to a riot by African American troops by killing hundreds of them, and burying them secretly. And that also was a—again, the Secretary of Defense mandated an investigation, and they came out, the investigators were out with us for many months. And we were able to, based on tracing, using the unit records that we have here, the rosters and morning reports, were able to identify the individuals who were assigned to the units that were there at Camp Van Dorn at the time of the alleged massacre, and we were able to follow these individuals through to the end of their military service and determined that there were not hundreds of people killed. I'm not sure that there were—I think there were one or two individuals who … were shot in, during those riots and that died. But we were able [to determine], again, documenting through the records that the hundreds of people [who] were there and assigned at that base, at that time, not only didn't die, they were discharged alive from military service later in the war. So that also was an interesting research effort. And there have been others. A number of investigations having to do with the use of mustard gas and Agent Orange by the services, and the exposure of military members to those … toxic agents. Also, I was appointed to serve two different times as a Records Expert on committees of the National Academy of Sciences. The one [committee] was investigating the long-term effects of exposure to radiation, exposure of military service persons to radiation connected with the atmospheric nuclear tests that took place from 1945 or '46 through the 1960s. That was … that committee worked for about, I think, two or three years. It involved numerous … attending numerous meetings in Washington, D.C., at the National Academy of Sciences. And then there was another committee that was appointed by the Academy to assess the effect of exposure to Agent Orange by persons who were in the military during the Vietnam War. It was essentially an epidemiological study, and the study obviously was founded on the use and the availability of the records of individual service members, as well as the records of military organizations, that we hold here in St. Louis. And, as I was an expert in those, you know, the contents of those records, I was asked to serve on those two committees at the National Academy of Sciences. So those were interesting experiences." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Do you have anything you would like to say about the Archives itself? Have you enjoyed working for it? Have you … ?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Oh, tremendous. It's been—that's, you know, why I stayed as long as I have, because the work is fascinating, it's very rewarding. As someone who loves history and understands the importance of history, archives are the foundation of historical research. And without archives, history cannot be served. So it's been a wonderful, wonderful career. Wouldn't change it for anything." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Do you have anything else you want to add to your interview?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "I don’t think so. Can't think of anything at the moment." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Okay. Is there anything you need me to edit out of this interview at some point?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "I don't think so, but I mean would I be able to listen to it? You know I—" }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "[Interposing] Yeah, I can send it to you." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Yeah, and I can let you know. No, I don't think—I don't think so. I think I was accurate in what I said, but it would be nice to be able to listen to it and verify that." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Yes, sir, once the recording came out, we'll—I should be able to send it to you." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Okay. Great." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Just to let you know, nothing will be put online or released to anyone in the public for probably about five years." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "So you have plenty of time to make your edits if need be." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Okay. Great." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Alright, well thank you for letting me interview you for our Oral History Project." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Alrighty." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "And thank you so much for talking to me." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Appreciate it. Good to talk. All right. Thank you." }, { "speaker": "Rebecca", "text": "Have a nice day. # RCHIVES National Archives History Office 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW Washington DC 20408" } ]

[ { "speaker": "Daria Labinsky", "text": "OK. Hi, this is Daria Labinsky. I'm interviewing Keith Shuler, and today is February 17th, 2021. OK, Keith, why don't you start off by telling us about where you work now and what your position is." }, { "speaker": "Keith Shuler", "text": "Currently, and pretty much always, for the past 30-odd years, I have worked at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. And I'm an archivist, GS-12 archivist, with all the duties incumbent upon that. Started there is a technician, and was lucky enough to get an office position, and have enjoyed my work there for the past 30-some years." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "OK, where did you—what was your education, your background, before you got there?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Education-wise, I got my bachelor's degree in history from Indiana University, and when I finished at IU, I did a quick tour in the military. And after I got out of the military, ended up coming to Georgia. No jobs in Indiana at the time, Rust Belt, unfortunately. And came to Georgia, worked a couple of jobs, and then went back to school and got my master's degree at Georgia State University, again in history, with an emphasis on the French Revolution and Napoleon. [Laughs] So, go figure that one." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Could you tell us a little about your military background?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Sure. When I was at IU, I ran into a couple of guys who were ROTC candidates, and they convinced me that that would be a good idea. And it was, it's been very helpful career-wise and just life-wise, I think. But so, I went in, went into ROTC when I was at Indiana and finished that course, came out, and the summer after I finished, I went down to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. San Antonio is still one of the most beautiful towns I've been in—and went through my “Officer Basic” course and became a Medical Service Corps officer. And Medical Service Corps officers are neither doctors nor medics, for the most part, they work a lot of the ancillary jobs in the medical field. So you'll find them in hospital administration, medical logistics, those kind of fields. I, on the other hand, was what they call a “Muddy Boots” MSC officer, which was that my first job in the military was as a medical platoon leader. So I was a med platoon leader with the 20th Engineers, which was part of the rapid deployment force on Fort Campbell, 101st Airborne Division, Air Mobile. And then my second job was as the executive officer for the 86th Combat Support Hospitals Headquarters Company. So basically, if you're an executive officer, you get to do everything, again, sort of ancillary that the CO, you know, basically has to have done, but is not necessarily, doesn't have all the time in the world to do. So, for instance, you become things like the, you know, the tax officer, the voting officer, the arms room officer. In my case, I worked with the chief warrant officer in the motor pool, also was one of my jobs, also worked with the guys in the medical supply and repair unit that was part of the hospital. You know, a lot of different, a lot of different jobs on a daily basis that need to be done, that sort of fall to an executive officer, health and welfare inspections, I was a drug rehabilitation officer. You know, there's a whole variety of different, of different charges. And then, eventually, it came time to decide whether I wanted to be a first lieutenant, and I knew, had been told that our particular branch, Medical Service Corps, was very much over strength. So it was sort of more manpower that it needed. And once I made first lieutenant, waiting to be a captain was going to be a wait, which never looks good on a promotion board for any reason whatsoever. So the jobs were few and far between for captains. So, you know, being stuck as a first lieutenant, you know, for an extended period didn't seem too much fun to me. So, I mean, I took an early out with an honorable discharge and said, “Now, let's go see what's out in the world.” Unfortunately, I didn't research the world first. [Laughs] So, my career options were somewhat limited. It was, you know, it was the early-mid-’80s and jobs were scarce. But that kind of sums up my military career. Unless you want to hear some really good stories about being in the Army, which I don't know if you want to do that, because we'll be here all day. [Laughs]" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "That might be a separate interview. They [the Oral History project] have a separate “veterans” section. Was 86th Combat Support, was that also—where was that at?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "That was also on Fort Campbell." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Fort Campbell, OK." }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Yeah, they were the combat support hospital for the 101st Airborne. Really good bunch of guys, really good bunch when it comes—you know, since this is for posterity, I'll just say it out loud—when it came to the people that I worked with in the military, especially the guys that worked under me, the guys that worked around me, I had some very good soldiers, and every one of them knew their job, knew it well, and performed it to the utmost to their abilities, and I was always very pleased with, always very proud of the guys. They were real, very conscientious of their work and very well-trained medical professionals, too. So it kind of made my job a lot easier, which was nice there." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "OK, so how did you get from Georgia State to the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Well, that's an interesting story right there. I started out at Georgia State, and I was a teaching assistant down there. So I was working with professors, and my intention was to get my master's degree and get my Ph.D. and go teach somewhere. Again, apparently, I didn't research the world, because there were no teaching jobs at the time but I was working as a teaching assistant, and we were getting no tuition breaks and $150 every two weeks, so we weren't making a whole lot of money. And I’d gotten a job working at … wasn't Barnes and Noble, let's see, shoot, the other bookstore that was at the time, I forget the name of the bookstore—Walden, Walden Bookstores [Waldenbooks]—and had just secured a job and was going to start in a couple of weeks working at Walden Bookstores part time, because there's something about paying rent and eating, that, you know, you want to do. But I was sitting in my cubicle that I shared with another individual— Eric Brauer—and one of the other teaching assistants came over. Her name was Lisa Grubbs. Great, great, great folks. And Lisa asked Eric, she said, “Well, how did the interview go?” And he said, ‘You know, it was OK, but I don't think it's something I want to do.” And I turned around and I said, “What interview?” And Lisa said, “Oh, I'm working over at the Carter Library project (at the time), the library had—the construction hadn't been completed, so they were still over in the old post office across from the Russell Building in downtown Atlanta. So, and they were still a project, so they hadn’t really opened. And I said, “Oh, that's interesting.” And Eric said, “Yeah, it’s just something I didn't want to do.” And I looked at Lisa, and I said, “What does it pay?” [Laughs] And she told me, and it paid, like, you know, half again what I was going to be making at the bookstore. And I said, “Can I get an interview?” And she said, “Sure, I'll call.” And so she called, and it was either that afternoon or the next day, I went down and interviewed with a couple of the folks down there. I talked to Don Schewe, who was director at the time, and Martin Elzy, who was assistant director. And when they described the job to me, I was like, “Well, this isn't bad, sure.” And I told them I'd go ahead and take it. And at the time it was a part-time job. So it was, you know, they were still employing students as part-timers at the time. And I did that for about a year and a half, I think, two years, while I worked on my master’s and when the—" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "What were you doing?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Oh, a lot of the—just, you know, a lot of refolding, relabeling, that kind of thing, not being, you know, not being completely vetted at the time. So, you know, I didn't have any kind of major clearances or anything yet with the agency. I spent a lot of time moving stuff from nasty old folders to nice new folders and, you know, putting stuff in Hollinger boxes and stuff, which was OK. I mean, like I say, it was part-time work. I didn't expect it to be, you know, glorious and glamorous. And it served its purpose. I mean, like, refoldering, reboxing, entire C track, a couple other things. And it was, make sure the right folders are in the right boxes, and the right files are in the right folders, that kind of thing. But did that, like I say, for about two years, and then, I’d just finished up doing all my classroom work and still had to work on my thesis, finish up my thesis. And the supervisory archivist— Dave Alsobrook, who is a great guy— Dave came to me and said, “Hey, there's an opening for an archives tech if you think you might want to apply. And he told me, he said, “You know, it's competitive, so you're not guaranteed you're going to get it.” He goes, “But you have been working here. So it kind of gives you a leg in.” He goes, “You think you might be interested?” I said, “Well, can I think about it overnight?” And he said, “Yeah.” And I went back and I talked to a couple of my professors, and they were very honest with me. They said, “Keith, we know you want to teach, you want to get a Ph.D. But the field is flooded. It's just flooded.” They said, “We’ve watched you teach in class, and you can relate to students and everything else. And you present material well and everything else,” they said. “But, it's just darn near impossible to get a job, and it's not looking any better for the next few years.” And so I kind of went, “OK, maybe, maybe time to change life course here.” Went back to Dave, and I said, “Yeah,” and he told me what I needed to fill out and I filled it out. And after I think it was about a month or so, few weeks, I got a notice that said, “Hey, guess what, you got the job.” And so I started, went ahead and did all my clearances and everything they needed to do. And I started working for the National Archives full time, so that—" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Ok, so what year was that about?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Oh, gee, that would have been—this is where it gets confusing for me, because I'm not good on dates. [Laughs] I think that would have been about ’86, I think. ’86, ’87, I think maybe ’86, ’87, right around there." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So the building opened in ’86." }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Yeah. Which was really interesting, because every once in a while we’d go over and kind of look, and you could kind of see it taking shape and everybody, I mean, everybody was really enthusiastic. I remember one day we went over to look over at the—they had finished all the inside. Nothing was up. It was just bare concrete and walls. And I went over with Jim Kratsas, who was the museum curator at the time. And I mean, he was very excited. He was like, this is going to go over here, this is going to be over here, and we're going to put this up here. So it was kind of nice to see it go up. But yeah, I was working there when they opened up, when they opened up full time, and they opened up—the museum opened on October 1st—Carter’s birthday—of ’86, and then the Research Room opened up in January of ’87. And we had quite a few records open, I mean, we had—the entire White House Central File Subject File was open. And so, we had quite a few researchers walking in, and press people that were all excited about being able to actually see stuff. So it was great." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Did you go to the opening, were you guys invited?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Actually, we were—they didn't need all of us, unfortunately. And they—it was kind of one of those things like, if you want to come and you're not working, you can come. But there's going to be so many people here that, you know, if you prefer to stay away, that would be OK. So, I was like, I don't know if I want to deal with the traffic and crowds and everything else. So I kind of hung back and let everybody kind of do their thing, and came in the next day and was like, “OK, yeah, we're open.” [Laughs] So yeah, but it was, I mean, it was really nice, it was a really nice opening, we got a lot of briefings on it and everything else. And there's kind of an interesting, funny story in there, too, it’s going to be—Dave Alsobrook, who was the supervisory archivist, has actually written a book about being an archivist, working with the National Archives [ _Presidential Archivist: A Memoir_ ]. He's going to have it in his book. But—Don Schewe was the director and was given a briefing on the opening, and how everything was going to be physically set up. And out behind the library where the ponds are located, there’s sort of a hill. And he was talking about where the press was going to set up and everything else. And Don said, “So the shots are going to be across the grassy knoll at the presidents.” And I kind of looked at Don, and said, “Never say ‘shot,’ ‘grassy knoll’ and ‘presidents’ all in the same breath.” So that got kind of a laugh. But it was a good opening, you know, the speeches were well done, good speeches, and a good crowd. So it was pretty good. And when we opened the Research Room that January, that was—you know, of course, our first research card was President Carter, so that was kind of cool. And we've been serving researchers ever since." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Did you help with the move, did you guys have to, like, physically do any of that?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "We actually hired, they actually hired a company to do the move, and their job—you know, we had to go in and mark the boxes. So we had codes that we kind of, sort of an alphanumeric code as to what floor, what shelving unit, what shelf it was going to go on. So we had to go through and mark all the boxes in that manner, before they moved out of the old post office downtown. So that was kind of a job, kind of a chore. But Martin Elzy was great at organizing and things like that. So Martin had kind of figured out the plan and kept us on track as to getting it done on time and how it was done and everything. But we had—I can't remember the name of the company that moved us, but they had some individuals come in, and it was like, “Take this box and this box and this box.” And we followed them out to the trucks and moved all the nonsensitive stuff in that manner. Now, I wasn't privy to how they moved any of the sensitive material that was classified, so—but I know it was moved separately. So I assume that it was moved with a whole lot more security and under some sort of guard. But that was not one part of the move that I was involved in. So I'm not sure how that was done. But I just remember we filled up, you know, box moving truck after box moving truck after box moving truck. It just—there were times it seemed it would never end. And unfortunately, of course, I think there was, like, one or two times during that move that a truck showed up, and we opened the back of the truck down on the loading dock, and one of the FRCs had fallen off the top of the pile, and there were kind of papers everywhere. Because moves happen, and things happen during moves. But you know, Dave Alsobrook, Martin Elzy were pretty well experienced guys, and had worked up in DC with Presidential Libraries, and had been involved in moves before. So the minute the back of the truck went up and they saw papers, the first thing they did was say, “Don't touch anything.” And so they would kind of go through, and interestingly enough, they'd look and see how it had fallen, and where it was laying and everything, and then kind of look at the papers and they were very, exactly managed to get stuff back where it should be. And so the “disaster averted” kind of thing. But yeah, we just had numerous trucks showing up at the loading dock, and then they’d put the stuff on floats and bring it back into the stacks, and it'd be like, “OK, put this one here and this one here and this one here,” so kind of an eye-opening procedure to watch just how much planning goes into moving that many boxes and coordinating the people and the trucks and everything else. So it was a real exercise in logistics." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Can you talk a little about the White House Central Files, since that was, you said, pretty much the first collection that was opened, and I don't think everybody knows what that is about?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Oh, well, basically, the—when things come into the White House, for the most part, they kind of go to individuals or offices that need to deal with them. And so, if it's public mail, it goes to the correspondence unit, if it's something that an agency is going to deal with, they'll get it, the proper people in the White House will get it over to a particular agency. But eventually, just like any other business office in the world, because the White House is really just—the White House is a business office, just in the business of running the country, is kind of the way that it was explained to me, and I think that's a pretty good explanation—the Central File is kind of, I don't want to say overflow, but I guess that's the easiest word to say. The way it works is, when people get too many files in their office, or when things need to be filed away permanently, they go down to the Central File. And it's just that, it's a central filing unit. And the Central File, the people that work on the Central File, will look at the documents, decide what the document is about, and they have a list of category codes that they keep. So, for instance, FG is “federal government organizations,” and like—I’m trying to think, I can't think of any of the codes directly, but say, for instance, like, FG-40 might be the Department of Education or something like that. So they file—what they'll do, what they'll do is, they'll take each of the documents, mark the documents that—and a lot of times, these are photocopies or onionskin copies of their replies to letters, things like that—they'll mark these copies with the major category code that they fit under. So, for instance, let's say if the letter, if it's a letter and it deals, if it talks about, mostly about the Department of Agriculture, but it also talks about the director of the Department of Agriculture and also the state of Idaho, OK? Since it's mostly about agriculture, up in the right- hand corner of the document, they'll put the category code for the Department of Agriculture, and then they'll do, like, the director’s name under that. And then a code for the state of Idaho. And if it's a multipage document, they'll photocopy the front page. The original copy, they will put in that first category code at the top on the right-hand side. And then they will take two photocopies for the other two categories and put that first page photocopy in each of those locations. So there's a way to cross reference back to the original copy. But it's a very—it's sort of a general subject file. A lot of times, you don't get a whole lot of really specific things on bills or actions that are taken in the White House. A lot of that material stays more with individuals’ collections. But the Central File does deal with those kind of collections, too, so a lot of times you'll see boxes in the Central File that are marked for, like, Hamilton Jordan, and it'll be an entire box out of his office that deals with a particular subject that he dealt with. In that case, when you find—they kept a log of those kind of materials. And so when we process a collection, we'll go through, look at that log, and make sure that there is no material marked as a Central File box or folder that needs to go back into, say, Hamilton Jordan's collection or Jody Powell's office materials, or something like that. So we try to reconstruct the office files in the way that they were when they were in the White House as best we can. And there are other adjuncts to the Central File. There’s the White House Central File Name File, which is just that, it's a file of materials kept by name of correspondent or by correspondent organization. So you might have, you know, John Smith's letter to the president in there, or you might have the National Organization of Women’s correspondence to the White House in there. And that's all done alphabetically. And the alphabetization is sort of difficult to deal with sometimes, because, like, [the folder labeled] “N-o” might include “N-o-a, N-o-c, N-o-d,” and so you've got to kind of extrapolate when you look at it. But it's a good collection, too, because, you know, a few times we've had people come in and say, “Hey, my dad wrote a letter to President Carter,” or, “I wrote a letter or postcard when I was a kid, do you have it, might you have it?” And you go look at a Name File, and it'll actually be there. So, it’s kind of nice to hand, just somebody that walks in off the street and say, “Oh, yeah, we got this.” So it's always nice to see their face light up a little bit. And then the other part of the Central File is, you have the White House Central File Oversized Attachments, and CF—Confidential File Oversized Attachments. Confidential File Oversized Attachments are a little bit more sensitive, a lot of times are not really confidential, but in either case they're both sort of oversized. They're not necessarily physically oversized, but maybe volume oversized, like, you know, seven or eight folders on one subject that somebody just needed out of their office. And again, we'll try to reintegrate those into the various collections. But the Subject File is literally just subject by subject, you know, cached away and in folders and Hollingers. And the folders are filed by category code, also. So you’ve got to have your manual to be able to know what the codes are. And I think the consolidated manual is probably, gee, gosh, it's got to be three inches thick, four inches thick. So a lot of category codes, a lot of cross referencing, that's kind of where it’s at. But a lot of times it's a good place to start researchers, especially if they're not sure where they want to go in their topic, it's a good place to start them, because they can kind of zero in a little bit better and sort of narrow that topic by using the Central File." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Is that your favorite collection?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "No, it's not. [Laughs] I mean, we have a lot of good collections. I don't think we have anything that is like, that I would say, “Oh, we just need to not pay any attention to this at all.” Everything's useful in one way or another. But I've got a couple of favorite ones. I like Speechwriters because Speechwriters was the first really big collection that I worked on. And it was interesting to kind of watch and sort of look at how a speech developed, you know, a major speech, even small speeches, you know, quick speeches, to see how they were developed, you know, within the White House and in the speechwriters’ unit. I think I kind of have an affinity for that, because when I was in high school, I did three years of speech and debate. So, you know, I sort of fall back on that. I like the Staff Secretary file, the Presidential Handwriting file, simply because it's the president's outbox. And so there's always a lot of good things in there to look at and see. But you know, even some of the stuff that I processed here in the last couple of years, like Cynthia Wilson's papers, she worked a lot—she worked on the Alaska Land Bill. And these were her personal papers. And they, you know, the stuff that she had in there was just really eye opening on the Land Bill and really on Alaska itself, was kind of one of those, “Oh, now I want to go to Alaska” sort of collections, really informative, just about the geography and topography, and the people, and Native American tribes. And then all the effect of the Land Bill itself, and how they were going to work with that, and a lot of the debate back and forth. So that was good. So, those are kind of three of my top ones. But I don't know that I have one that I would say, like, “This is my favorite,” and I don't think that's a bad position for somebody that's an archivist, because I think if you have a favorite—you know, I've seen people that have had favorites and, not illegitimately, I mean, it's not a bad thing, but you have a kind of tendency to steer people to that, because you know it more than anything else and—not that that's a bad thing. But I kind of take more of a sort of a scattergun, I guess—maybe that's too random— more of a broad spectrum approach to it, because, you know, I kind of like to be able to say, “Yeah, this would be a good collection for you, but this one and this one and this one also might help.” So I kind of try to keep an open mind on what's good. So I just think that everything is good and try to point researchers in that direction. But, you know, if I had to pick one—if you ask me what my favorite document was, then it gets really easy, because I do have one favorite document that I found when I was working on the Staff Secretary Collection, on the Presidential Handwriting materials. There were three of us that worked on that, Jim Herring, Gary Faulk, and myself. And so we sort of split it up year-wise. And I think it was, gosh, I forget what year it was I worked on it, I’d have to look at the collection—“Oh, yeah, that's mine.” But it was a memo from Gerald Rafshoon to President Carter, and it was talking points, which are usually just one little, one page. And they're usually about individuals or press that are going to come in and talk to the president. And Rafshoon in the body of the memo said, “Hey, these guys from _Sports Illustrated_ are going to come in, and they want to talk to you about fly fishing, and sports, and softball games, and everything like that. So, these are the two individuals, and this is some stuff you want to talk about.” And at the bottom of it, there's a handwritten note from Rafshoon, and it says, “Mr. President, this time when asked about your athletic prowess, break from standard practice and lie. Ha ha ha.” And President Carter actually wrote a note underneath it, and sent it back to Rafshoon. It says, “Jerry, that wouldn't be a break from standard practice. Ha, ha, ha.” And I love that document because, you know, first of all, it's funny and it's nice. It's kind of a, it sort of hits you out of nowhere, and it reminds you that these people have a sense of humor. And the other thing it does for me, too, is it reminds me that, you know, yeah, you're the president and yeah, you're running the biggest, most powerful nation on the face of the Earth. And it's not an easy job, and it's complex, and it's a serious job. But you can still have a sense of humor. And the other thing is, that it reminds me that these guys, it doesn't matter the fact that they're the president. They still put—they're still like me, they put their pants on one leg at a time. And they just have a bigger, more important job. And it reminds me that they're human, and I think that sort of hits home when you look at criticisms of a president—and let's be honest, every one of them get criticized, you can't make 100 percent of the people or 100 percent of Congress happy every day. It's just not going to happen. But it reminds you that even through the criticism, they're trying to do the best job that they can. And so that is really my favorite document in the library. I mean, of course, the notes on the Camp David Accords, his handwritten notes, is kind of up there, too, because you see what a great sort of reader of people President Carter can be. When he looked, when dealing with two peoples who have not seen eye to eye for generations, and he's able to sort of get an understanding and a read on their mind. It's interesting to see how he does that. So, yeah. So that's kind of the greatest hits here." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "What part of your job do you like best, is there a—" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Gee, you know, I mean, I kind of like it all. I mean, it all has its moments. It all has its moments, and it all has its moments. It’s—I often tell, when I get people that ask me, when you tell people what you do, you know, a lot of times they go, “Oh, that sounds really exciting.” And you're like, “Well, yeah, but it is a job, you know?” And so, the first six months is like, “Woo! And then you're like, “OK, it's a job, and it's not a bad job.” But, you know, I mean, I've had enjoyable experiences kind of across the board, you know, processing, reading things. It's, you know, sometimes it is tedious, let's be honest, because sometimes it's fairly mundane stuff. Other times, very exciting to see how decisions are being made and who's saying what about what. Working with researchers, you know, sometimes you have to put in a little extra effort, and sort of delve a little bit deeper, I think. And I mean, if I had to sort of, you know, buttonhole one thing, it would be—working with researchers can always be fun. You know, it's nice to see that you've given them something that is going to be useful and that sort of makes their day and sort of completes their research. And they're always grateful, so that's always nice. It never hurts to get kudos. And especially, like, undergraduates, it's always nice. Somebody that's never dealt with primary source material before, and they're kind of at a loss. It's sort of fun to be able to say, “OK, take this approach and look at it this way and frame your thesis question, keep asking that, look at the material.” So it's kind of nice to help in that, sort of furthering their abilities in that way. But even though we don't do a ton of conservation work—and again, that can be sort of very, you know, [a] rigid, work-hard kind of thing—a lot of times it's interesting, when we do get to do it, to see what methods we can use locally, and how it's done, and sort of get coached through things. So it's all kind of fun most of the time. It's all kind of a job sometimes. But if I had to pick one thing, it would be working with researchers. It's just fun to talk to people. You know, because we do spend so much time not talking. I have a tendency to be a little loquacious. [Laughs] And it's fun to see what different people are researching, and how they're coming at the material. You know, everybody's got a different way to approach it, and everybody's got a different idea on how to interpret the same thing—which I've always found interesting, that four people can walk in and read the same document and get four different things out of it. So that's kind of, if I had to put one at the top, it would be working with researchers." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Do you, how do you—first of all, how has the library changed over the time you've been there?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Uh. Wow, that's a long time to cover. I think one of the things is sort of the, I'm not quite certain how to phrase it, I want to say the depth of the research, but that doesn't really kind of hit it. It sort of does and sort of doesn't. You know, when we first opened, everything was kind of new. And so, you know, people were coming in, and it was, like, “Oh, we're going to write on Camp David,” or “We're going to write on the hostage crisis,” or “Oh, we're going to write on the Olympics.” And so, there were sort of these broad, really broad topics that people kind of came in and researched. And, of course, you know, when you first open, you have a limited amount of resources that you can provide people with. So over the years, as more things have opened, people have found ways to sort of drill down into those broad topics that were initially broached for the Carter administration. So they found ways to sort of tunnel in and get more specific on, you know, “OK, what was Begin’s thinking during the Camp David Accords?” Or, “What was Sadat's thinking,” or “How did they react?” So they were able to get a little bit more specific, because of the amount and types of materials that we've opened. And so, as the years have gone on, that has kind of changed. The approach to what we're processing, and how we're processing, has shifted a little bit, too, because, obviously, in the early years, you're trying to get a little bit of material out, OK? So you don't neglect a really, really complex or hard collection, but you might set it aside for two or three years. And so, something that is as labor intensive as, say— I'm trying to think of a good one, particularly like personal—like Cynthia Wilson's material, OK? There was a lot of loose material that took a lot of organization and things like that. So, yeah, you could do it your second year, but why not wait until your third or fourth year? Because in your second year you might be able to open four or five, you know, less complex collections that’d give you more material. Which is not an invalid way to approach things. And, of course, as time has gone on, of course, we've had to kind of, we get more and more involved in doing more declassification of material and things like that, because it becomes more available as time goes by. So that's kind of changed. Our approach to working with researchers has never changed. You know, we're always, we always want to be helpful, always want to be respectful, always want to be professional with them, and friendly. And actually, the way that's changed over the years is, you kind of develop, you know, sort of deeper relationships with researchers that keep coming back. You get a little closer to them. You might not get downright on a personal, friendly level with them. But you get to know them a little bit better and can kind of interpret their needs and anticipate where they're going a little bit better. So that's kind of changed. Organizationally, there's been more of a movement to integrate the archives and the museum staff a little bit, so that we kind of know what each other is doing, which I think is a good plan, is a good plot there. And of course, as the years’ve gone by, we get a little bit more conscious of going back and looking at collections and saying, “OK, now we're going to redo this,” in terms of conservation, or reboxing, or those kind of things to, you know, make sure the material is still going to be there 100 years from now. But the job itself, the work itself, the day-to-day processing, reviewing, describing, those kind of things haven't changed that much. Description-wise, we've had to become more attuned to an electronic environment. So our finding aids have sort of been shifted to present themselves in, you know, in a more effective way in an electronic environment. But when it comes down to it, it's really sort of a matter of organization, in that—how are you going to organize it and make it show up on a screen a little bit more effectively in terms of how a reader in an electronic format sort of looks at stuff, you know, they don't want to spend a whole lot of time looking at a title. They just want the title there, they want the links to go exactly where they want, they don't want to have to search through four or five pages to find exactly where they want to be. So we've sort of had to tailor our finding aids and descriptions more toward that format—which is, you know, it's the same information that we would present in a written format, a nonelectronic format. It's just organized in a different way and sort of presented in a different manner. And description has become a little bit more, a little bit more involved. To start out, we never had ARC, we never had DAS, we never had any of those tools. So, learning how to enter that material effectively and efficiently—because it is time consuming, it does take time—so learning how to do it, and do it effectively and well and not spend, you know, an hour entering one folder in, becoming a little bit versed in how to do that is—there was a learning curve there for everybody involved. But for the researchers, it's great. An electronic search tool is a whole lot easier than thumbing through page after page of a finding aid. I still have a love for handwritten, our old hand-typed finding aids. But, you know, that's because they’re old and so am I. [Laughs] But the day-to-day job, I don't think that in terms of processing documents and dealing with the public, that hasn't changed much. Even though the electronic world is a little bit faster world, I think all the researchers understand that research is research, and it's going to take time. So they understand. So they're not like, “I want it right away.” So, yeah, it's different in some ways, but I think the job, you know, in general, as a whole, hasn't changed that much." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Something you mentioned earlier, I thought maybe you should explain for people—you mentioned, when you process, looking at every page—why do you have to do that?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "OK, so, yeah, when I first started work, I was told that Presidential Libraries was kind of a different bird, in that, you know, the federal records centers—and no shade on them, they do a great job, they do a lot of good work—they have a lot of challenges that they face in terms of the records that they have to deal with and everything else. And a lot of times they can do bulk reclassifications or bulk openings where they don't, they're sort of taking a whole box and saying, “Yeah, this is good to go.” For us—and I'm sure that there are times that they get much more involved in just saying, “Hey, here's a folder, we can open it.” I'm sure that there are a lot of times that they have to get very detailed in their work. I'm not familiar with the complete job that they do, but I do know that they do a good job. With us, the material, because it comes out of the White House, can be very sensitive. And it can be very sensitive in a couple of different ways. One, of course, is that it can be sensitive in terms of, you know, portions of it are classified, OK? And of course, you know, if it's classified, it has to be removed from any kind of open material, and it has to be safeguarded in proper ways. So we look at every page to make sure that none of that material is released. OK? The other way that it's sensitive, too, is that you've got to look out, just like in any other review situation, you've got to be aware of people's personal information, Social Security numbers, driver’s license, those kind of things. And, you know, it's very—the stuff, that personal information can kind of sneak into the records in sort of odd ways. For instance, one of the collections I was working on had some documents from veterans that were writing in about problems they were having with their veteran’s benefits. And they wrote letters to the president, and they would put in their service number. Having been in the military about the same time, you recognized right away that somebody's service number was their Social Security number. So, if you're kind of not aware or not noticing that “hey, there's this pattern to these numbers,” you know, “could it be?” —You want to make sure that kind of stuff is taken out. And then, of course, you get people that write the president and will, you know, there might not be a Social Security number, and there might not be anything, any kind of that sort of content that in a digital world could be devastating to somebody's credit rating or reputation or whatever. But people will write in to the president with their problems and they will, in some cases, fully describe what is going on in their family or in their life. And, you know, that's their personal business. And so you want to take those kind of materials out. And like I said earlier, the White House is a business office in the business of running the country. And they hired people, and they had to make assessments on people that they were hiring, and they had to make assessments of people that they'd already hired. And, you know, life is life. And sometimes those assessments are critical. And again, that's somebody's job performance and everything else. And so, those are the kind of things you want to be sensitive of, and so, those are the kind of things you look for. And then you add on top of that that a lot of times—well, not a lot of times, but occasionally—somebody would write a report to send up to the president, or send out to an agency, and they would include information from another agency, and perhaps that material was classified, and they would sort of fold it into a report. And so you have to be aware of, when you're reading things, you have to be able to go, “This sounds very suspicious, and it looks like something that should not be open.” And so then you have to kind of do a little bit of research and say, “Yep, OK, they put these numbers or this information in here, one or two sentences that really, we can't let go.” And so you need to be able to withdraw that. And the way, what I was taught was that if you weren't certain about withdrawing something, you withdraw it. It's just always better to err on the side of the angels, OK? And, you have to go back and fully research something for a couple of weeks to make sure, a couple of days or whatever, to make sure and get the authorization from the proper agencies and the people, to make sure something can be opened than to open something you shouldn't have opened. You can always release something, you can't take things back, is kind of it. So we were always taught to be very, very cautious and very, very conscientious in our review of documents. So I've always tried to be, and everybody at the library always has been." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Did you ever work with President Carter?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Unfortunately, no. I've never had the opportunity to work with him. I've met him a couple of times. I’ve shaken his hand. And it used to be the norm that they would have great Christmas parties [at the Carter Center] and great Fourth of July parties. And, you know—my wife has actually, has the privilege of being better acquainted with President Carter than I am. Because when we were going out, I went to the Christmas party, and he actually came across the dance floor and asked her to dance one dance. Yeah. [Laughs] And of course, you know, she's my wife, so I like to think it's because she was the prettiest girl there—and she was. But yeah, he actually danced with her. So I kind of stood on the sidelines and went, “Wow, so many years working here, I get to shake his hand, she gets to dance with him.” But yeah, I mean, I've been in a couple of meetings where he's been there and it's— the first time, I’ve gotta laugh, because the first time I ever met him, we were actually over at the Carter Center side in that central meeting room they have right when you go in. And I was sitting on—there was a couch in there, and there's a table, a meeting table, a bunch of chairs and some couches and chairs around the outside, and I was sitting, and I had my back to the door, and I was talking to Bob Bohanan, who was a librarian at the time, was our librarian. And I was in the middle of this discussion with Bob. And all of a sudden Bob jumps to his feet. And I looked up and said, “Bob, what are you doing?” And I turned around, and Carter had walked in the room. And I'm like, “Oh, God, this is embarrassing.” So that was the first time I ever met him. And then, oh, lucky for me, about a couple of weeks later, we got to get our pictures taken with him. So I was hoping he wouldn’t remember who I was. [Laughs] But he’s got a great memory, so I’m sure he did. [Laughs] But as far as working with him directly, no, I never have. Research-wise, I mean, I've had the opportunity to work with some pretty interesting people. Stansfield Turner, Leslie Stahl, Vice President Mondale, Kai Bird, authors, just a whole bunch, a whole raft of really interesting researchers and authors. But I think all our researchers are interesting." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Do you feel like the library is part of NARA? How does it, what's the relationship, in your opinion, between NARA and the libraries, or this library?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "I think that when we first opened, there was that sort of, that in-house divide or rivalry that you get in any agency when you have different departments within an agency. It was kind of, “Oh, those are kind of field offices,” and the presidential libraries and—I don't want to say there was, early in my career, I don't want to say that there was this, “What do we do with them?” sort of feeling. But there was, you did kind of get the idea that somehow we were a little different. And I think we _were_ a little different, because of, just, what we did and the way we did it, our processing review procedures were different, are a little different than the rest of the National Archives. And the fact that some libraries were dealing with presidents directly and foundations and things like that, we sort of had to approach the material in a little bit of a different way sometimes. And organizationally, we had a museum. How do you deal with that? So, you know, there was that kind of thing. But I think over the years, there's been more of an effort to sort of draw really every part of the agency together, to sort of get everybody on the same page, and everybody kind of working toward the same kind of goals, and working up to, toward a final end in how we're doing things and how we're looking at the agency itself. I think there's sort of been that move to—I don't want to say consolidate, because that makes, that sounds more like conformity. And I don't think that's true. I think that the overarching umbrella of the National Archives wants to be there. But I think it does want to recognize, you know, records centers, and presidential libraries, and regional archives, all of those. I think it wants them to have their own flavor. I think it just wants them to sort of have their own flavor underneath the umbrella of the National Archives and to make it more readily recognizable that it’s there. For the longest time—I mean, it's hard enough when you say you’re a presidential library, everybody thinks you’re a library, doesn't understand that you’re an archive. But a lot of times, we would get people who go, “Really? You're part of the National Archives?” Because it wasn't that readily advertised. And now I think it's more recognizable that we're part of this and we do this, so it's changed. It's changed in that regard. And like I said, I don't think it was kind of, “Ooh, they’re presidential libraries,” you know, “We don't want to have anything to do with them.” I just think it was kind of, like, “They do things differently” kind of thing. And so, they've kind of tried to fold that back in." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Is there any one thing you're most proud of that you've worked on?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Oh, wow. I try to do everything well, and try to take pride in everything, but is there any one thing? I think if we go back to that first big collection, I think it would go back to Speechwriters, because it was a very—I mean, it was well organized, but it was sort of—you had to do some work to put it together, so that it would make sense. I think also getting the actual speech files themselves and working to get them organized. I mean, they were generally organized, but you’d get, like, seven different copies of the speech in one folder, and it’s sort of a challenge to look at each copy and say, “OK, this one needs to be first in the folder, because this was the first copy. And then it changed to this, and then it changed to this, and this and this and this and this. And this is the final copy.” And how do you take a speech where they've got the first draft, and to get the final draft, they've made, like, 30 different changes in it, but what they've done is taken and typed out strips of paper and taped it over the top of the original, because people want to know, “What did the original say?” So how do we deal with that? How do we work with that? And again it was the first really big collection that I worked with. So I'm proud of that, and I think as sort of a semi-apprentice journeyman archivist at the time, I think it was a challenge for me, and I came through it. I mean, Staff Secretary stuff, you can't help but be proud of that, because it's such high-quality material in terms of the information that's there. But I’ve tried to do the best on every collection that I've worked on. Some have been easier than others. Some have been a lot of, you know, “Gee, what do I do with this entire box of loose paper?” [Laughs] An entire FRC of just, you know, somebody had no folders, no topics, no subjects, no nothing. So those have been kind of, some of the ones when you get those are challenging. At the end of it, you feel very good about getting it done. But if I had to pick one, I'd say Speechwriters, it's interesting to see how they work on speeches, how they develop them, and sort of, how they reacted to the reaction, those kind of things. So, yeah." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Do you have any kind of stories you want to share, work-related stories?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Gee, 30 years, I think I got one! [Laughs] It's kind of fun, because when you work in a presidential library, you deal with material, and some of the stuff is so high powered, and you talk to different people every day. And I had one colleague, Gary Faulk, God rest his soul, he was a good fellow. And Gary had been working with us for a while, we'd gotten into a couple of conversations. And Gary was, he was very much, “Aah, famous people don't faze me.” And it's funny, because you do sort of develop this atmosphere of, you know, Lesley Stahl walks into the Research Room, and you're kind of like, “Oh, that's nice.” Because, first of all, you don't want to jump up and down. [Laughs] So, Gary, we’d been talking. He was like, “You know, famous people don’t faze me.” And it was 4:25, 4:20, something like that in the afternoon on a Friday, and Gary and I were the only ones back in the office—we had some other office administrative folks floating around, but we were the only two archivists, quote unquote—yeah, we were both archivists at the time—in the building. So we're closing at, like, 4:30, 4:45, something like that. And the front desk calls, and they said, “We have two individuals out here that need to talk to an archivist.” And I answered the phone, and I said, “Well, we're getting ready to close here in a few minutes. We can't really do a whole lot for them. Can they come back on Monday, so we can talk to them?” It's Friday. Let's be honest. [Laughs] You know, Gary and I are ready to go home. But we know we've got to do our civil duty, because we're getting paid to do this. And I said, “OK, one of us will come out and talk to them.” So I looked at Gary and said, “How do you want to do this?” And I think he said, “Rock, paper, scissors,” and we shot for it, and I lost. [Laughs] So I walked out and I came around the corner, and there was these two individuals standing there. One individual just, I mean, the guy was tall and sort of rangy, you know? And I thought, “Wow, he looks kind of like I might have seen him somewhere before.” And the other fella—I mean, I'm embarrassed to say this—the other fellow was actually a professor from Georgia State University, and he was an economics professor. And to this day, I can't remember his name, because what happened to me was, he looked at me, and he said, “Hi, my name is Professor So-and-so from Georgia State University. And we're having a symposium today, and one of the speakers thought he would like to come down and just see the library and talk to a few people.” He goes, “This is John Kenneth Galbraith,” the economist. And I went, “Really?” [Laughs] And I told him, I said, “I'm sorry, but we're getting ready to close here in just about 20 minutes. I can't let you do any research.” And he was, like, “No, I’d just really kind of like a tour and to get an idea of the kind of material.” So I said, “Well, if you’ll wait here, I can go get a couple of boxes of stuff.” And I went in the back, and I got a couple of Hollinger boxes and brought them into the Research Room, because he just wanted to be there for a few minutes. And he kind of looked at some stuff, you know, just a couple of boxes from the Central File on economics. And we talked about doing research, and what kind of researchers we've had, and that kind of thing. And I was so awestruck, I had no questions for him, [laughs] you know. But at the end of it, he was a wonderful, very polite, really, really astute, I mean, almost erudite, it was just … kind of wonderful. And at the end of it, we were talking and everything, and I said, “I've got another individual here that would just love to meet you”—because Gary had been talking about him, actually, three or four days before, some show, some TV show he was on. And he said, “Oh, OK. So I walked him back into the offices, and Gary was looking down, and I said, “Hey, Gary, I’ve got somebody here you need to meet.” And Gary looked up, and he went, “Oh, my God! You’re John Kenneth Galbraith! I saw you on TV!” [Laughs] And it was all I could do to keep from laughing, but, you know, it was that one second of total noncomposure, and then he collected it and stood up and shook his hand. And Galbraith just smiled, you know, that kind of stuff. So, yeah, that's one of my favorite ones. And I think it kind of gets the nature of presidential libraries. You never know who's going to walk in, and you never know how you’re going react to them sometimes. And in terms of finding documents, I think that, you know, that Rafshoon thing, just when I saw it, I was just like, “Wow, this is great!” And I can remember Jim Yancey, who has since retired and worked declassification for us. Really talented individual, very bright, wonderful guy, just a great guy, conscientious and, really, work-wise. And I mean, I can remember [him] getting so excited when “Charlie Wilson's War,” the movie, was out, there are scenes where he's walking around waving a piece of paper about getting funds for Afghan rebels to fight the Soviets. And, Jim is, like—I remember when he showed me, he said, “This is the piece of paper!” because it had been declassified. And I was, like, “Cool! That's really neat!” So that kind of stuff, you know? I think, too, stories just about helping researchers who, they're like, “Oh, my gosh, this is just what I was looking for!” Tor Petersen from University of Trondheim in Norway had come over to do research for about a month. Wonderful guy, just a great researcher who just—I actually went to lunch with him a couple of times. I make it a point not to get too personable with researchers, because it is a job and you don't want to get in a conversation, let anything slip that you shouldn’t. But I did. He was very personable. He was personable, was nice, had a lot of questions about the United States. So we went and talked a lot about American culture. But at the time we had a system installed in the Research Room that had a ton of declassified documents on it, and it was all electronically searchable and everything. But, you know, Professor Petersen, he didn't like computers too much. And when I said, “You should try it,” he’s like, “Well, I'm not sure.” And, you know, he'd been there about three or four days. And I said, “Well, let me show you what it can do.” And I showed him, and boy, he stayed—he was like, “Wow!” And he spent several days just doing research on that system and loved it. And he was very excited about the information he'd been able to get so quickly, that it sort of freed him up to do a lot of other research during the rest of the time he was there. So it was nice to see him get that excited. You know, I'm sure there's, like, three tons of stories that I could tell, but we really would be here all day. And I don't think you want to do that. But all in all, I think the, sort of the grandest story that I have out of this is that the job has been good, and it's been good to me. You know, you sure can't argue with the paycheck [laughs], and you sure can't argue with the people that you get to work with, and the people you get to meet. And it's been very convenient for being able to spend time with my family. And, like I said, I've worked with a lot of good people, met a lot of interesting people, had a lot of fun. You know, the kind of people, I mean, I can remember, a couple of times, when we worked as a staff and we’d have a Christmas party, and we would all decide that any leftover food was going to go to a men’s shelter or a women’s shelter. So, you know, those are the kind of stories that you kind of hold onto that are good, good stories." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "I guess I have to ask, what have you been doing during the pandemic? I mean, work- wise." }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Well, I've kind of been all over the place, just like everybody else, you know, I've worked on a couple of finding aids. The Staff Secretary finding aid, initially when we did it, was accessible only through date. It was pretty much a chronological file. And so at one point, we went back and sort of delineated topics for each folder in the collection, which is a lot of folders. And we had that in written form, and we had it in electronic form, but the formatting of it was a little bit too cramped and a little bit hard to read. So went through it folder by folder, entry in the finding aid, all 400-and-some boxes, and sort of, you know, grouped it with the folder title, which is a date. And then had to indent and group all the subjects under each folder, so did that. Did the same thing with Zbigniew Brzezinski’s donated historical material, so went through and did that, put three collections in DAS, [I’m] sort of at the end of doing one of those. And so’ve done that and have spent a wonderful few months here going back and fixing my mistakes [laughs] that I did in DAS. You know, did some training, a lot of stuff. I freely admit that I am old and of a generation that looks at computers and goes, “Wow, those are interesting and complex.” So, you know, I've been trying to up my Google skills, which I found that I can learn it, and then if it's something that I don't use for a couple of days, I got to go back and relearn it a month later—the joys of being in your 60s, I guess. So, been doing some training, been doing some outside stuff. I found some great YouTube videos on customer service that I kind of went, “Wow, I never thought of that before,” those kind of things. So that's kind of it. I'm trying to think what else I've done. I think it’s just been, gosh, kind of little odds and ends here and there, you know, work on this project, work on that project, but have managed to stay busy, much like everybody else. But it is still—not going into the office is kind of a trip without luggage. You’re kind of like, “Wow, I wish I had somebody to talk to.” Because my wife works at home, too, so we get, like, 30 minutes in the afternoon to say hi. [Laughs] And then at the end of it, it’s like, “How was your day?” She's in one room, I’m in the other. But it's been “anything but processing” sort of stuff. I've had several researchers write and say, “Hey, can you help me with this?” And in a couple of cases—since we're not open for research and we can't get to the documents—in a couple of cases, I've been able to sort of point them in a direction and say, “Well, why don't you try these people, try this this particular archive, or maybe you can get in touch with these individuals and they might be willing to talk to you.” So that kind of stuff. I’ve managed to stay busy, do a few things." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So are you looking forward to getting back in the building?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Yeah, you know, I mean, it's nice to see your colleagues and talk to them, and it's a change, it’ll be a change of pace from staring at my four walls, that's for sure. Getting into the building is something worth looking forward to. Getting back into the drive through Atlanta is not. [Laughs] That is the one thing that I have not missed, is Atlanta traffic. It's just miserable. That's the one thing I will say, the couple of times that I've had to kind of go far afield from home, to either a doctor's appointment or something like that, the fact that we have a pandemic and there's no traffic in Atlanta has not bothered me at all. [Laughs] It's been easier to get there. But it’ll be nice to get—the other thing is, too, there's only so much you can do outside of work. And when that starts running out, what are you going to do? You know, they can't pay you for sitting around doing nothing. So I don't want that day to come. I don't think any of us do. So when we can get back in, that’ll be good." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Anything else you'd like to say?" }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "Well, you know, it's been an interesting and fun 30 years, 30 some-odd years, I've learned a lot about the federal government. I've learned a lot about the White House, the presidency, what goes on, and why it goes on, and how it goes on. It's given me a whole different perspective and respect than I got in my history classes at university. I've gotten to work with some really good people, had some good friends. Have really, I think from day one, have disproven that whole idea of, you know, government workers. They get a bad rap. I think my colleagues are intelligent, witty, capable, competent, efficient, effective, professional, friendly, you know, all the good adjectives you could throw at them would stick. So that's been nice. Not that it's been perfect, no place is, but I think that everything that I've said would [unintelligible]. So it's been something. And the agency has been good and fair, and I think it's grown and changed over the years, which is good. And all in all, all in all, a good experience. I think that's pretty much it." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "All right, thank you. I'm going to stop there. We're going to shut off the recording." }, { "speaker": "Keith", "text": "OK. [STOP RECORDING] National Archives History Office 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW Washington DC 20408" } ]

[ { "speaker": "Daria Labinsky", "text": "Hi, this is Daria Labinsky, I am doing a NARA oral history interview with Joseph SOOS-ter. Is that how you pronounce it?" }, { "speaker": "Joseph Suster", "text": "SUS-ter." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "SUS-ter. And today is February 24, 2021. Good morning. Why don't we just start by, why don't you get us back to the beginning, when you started at the National Archives? What was your background before that?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Well, before that, I was a history graduate from Loyola University, and I was between jobs, and in the summer of 1968, I had a number of financial obligations. Some of my friends were getting married, and the like, and I was in need of a job, immediately. And the records center was hiring at the time, which was about a mile—which _is_ about a mile from the family residence." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Oh, wow." }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "And I’d gotten word of mouth that some of my friends, some of my neighbors had been hired at the Chicago Federal Records Center. So I went over there and applied. And the manager at the time, David Kuehl, hired me. And that's how I got started. I was, as I mentioned in my background information I sent to you, I started as a GS-2 “intermittent,” an archives aid, and was responsible mostly for moving boxes around the records center, that was my initial job. The Intermittent Program, we just worked for wages. We were not full civil service employees. We were brought in—the purpose of the program was to bring people in to do jobs that had to be done immediately, special projects and like. And so I worked 79 hours every pay period, so I was not considered a full-time employee. And there was also a wage limit and an hourly limit on how long my appointment could be. So in the interim, I took the civil service test—which was necessary at the time, in the late 1970s, to become a full-time civil service employee—passed it, and then shortly thereafter, there were some job vacancies at the records center, and I was then able to become a GS-3, GS- 4, etc., etc., and proceed with my career. So it started very early." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Was it, was the records center the same records center as now? Has it been, is it renovated since then?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "It is exactly the same building that I started at in 1978. In fact, I remember seeing it being constructed in the early 1970s, and I always wondered what that building was. And then I found out, when I applied for a job there, that it was in fact a federal facility, a National Archives facility. I didn't know what the National Archives was at the time. But it's relatively unchanged, it's the same facility. The archives unit that's stationed there, is colocated there, is a little different now. But essentially, the facility is the same as when I first started in 1978." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Do you remember how much you made?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "It was about three dollars an hour, I think—as a GS-2 archives aid, I think at the time, in 1978, it was about three dollars, maybe three dollars and twenty cents or so. Yeah. [Laughs] But it was a lot of money, particularly for somebody who needed some fast cash." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "What was the civil service test like? Do you remember?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "You know, I barely remember it. I think it was about an hour and a half in length or so. I remember having to go to downtown Chicago to take it at a federal building. But I don't remember a whole lot more about it, other than I passed it, got the word. And then I believe it was in January, late January 1979, I became a full-time civil service employee with full benefits, you know, leave, insurance, etc." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "And so then you got into the CIDS [Career Intern Development System] program." }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Yes. Somebody saw some potential in me, and I was recruited into the Career Intern Development program in the summer of 1979, and was given a variety of different job assignments and training over that two years, special projects to do—including putting up the catwalking in one portion of the records center, I was responsible for that—which has subsequently been taken down. And so I had a variety of projects during that time, and then I graduated in the summer of 1981. I had to sign a mobility agreement in order to become part of the CIDS program, and after I graduated, I was told there was an opening at the Washington National Records Center in Suitland for me, and I subsequently transferred there in September of 1981 and worked there for about, just short of two years there." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "OK, how was that different from the Chicago records center?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Oh, much larger facility, it’s about five times the size of our facility in Chicago. A little different work environment. I worked on a quality control team with some very good people, several of which advanced very far in their NARA careers. But it was a little different. It was my first time outside of Chicago, living in suburban Washington, D.C. I lived in Alexandria, Virginia, and then I would make the drive over to Suitland every morning over—I believe it's the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, over the Potomac. And that was about a 45-minute drive. But it was much larger, much larger workforce, but I made some longtime friends there. I'm still friends with one of my coworkers there that I started with in 1981, very good friends with. So it was a different experience for me." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So you got onto the records management track rather than an archives track. Was that sort of a natural fit for you? How did you fit in with that?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Yes, I did do some work in an archives, a small amount, when I was a CIDS trainee, but most of my track, at least in the first half of the career, was in the records center—working with customer agencies, getting their boxes of records to the records center, helping them with records management training, and the like. Over the first 21 years that I was in NARA, it was all in the records center program." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Is records management something you'd recommend to people who are looking to pursue a career?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Yes. It was a very good career for me. I did records management while I was in the federal records center, I did records management training, and the like, but I didn't do it full time, because I had other administrative responsibilities that dealt with getting records in and out of the records center, and reference, and all that, over my time in the federal records center program. But I'm a member of ARMA [Association of Records Managers and Administrators], the ARMA chapter here in Chicago. So, yes, I think there are a lot of opportunities, particularly now with the transition from hard copy to electronic records. There certainly is a need for people to be able to provide guidance, because dealing with electronic records is so much different than hard copy, in terms of—there are some basics that are the same, but still, in terms of their longevity, how they can be managed over time, it's a very challenging environment. And I think it is a profession that people who are interested in records and recordkeeping, whether it's just dealing with administrative records or with records that have long-term marketable value, would find very rewarding, because it overlaps both into nuts and bolts records management—storing records, referencing records, keeping them over their defined retention period—but then also taking care of archival records, too. So if you're interested in archives, I mean, that falls under the umbrella of records management—or information governance, which is now the more prevailing term, it seems to be. There's certainly a need for that. And I think people, particularly people who are interested in library science and the like, could also find a career in records management or information governance." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "OK, so you got back to Chicago, and that was a promotion when you went back there?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Yes, in 1983, I became the reference branch chief, which was responsible for servicing the records that were stored in the federal records center, and then also for overseeing the destruction of temporary records that would be destroyed after the retention period expired, and then also transferring permanent records that we received from our customer agencies over to the archives branch that was colocated in Chicago—it _is_ colocated in Chicago. And that was my primary position. Then a GS-12 position, appraisal and disposition, which oversaw the paperwork process, and which is also responsible for providing training to agencies on how to get records to the federal records center, and then also other records management concepts. That opened up in 1985, and I pursued that job until the Records Management Division essentially was created by Archivist John Carlin in the late 1990s. So the Appraisal and Disposition Branch involved also making sure the paperwork is right, in order to get records over into the records center, making sure that the retention periods were properly calculated, the disposal—the disposition authorities were properly cited. It was mainly administrative tasks. And then you also oversaw, you did quality control work over records that were being dispositioned, to make sure no records were being thrown out before they were supposed to be, if they were temporary, and making sure the permanent records were getting over to the archives on a timely basis." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "And you had to do some auditing with that, too, right?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "That was at Suitland. We did the—that was my primary job at Suitland, was as quality control auditor, where we would actually go out to the stack areas, and audit the records being pulled for reference and returned to the customer agencies, make sure that was accurately done, make sure that disposal was being properly pulled and accurately pulled from the shelves, and things like that, that was the type of quality work. We also did some small project work, but mostly it was just reviewing the records products that were being pulled by the staff there and then being returned to the agency for their reference—boxes of records, folders of records, individual documents, etc." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "What were some of the—what are some of the collections that you dealt with at Chicago?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "In Chicago? Our biggest customers are the courts system. We also service a small federal agency that is unique to Chicago, called the Railroad Retirement Board, which gives out pensions to retired railroad workers. And actually, there's a large volume of those claims files at the Atlanta Archives that were moved from Chicago when we ran out of space and were subsequently moved. I think there's a—before I left, I think there was some rumbling that they were going to be returned to Chicago. I don't know what the status of that is now. But it's a small agency, it's only about a thousand FTE [full-time employees], maybe less than that. But it is a main customer of the Chicago Federal Records Center. So we serviced their claims files and other types of records—court records, U.S. Attorney was a very big customer of ours, EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], which has a regional office in Chicago, Region Five, is a big customer of ours. The VA [Veterans Administration], of course. So there was a wide variety of records, both long term and short term, claims files, bankruptcy case files, criminal case files, etc., etc. We did some tax return work, storage of tax returns in Chicago for a little while, but that was not one of our primary customers. Most of that stuff, most of those records, usually went to Dayton for storage. But we had, literally, hundreds of different types of records series that we would service and have to oversee while we stored them." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So was your records management training mostly on the job?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Yes. Unlike most of my colleagues that came on after Archivist Carlin created the records management program in 1997 or 1998, who majored in either information science or library science, or the like, all my early records management experience and knowledge came from hands-on working with records, working with records retention schedules, learning procedures, learning policies. It was all hands-on, on-the-job training. Yes. So that made me a little different than many of my colleagues who had advanced degrees in information management and library science, and the like. But it benefited me well, because I really learned, with the hands-on, I really learned. When I was an A&D branch chief, I dealt with records retention schedules and recordkeeping policies exclusively. I was always going into agency retention schedules and reading their policies on managing records. So it was a very good experience for me, a good background. So when I would go to agencies to provide technical assistance, in the latter part of my career, after 1998, you know, I could talk to them in depth, usually, about their record schedules, about their policies, because I was very experienced then by working with them, working with the records in the record center." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So you had to do a lot of onsite visits?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "When I got into records management as the Director of the Great Lakes Region and had a staff, yes, we would do, we had what we called a “targeted assistance program,” where we’d provide free technical assistance to agencies on various records management projects, whether it would be helping them interpret their records schedule, provide training, helping them with their records management, files management, and things like that. So it was primarily project work, once I got into AC [Office of the Chief Records Officer], as it's known currently in NARA. It was a lot of project work, helping agencies. So that was different. It was less hands-on going into boxes of records, and more helping the staff, essentially, work with their records. So it was more working with staff, rather than in the records center. I'm actually working with the records themselves, to some extent." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So you were, you were there when they switched to the ERA [Electronic Records Archives] as a management—?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Oh, yes, yes, yes. That was also during Archivist Carlin's tenure, when ERA was first thought of, and then in its development stages. And I would have to say, that was one of the landmark events in my career. There’s several of them, but I certainly consider—when the decision was made to develop the Electronic Records Archives, that was certainly a very important—And actually, it marked, I think it was a pivotal turning point, as we were seeing the agencies were starting to get away from the creation and lifecycle of textual records, and were now moving into the electronic age with digital records. And I think that was a turning point. It was also at that time that we changed our curriculum, our records management curriculum, and made it much more uniform, and made sure it included electronic records. Where our previous curriculum, which was actually not uniform from region to region, everybody was kind of—the basic principles were the same, but everyone was teaching things just a little differently. Finally, coincidental with the development of the Electronic Records Archives, we developed a uniform curriculum for our agencies, to be able to present to our agencies, so everybody was teaching the same thing in the same way and providing the same information, more or less. So those two things were linked, both the development of ERA and then also the way we changed records management training—and archival training to some extent, because taking care of archival records was also part of that training. That was all kind of linked together in the mid- 2000s to around 2003, 2004, 2005." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So you actually worked on setting up, creating the training?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "There was a whole group of us who created what we call the knowledge areas. I don't know if you've heard of those, the knowledge areas, the six knowledge areas? There were probably, there were multiple teams of archivists and records management analysts who worked on the individual knowledge areas. The six of them had different responsibilities. I believe I was on—Knowledge Area Four, I worked on a lot. But there were probably, I would have to say—besides contractors, also, who helped us—were probably 40 to 60 people who were working on the various teams to develop and then, ultimately, finish the knowledge areas and then be able to start presenting them." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So what were some of the landmarks—you said that that was one of the landmarks—in your career, things that really stand out?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "I thought you might ask me that question, Daria. I thought of three things. Number one, the independence of NARA in 1985, when we became an independent agency. Rather than the National Archives and Records Service as part of GSA, we became the National Archives and Records Administration, which I believe was April—I should have this memorized, but I think it's April 1st, 1985, if I'm not mistaken. That was one. ERA, which we just discussed. Excuse me—before that, when the records center program went totally reimbursable in Fiscal Year 2000. Prior to that, most of the services the records centers provided to federal agencies—there were a couple of exceptions for some major federal agencies, but for the most part, the services that the records center program provided to federal agencies were free. We stored the records for free. We did the reference service on the records for free. We disposed of the temporary records when their retention period expired, we disposed of those for free, and then we transferred the permanent records that the agencies had created and sent to the records center for storage, when they were eligible to come to the archives unit, we moved those records over for no charge. So almost all—with the exception of the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, and probably a couple of other agencies, all those services were provided for no charge to our customer constituency in the federal government. And that changed in FY 2000, where we began charging agencies for every time we touched a record, essentially, whether we took the records in, the boxes and folders in, whether we did reference service on them, whether we refiled records, whether we disposed of the records, whether we transferred the permanent records to archives, all that, we charged agencies for that. So the records center program, because of its different financial funding, actually became a little separate from the rest of NARA, simply because it wasn't dependent on direct funding. So when we would have government shutdowns, the records centers would still operate, where the rest of us would be sent home. So that was the second thing. And then the third thing, as we just discussed, was the Electronic Records Archives. I think those were the three major events that I remember, that I will always remember in my career at NARA." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "When you dealt with agencies, with their records, did you run into some that just had a lot of problems?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Yes, yes. There were agencies that would do a very good job with their records. United States Air Force, for example. I'm not going to mention the ones that didn't do so well, but there were agencies that had very good programs—EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, had a good program, the Railroad Retirement Board, very good records management program. But I would have to say that the majority of agencies, records management was not a priority with them. It was an administrative task akin to buying supplies, renting office space, that sort of thing. And it was not a high priority with them. And so there was always a challenge in getting agencies to do the right thing with their records, whether it be just the nuts and bolts of sending them correctly to a records center for storage, or whether it was making sure they were managing the records they were keeping in-house properly and following proper lifecycle guidance concerning creation, maintenance, and disposition of their records." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Seems like there's a little bit of, kind of, babysitting or hand holding of certain agencies?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "There were agencies that required a lot of help—put it that way—that required a lot of help and used our services extensively, sent people to training on a regular basis. But it was to NARA’s benefit, also, that agencies do the right thing. So we would get the records in a way that the records could be used in the future. So it was not just “file it and forget it, send it to the records center and forget about the records, we don't need ’em anymore” or “they're just not important to us anymore.” And we knew, of course, working for NARA, we know better than that. Records are going to be used again in the future, whether it's just for strictly administrative purposes, or, if they have informational and evidential value, will be used for archival purposes in the future, for people to research for various reasons. So it was important for us to make sure that agencies were doing the right thing. It was a mutual accommodation. It was in the agency's benefit to maintain—create, maintain, and disposition the records appropriately, whether temporary or permanent. And it was certainly to NARA’s benefit as the federal government's recordkeeper, the nation's recordkeeper, to make sure that the records came to us in a way that they could be usable in the future, whether we're talking about paper records or the issue of sustainability for digital records over the long term." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So did you start doing training on electronic records? Is that something that you were able to do?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Yes. The first training was developed in the early 1990s by a couple of staff members in Central Office. I remember first being presented, I was down in St. Louis for a conference in the early 1990s—it wasn't at the [National] Personnel Records Center but was nearby. And we were first presented the—and it was very rudimentary, essentially definitions, some basic stuff like that. What's data? What's a bit, what's a byte, that sort of thing, you know, hardware, software dependency. You know, “show and tell” with 5¼-inch floppies, and that sort of thing. [Laughs] But it was a beginning. And we used that course extensively, that was the course we had. And we used it until we developed more refined training in the 2000s—in conjunction with the knowledge areas, we also updated the electronic records management courses. And we still had a separate course—even with the knowledge areas, we still had a separate course for electronic records, always. Up until when I retired, we were still teaching that course. And we had updated it, of course, to reflect the advances in digital records over time. But we had been doing it for about a—since the early 1990s." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Did you enjoy being a manager?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "It has its ups and downs, as any manager will tell you. I don't know if you have management experience. Personnel issues are very challenging, can be very challenging, at times. That was probably the biggest challenge for me, dealing with the day-to-day issues of personnel management—not that I had a lot of them, I didn't, but sometimes they would come up, and they would be challenging, and they were the less desirable aspects of my job. But in terms of directing the program and being able to schedule the training at various locations in the Midwest, which was my responsibility, and mentoring my staff, I enjoyed doing that. In general, it was a good experience. But the personnel issues—and I think most managers will tell you that—those are the ones that wear on you the most, and those were the ones I found most challenging." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "How many people did you have, at most, that were working for you?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "In the reference branch in Chicago, I think I had about—between managers and staff, probably about, at that time in the early 1980s, I would say probably 60 to 70. Now, I did have line managers below me that would handle a lot of the issues, but in terms of my ultimate responsibility, I would say about 60 to 70, somewhere around there. When I went to the— became an A&D appraisal branch chief, I essentially had two people that I supervised besides myself. And then when I went into records management, when we had our individual records management units created in the late 1990s, staff size was usually between four and six. And these were professional positions, high-graded positions that I was managing. In the records center. I would be responsible for a lot of lower-graded positions. And that's why there were so many of them, because they were larger staffs." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "You mentioned in your bio that you had a temporary position as assistant regional administrator." }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Tell us about that." }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Yes, our regional administrator at the time of 9/11 was in the Naval Reserves, Denis Paskauskas. And after 9/11, he was called up to active duty. And so the assistant regional administrator position came up, and it was a temporary position, it would go from year to year. And so I applied for that, and I received that. And then for the—I don’t know, about 20 months or so that Denis Paskauskas was on active duty at Central Command during the aftermath of 9/11, and then also for Operation Desert Storm, I served as the assistant regional administrator. And I had responsibility primarily for the Chicago Federal Records Center. We had two records centers, two archives programs that we were responsible for, and then one RM program. And I still remained the RM director, also, for our records management program. So we had five programs essentially—four, I should say, because Dayton didn't have an archives, doesn't have an archives. There were four programs that the regional administrator and myself oversaw. And I was responsible mostly for the operation of the Chicago side of the region. And Dave would take care of the Dayton side of the region. Dave Kuehl was the regional administrator. So I did that for about 20 months, in addition to my records management director duties. And that was a fun time, went by very fast, because there was always a lot to do. [Laughs] And so, yeah, that was an interesting part of my career, too. But Dennis came back from Reserves in August of 2003, and then I got reverted back to my records management director position." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Was that one—what were some of the highlights? Would you consider that sort of a highlight of your career?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "[Thinking] No, I think being the records management program director was actually the highlight. I mean, it was an interesting period, because we were building an additional record storage area—records storage center—in the Dayton region, in the Dayton metropolitan area. Kingsridge [Federal Records Center], as it became known. And that was constructed while I was the acting ARA. And that was interesting, watching that building being built. And it's still in operation today in Dayton. But that was sort of the highlight of that. And as I say, I still also had my records management duties, so there were a lot of different things going on while I had both duties. But I still think of the records management directorship in the region, being regional records management director, as probably being the so-called highlight of my career, because it was the longest part of my career doing one thing, essentially." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "You mentioned the flattening of the records [program]—could you discuss that a little?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Yes. When Archivist Ferriero came on board in, my recollection was November of 2010, I believe he was confirmed. He said—I remember we were having a records management conference in College Park at the time, at the Marriott hotel, over by the University of Maryland—and he came and addressed us. Paul Wester, who was our director at the time for the RM operation, brought the Archivist over. And he said, “Well, I'm new here. I have a little records management experience, when I worked at the library”—was it Duke or North Carolina? And of course, he was also affiliated with the library in New York City. Well, anyway, he said, “Well, I'm going to take a look at the agency, and spend probably the first year of my tenure just looking around, seeing what's going on with the agency. How does the agency operate? What does it do well? What it doesn't do so well.” And he did spend a year doing that. And then he decided—actually was 2009, I believe, November 2009, that the Archivist came on board, not 2010. And then a year later he came out—after consulting — and he also had a team that he worked with, a reorganization team— they came out with a reorganization structure that, for all intents and purposes, ended the regional structure. One of the tenets of the reorganization was, “One NARA.” I think there was a perception—and this is just my opinion, there was a perception that there were two NARAs, there was one within the Beltway, and then there was a second one outside the Beltway that operated a little bit differently. Whether that was true or not, I don't know. But anyway, the regions—even though we still have field facilities, such as the one you work at, and our facility in Chicago—the regions were dissolved, and everything was reorganized. That's what I meant by flattening. In my particular case, the regional records management programs were eliminated, in all the regions, and the staff was dispersed among a new organization of records managers that were tasked according to function. So previous to that, my records management program—not my, _the_ records management program in Chicago—we would deal with everything. We would do training, we would do agency inspections, we would help with records appraisal, we did everything. It was all the records management functions. In Archivist Ferriero’s reorganization, as far as records management was concerned, now we were reorganized according to function. So we had a team now to do records appraisal. We had a team now to do training. We had a team now to do agency appraisals. We had a special projects team, etc. I think they're—when I left, I think there were still four or five separate functional teams, something like that. So that's what I meant by flattening the regional—essentially, the regional structure was disbanded. And had been disbanded in the past, also, but this time it looks like ... . So there was no more Great Lakes Region, for example. And I think it was—I'm trying to think what the Atlanta region was, I don’t know if it was the Southeast Region or what its name was. But all those were gone. And now we have the Atlanta facility, you have the Chicago facility, etc., etc., but there's no more references to any kind of regional things. So that's what I meant by the flattening. And so I lost my position in management because of the flattening. And I decided at that time, “Well, I really like doing training, that was something.” So we were allowed to apply to which function that we thought we'd best fit into, in this new functional arrangement, rather than organizational arrangement. And so I always liked training, always enjoyed it. Probably should have been a teacher in another life, another career. So I went with the training team, and then from November 2011 until my retirement in September 2019, I was with the training team and provided records management training, and also developed records management educational products." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "But you were doing that out of—you were still in Chicago? Were you still in the records center?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Right. Yes, I had an office in the records center, and—it was my old office [laughs], it was the office I always had. And many of us who are colocated—are still colocated — most everybody is working at home right now, at their residence — we were all still colocated at the facilities that we were originally at, whether it be Atlanta—I don't know how well you know the staff at the Atlanta facility, Gina Williams." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "I know Gina, yeah." }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Gina started in Chicago, as a matter of fact, she was a CIDS trainee. I helped her with that when she was in Chicago. And then she moved on in her career. Yeah. Gina Williams, Rich Rayburn. I don't know who else is still there. They were—before the pandemic, of course, they had offices at the Atlanta facility, and that was the same with me." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "So was most of your training in person? Or, when did it start to switch to online training?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "We did not—it was all face-to-face training. We still did a lot—the majority of training was still face to face up until my retirement. We were starting to do, I would say probably from about 2015 on, we started to convert some of our face-to-face courses to online training, at least some of our basic courses, like, we had a records disposition course, which just taught the basics of how to get records out of the agency office and get them to a NARA facility. You know, how to fill out the paperwork, some basic stuff about what the records lifecycle meant, and what the definition of a record was, etc., etc. And we did convert a couple of those courses to online modules. But what we were primarily working on during my last couple of years with the agency was, we had an edict come down from the Archivist's office that we were going to end face-to-face training. And essentially, face-to-face training ended shortly after I retired, and we were going to go to completely digital training. So our team spent most of the last, I would say, two years or so, developing replacements for the knowledge areas. The knowledge areas were essentially retired in October of 2019, the month after I retired. That was the last time the face-to-face classes were given. And in its place, we provided these digital classes, these digital courses for a—it's not a certificate program, I forgot what they call—a credential program. It's called a credential program. And it's still mandatory for an agency records officer to take those courses. So you essentially replace the KA’s with digital courses that can be taken online. So there are no more face-to-face classes. Those have ended. And now, if somebody wants to take NARA records management training, they do it digitally. They can access NARA’s site and take the courses there. And also utilize the materials, they can take the materials and tailor them to their own agency's needs, if they wish to, they can customize the training. It's all there and available to them now, at no charge. In face-to-face training, we were still charging people to attend. There was still a tuition fee for them to attend, but that all ended. But we had started doing, as I said, some rudimentary digital courses a couple of years earlier, before we actually ended the KA courses. But we went full digital in FY 2020." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Well, as you mentioned earlier, making that available is to NARA’s benefit, as well, because you’re teaching them." }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Yes. I believe that was the Archivist's Office—[their] position was, number one, it would save the agencies money, it would cut down on travel. That's the way people are learning now. The days of people coming and spending a week in a class with a three-inch-thick binder, that's not the way people learn anymore. I think that's recognized. So clearly, people are now usually—at least adults are. I know that, you know, there's issues with younger people in schools, grade schools, particularly. But that's the way young adults, and adults in general, learn now, is online, at least for many things, for most things. And then again, between budget constraints for travel and having money available to pay for your training. I mean, if you took the full knowledge area curriculum, I believe was something like $1,250. And that doesn't count sending somebody to College Park, or to Chicago, or to Atlanta for two weeks to sit for the training, paying for their hotel, their per diem, travel, etc., etc. It would be a big expense. So to pare expense and then also to recognize that the way people are learning now is through online training, for the most part. The decision was made to essentially end face-to-face training, once the digital courses were ready to be presented." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Do you have any stories or anecdotes that you'd like to share about your work with NARA?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Oh. [Thinks] No, not that I can share. [Laughs] Not that I could share for an oral history. [Laughs again]" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "I understand that." }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Some good times, though, let me put it that way. We had some good times. Some good times." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "OK, well, what have you been doing during your retirement?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "During my retirement, I still stay active with our ARMA Chicago chapter. I'm still an elected board member. And just enjoying life for the most part. You know, with the pandemic, and I'm sure you're experiencing the same thing, there's only so much you can do. Travel has been cut down. It was my intent to do a lot of traveling once I retired. There's some cities that I've never visited before in the United States. And I was planning on doing that and seeing my colleagues, my still active colleagues in places like Seattle and Boston, visiting them. Two cities — I've never been to Boston. I have been to Seattle, but never been in Boston. And I was planning on doing that. And, of course, the pandemic, you know, put an end to that, for the time being, at least, and so couldn't do that. But I do play golf. I have been able, I was able to play golf, that's one of my hobbies. So I've been able to play golf, even during the pandemic, you've been able to play golf. You've got protocols that allow you to play. So I was able to do that. So I joined a golfing league last year, I was able to play golf. But essentially doing reading and just trying to stay healthy, too, during these unique times. So I haven't done as much as I planned. Let me put it this way. I haven't done as much as I planned on doing since I left last—actually, two Septembers ago. Yeah. So hopefully now, with the vaccine coming out and hopefully some return to normality in the next six to eight months or so, I'll be able to do some traveling and some of the things I planned on doing once I left NARA." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Well, it really hasn't been that long." }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "No, 18 months. It goes by pretty fast. It will be 18 months at the end of March. So it does go fast, as people say. Hard to believe, actually, I’ve been away 18 months, almost 18 months. But it was good, it was a good 41 years, I was glad to be part of NARA, and be able to work for the National Archives. It's an important agency. It's an agency most people don't know about— what it is we do, why we do it. But it's important. When you do mention the National Archives, you can tell them what it is, the mission activity, and, “Oh, yeah. Yeah.” But it was good, and I met a lot of good people. You know, I don't know what your experience is. Mine is, the majority of my friends are in the private sector, and don't have a high opinion of the way the federal government operates. I don't know if that's your experience, but that's my experience. Most of my friends are in the private sector. And, I get a lot of flak for being a long-time government employee. And I realize how misguided that is, knowing that the quality of the people who work in the National Archives—I mean, the agency, and the government in general, couldn't function unless we had very competent, capable people in it. And I was able to recognize that and be lucky enough to work with some of those people during my tenure there over the 41 years." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "That sounds great. Do you have anything else you'd like to say?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "No, other than, again, I thought it was—the luckiest opportunity I ever had was when somebody told me, “Hey, they need some laborers over at the Chicago Federal Records Center to move some boxes around,” you know, “It only pays a couple bucks an hour, but … .” And I looked at that, and I said, “Hey, OK.” I never expected — One story. When I went there in July of—I never expected to last more than a few months, once I had earned whatever the salary cap was—I think it was about, salary cap was, like, $4,000, or something like that. And the hourly cap was under a thousand hours. I said, “Well, I'll be around for five, six months, and I'll go on, I'll move on and find something full time.” And making that decision to take that intermittent, part-time, non-civil-service job actually turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made. Because, luckily, the records center had some vacancies at the time, some civil service vacancies. And I was able to move up. Somebody, you know, took a chance on me, Dave Kuehl—who I still play golf with. He retired as the regional administrator in 2012, but I still talk with him—he hired me and had some faith in me. And from then on, everything just, just moved along. And I was very fortunate that way. I was fortunate enough that somebody took a chance on me, and that I was able to take advantage of the opportunity when it was presented to me and make the most of it. So." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "That’s great. I mean, it's—you never know, like, what is going to change your life." }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "No, you don't. You don't know, and you have to start somewhere, too. I always tell, I tell my nieces and nephews, you've got to start somewhere. And it may not be very glamorous where you start, but it's not necessarily going to be where you finish. And I can speak from experience on that, so, yes." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "OK, I'm going to shut off the recording. Thank you very much." }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Well, thank you, Daria. Thank you. [STOP RECORDING] [START RECORDING]" }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "OK, we're recording." }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "All right, Daria, you asked me about a story during my career, and one just came to mind. After President Obama left office, his materials were moved from Washington, D.C., to Chicago, at a temporary facility that we have in a northwest suburb called Hoffman Estates. Well, while those records were being moved, the skeletal staff that was in place there needed assistance from staff at the Chicago facility, both in the records center side and also on the archives staff, to be able to observe the materials as they were being offloaded from the semitrailers coming directly from Washington, D.C., to this temporary facility in Hoffman Estates. Because there was a NARA requirement that these materials had to be actually watched over until they were actually shelved. So they didn't have enough of their own staff to do that, to watch the records and artifacts, as they were being offloaded from the trucks into the facility. So they asked NARA staffers to come out to help with this witnessing responsibility. So I was asked to come up there to be a witness and watch. And what they had, they had sailors from Great Lakes Naval Base help offload the trucks. So they would do the offloading, and we would be positioned at various places within the facility to watch them offload the trucks. And we would watch the materials [makes watching movement with head], make sure nobody was looking at them who shouldn't be, or touching them, or whatever, acting inappropriately with them, with the materials. And so, I was positioned just outside the loading dock. And this blue chair comes by on—they’re carrying it on a forklift—a handjack, actually. And so I went to the administrative officer who was there, and I said, “This blue chair, what exactly is this blue chair?” And it was all wrapped in plastic and everything. And the person told me, “That is the chair that President Obama sat in when he was observing the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.” There's that iconic shot of him in that room with Secretary of State Clinton, and the vice president, and all sorts of other officials there. And he's sitting there, and he's watching it, watching the video feed. And he's in that chair. And that blue chair was the chair he sat in while watching the raid. So that's my story. [Laughs] I watched that chair being delivered to the presidential materials facility in suburban Chicago." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "That is very cool. And this is sort of changing the subject, but it reminded me. So one of the things I was interested in, I didn't know about until I did records management training, was that there are these other facilities that are federal records centers where records can be held." }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "Can you talk a little about that, explain that?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "And the facility in Hoffman Estates is one of them. Yeah. NARA will lease facilities to store records, but they have to ensure that they meet certain structural standards and security standards. In the case of this facility, where President Obama's materials are currently being held, that was a former warehouse facility where they stored furniture. And they couldn't find a facility to store his records in downtown Chicago or outside downtown Chicago, couldn't find a facility that met their space needs and the like. But they found this furniture warehouse in suburban northwest Chicago, and it fit their needs. It had large open space. It could be shelved out, for example. It had rooms that could be used for processing materials. Also, a SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility] could be put in place there for your secure materials, to have secure conversations. But it had to be retrofitted to meet NARA’s facility standards in terms of fire protection, security, things of that nature, very technical things that an engineer would appreciate. So NARA has some of these facilities going, Chicago being the most prominent, where they convert these former warehouses into NARA storage areas, but they have to meet certain facility standards, have to be retrofitted so that they can securely store government records." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "How many of those do you think there are around the country?" }, { "speaker": "Joe", "text": "I'm only aware of, right now, the presidential material, Obama presidential materials facility in Hoffman Estates. There may be one or two others, though. That's the only one I'm aware of right now." }, { "speaker": "Daria", "text": "OK, thanks. I'm going to shut off the recording. [STOP RECORDING] Joseph D. Suster 02/24/2021 National Archives History Office 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW Washington DC 20408" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "This is Jack Kabrel. Today is June 24, 2016. I am conducting an oral history interview with Tasha Thian. This interview is part of the National Archives and Record Administration's Oral History Project. Welcome, Tasha. I appreciate you spending some time with us this morning." }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "Thank you, Jack. It's great to talk to you today. I truly enjoy working at the National Archives, and I look forward to your questions." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Great. The first one I'd like to ask you, just give us a very brief—in a minute or two— overview of the arc of your career at the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "Well, actually, it's fairly brief. I've worked here for two years now, and when I retire on June 30, it will be two years and two weeks, I think, exactly. I came over to be the Director of Corporate Records Management June 12, 2014. I've been doing the same job for those two years." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. Very good. Tell us a little bit about your earlier education and work experience, before coming to the National Archives and what led you to coming here." }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "I started out my career as a part-time, temporary passport examiner, which seems to have |no relationship whatsoever to what I'm doing right now. Eventually, I moved into|different positions,| |---|---| |and I went into supervisory positions, and then a division chief position. I was able to move over to|| |another division chief position, which was the Chief of the Record Services Division, back in 1992 and I|| |held that position for about nine years. I had another position that was more FOIA-related (Freedom of|| |Information Act) after that. Then I went into a backlog reduction-type position in records management.|| I love records management, eventually I became the records officer for another department. I have 18 years of experience in records management. I became a certified records manager with the Institute for Certified Records Managers. It's kind of funny because I worked very closely with the National Archives, but I didn't know about their own internal records program. I saw a presentation given on the Capstone approach and the email management system, and the speaker was the Director of Corporate Records Management. Obviously, they would have their own internal program, but I’d never heard of it before. I was curious about that. Later, that director left, I saw the position available, and it was the right timing for me. I got tired of the commute downtown, and wanted to have a work/life balance. I thought, \"Well, gee, they're being very proactive and progressive.\" Their concept with the Capstone approach was truly amazing to me, because being in the business—being in the records management business—these are difficult decisions to make on record scheduling. This concept was so advanced and unique, I was really impressed. I thought, \"Well, NARA looks like a good place for me.\"" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Describe day one on the job." }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "Well, day one—okay. That's kind of your orientation coming in. I think it's just the general impression that I have, and I think this has been almost every day when I come in to work at A2. It's kind of an experience. My commute is easy. I come in; we've got parts that are just—I mean, they're amazing. Everybody is friendly; it's very welcoming. The building is very welcoming. I'm impressed with the way other offices work, like Security and Facilities. It's a top-notch place to be. You have the management that's really top-notch as well. I think it's really an impressive place to work. I feel blessed coming in every day to work here. And it's the same thing; it's not phony. You walk in, the guards are very friendly, and people are very happy to work with you." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "You had said that you were very impressed with NARA's Capstone approach, which is a big- bucket approach to mailing." }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "When you finally were able to settle in to your new position with NARA, were those expectations met and realistic?" }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "Well, I saw NARA as being—in the past. I didn't see NARA as being progressive. That it was very difficult to implement records management in an agency; and particularly, the large agency. The Capstone approach was so unique. It's so simple, it makes complete sense, and it just really alleviates the burden off the user. I was impressed with that. I'm still impressed with that. I think that to have these concepts makes them easier to implement. In other words, if you have a senior official—and generally speaking, they are making the policy-level decisions, or the major decisions for the agency, and that type of thing—if you're capturing all of their email, then without having to have somebody come behind them, and print them, and file them. Or, \"Was that a record or not?\" It's simplified it so incredibly that people can do their job. Really, records management should work in the background. If you think about it, in a lot of IT systems, when you build an IT system and they have workflows, the system automatically captures the records. Whatever that process is, there's a capture, and there's an archive that stores records, generally speaking, with an IT system. Essentially, you're taking what we call unstructured records like in the email system, and giving it structure. You're giving the records this position for it without a burden on the staff. I think that that's really a fantastic approach. I've enjoyed working with that approach because the email management system, the records management portion of it is administered out of corporate records management. I have a lot of activity with how that system works. It's impressive. We've had a lot of agencies come over and talk to us about it, and I've done presentations for the Executive Secretariat Council. When I showed it to them, I said, \"It's just amazingly simple. This is what you do.\" People are like, \"Are you kidding me?\" Because all of the effort that they have to take to either print a file, or people making decisions is totally alleviated. It really is a great concept. It’s a great marriage, where you have IT systems and records policies working together." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What successes would you say that you've accomplished with your two years at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "The way I look at it, it's a team approach. I'm more the conductor, and then you've got the orchestra, right? So, the staff and all the people that are actually outside of corporate records management are important players. Some of those people that really helped out, such as General |Counsel (NGC), Office of the Chief Records Officer (AC), Digital Engagement Division (VE), information|Col2| |---|---| |services, and all those partnerships came together to do a lot of different things. My staff were involve|| with all kinds of different initiatives that we did. One of the first things that I did was assess NARA's corporate records management program. It's tested against the CFR—the records management self- assessment criteria, and the Managing Government Records Directive. It determined the areas of weakness, and we start working on those various issues. Two years later, we have things like a very viable records management website with lots of good material on it. We've done a lot of things with the email system to have a policy directive, and a records schedule, and those types of things. We have, for the first time ever, a mandatory records management- training module for everyone. I'm very impressed with the Archivist and all of the support from senior management to put things in place. It might surprise you if you're not a supervisor or a manager, but we do have, now, that records management is part of the critical element for supervision. They're held accountable now in their ratings for records management. We have information in the supervisory handbook on records management. |We've completely revamped|the RIM network—which is the records and information management|Col3| |---|---|---| |network—which has about 260 Information Management Officers (IMOs) and Records Custodians (RCs).||| We have presentations every two years, at least. Communication was a problem. We send records tips every week, so that it's very quick information, but it keeps it alive, and it keeps it where people can learn the records management concepts. We've been working on backlogs in our disposal processing of temporary records to make sure we're accessioning permanent records. We have a larger staff now, to handle various activities. A lot has changed, and I have to tell you that was through upper management support. We have three additional positions. Essentially, if you count me, there's five new people in the organization. I think it's a different corporate records management, and there is this saying throughout NARA, \"The cobbler's children have no shoes.\" I'm really hoping that, at least, they have one now." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes. Sort of like a \"practice what you preach\" type of philosophy." }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "When I was interviewed for the position, I was also interviewed by the Archivist. He did say, \"The cobbler's children had no shoes.\" He recognized it; everybody recognized it. They want corporate records management to be the model for agencies, and we are really moving into that position. Other agencies would seek us out on several different things. For example, we switched over to the new 308 series, and people were interested in our position descriptions. Several of agencies need help for systems on email management systems, and they've come to me, and come to my staff on that. I think we're really moving in that direction as the model agency. There's more to do, but I think that NARA has that ingrained in them, and they want to make sure that actually happens. Like I said earlier, when I worked at another agency, I really didn't know that NARA had its own corporate record management staff. They didn't attend meetings. Now, the corporate records management director is part of the Federal Records Council, and attends those sessions. There have been a lot of changes over the last two years that bring recognition to our program and upper management wanting us to be out there and be leaders." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "It seems like there has been a lot of support behind this initiative. Could you identify any impediments that may have occurred during your two years, as far as going further in corporate records management?" }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "I really don't think so at all. I think that there has been a lot of support. The only thing that's probably challenging—and I do want to emphasize that for records officers across the government, it is an extremely challenging position. I don't think that upper management really understands how challenging it is. Really, you're a change agent. Essentially what's happening is—and particularly in the vein of the Managing Government Records Directive—you're basically saying you're retooling the whole Federal Government. The Managing Government Records Directive is really moving the government towards electronic record keeping. If you don't have systems in place already—which most don't have systems in place for things that will manage their email, for example, or manage their share drives, or manage social media, or manage digital photos, or those kinds of things—you're now saying that we have to have these IT systems. That is phenomenal, and we need to do that. It is huge to do that, even in an agency like ours, which is a medium-sized agency that has 4,000-plus seats, if you count our contractors, the government people, and interns, and volunteers. You've got a large group of people that you're going to have to switch over to these new tools. I think management has to keep in mind how difficult this job is. It's bigger than I think they're planning, if you can understand what I'm saying. For example, NARA is going to be moving to a case management system. Case management system is awesome because the new technology would just floor everybody. It's amazing. It's kind of like every office having a dream, where they can have their own mini-IT system developed for them. If you're talking about implementing that, then you're really going to have 100 different instances of case management and you need to have people working on that. You need people in records management helping every organization so they know how to manage those records. It will be extremely time-consuming to transfer over with case management, with the replacement to the shared drives." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Would you say that one of the keys to record management is having everything being done behind the scenes?" }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "Absolutely. If you can just imagine, if you were building an IT system—like Electronic Records Archive (ERA). Let's say you have ERA. ERA is capturing the transfer documentation; it's transferring the record schedule information. Within the system, you can determine, \"Is it permanent? And what will happen to those records?\" For example, the Transfer Record (TR) and the Legal Transfer Instrument (LTI) would be permanent records. If you have records schedules, what are they? Are they going to stay in the system? How would you do that? Then, you have a records schedule around that, but the system manages it. Nobody has to go in and say, \"Okay. Is this permanent, or temporary?\" You don't have to do that; its' already done for you. You just have to go in and populate the workflow. Yes, to the best that it's possible that you can automate this process, that's what should happen." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Do you feel that there's more to accomplish in your position? I know, technology being the way it is, will progress, and challenges will occur. As you're getting ready to leave right now, what do you feel there is left to accomplish?" }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "There's a ton of things to accomplish. I have to say that I think records management is a never-ending job. When I reach out to management or supervisors, it's kind of like human resources management. You're always going to do certain functions with managing your human assets, right? Well, records management is managing the business assets, and you're always going to be doing things to manage those business assets. You may do it differently—you may do it in an automated way—but there will always be something, such as you'd be administrating the systems, or you would execute a disposition within the systems, or you would control the records' creation, walk it down; those kinds of |things. Access.|Col2| |---|---| |What needs to be done? Obviously, according to the Managing Government Records Directive, we've|| |got the 2019 goal. The 2019 goal is to automate everything. Even though it sa|ys permanent records, y| can't really separate out the permanent records. Essentially, from now until the end of 2019, the efforts will be focused on converting everything over. There is a tremendous amount of work to be done, and for records management, like I said, it's a never- ending job, so you're either cleaning up stuff and backlogs from years ago, from people's poor habits or just because the record's life cycle is long to handle those records—to eventually converting over. And then, there will always be long-term issues of converting to the next system, migrating the data, and all of those kinds of issues." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What aspects of the job do you enjoy most, would you say?" }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "I actually—I love the people. I love working with the program. Records management is a program, and I love the different program activities. It's cool to be inventive, and work on an IT system. I've had a lot of fun with that in the past. I really enjoy it. I like to take things in a lab, and kind of figure out how it could work, and then roll it out. That's a really neat aspect of records management." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "If you had one issue that you would tackle—whether inside NARA, or inside corporate records management, either one—what would you choose?" }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "I think probably the biggest challenge—and it's in every agency, right? It comes down to compliance, and I've been trying to target it here as well, and it's really the managers and supervisors. I don't think they clearly appreciate their role with regards to managing the business assets. I don't think they understand that records management is set up to support them. For example, you have a records schedule. Well, the records schedule usually was generated working with their office to create this record schedule and to determine, kind of like a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), how long they keep their records, based on whatever legal or fiscal reasons, or historical reasons, for maintaining the records. I think many times, that managers and supervisors don't know that this is all set up for them; to help them manage their records. The parallel really is similar to the personnel system where we have work commitments, and we go and are appraised. We go through this whole process to properly manage our human resources. I think there really needs to be an emphasis on managing the business assets. I would like to see a more shaping towards records management, but it's your business assets. How do you use them? How do you properly manage those records? I would like to see, in the internal controls reporting, that each organization, each supervisor or manager, is held accountable and has to report on what they're doing, what are their business assets—their record assets. I think that's one way to get better compliance. They need to know they're the main driver. There's a lot of focus on, everybody has records management responsibility. Well, that's true, but the records supervisor makes it happen; and I don't think agencies get that across the board." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Some in the National Archives feel that we should get out of the records management business, and focus more on securing permanent records. What would you say to that?" }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "That would be a complete lack of leadership. I can't imagine something like that." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Well, I think people feel that it's very difficult to get the agency to comply to record management issues, and that our focus should just be on securing permanent records to the agency." }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "I don't see how you could separate the two, to be honest with you. I think there are things that could be experimented with, because I think the whole appraisal process is very convoluted. It takes way too long. I think that if you had people in the agencies that are certified records managers, and they can test something—that they can appraise temporary records and things like that. I think there are ways to make it easier. Part of the problem NARA has to realize—particularly in records management—and we'll take the Capstone approach. NARA created the Capstone approach. Luckily it was NARA, because if it was some other agency, I don't know how they would have pulled it off. I have to say, they treat corporate records management just like any other agency. In other words, Agency Services, often the Chief Records Officer, treats us like any other agency. I don't think other people realize that. We had some challenges on getting our Capstone list approved. Here, you have the very creators of the Capstone approach having a challenge, with another part of the organization getting the positions we proposed approved. Eventually we work through it, and it’s just any other records schedules. Other agencies can have some innovative approach, and we don't know that NARA would really support it and approve the records schedule. So, what comes first, the chicken or the egg? It's really hard to implement new innovative records management policies. I would like to see something more—in particular, in corporate records management—where we are more in the lab, test things out, and work through closely with the Chief Records Officer (AC) on these new concepts." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "That leads to a question I was going to ask at the end of the interview, but I'll ask it now. Where do you see NARA going, into the 21st century? That being the case of what you just said about us being on the forefront, do you see NARA as an agency that will be a leader, as far as the technology goes?" }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "I would like very much to see that. We established a working group. We call it the 1.1 Electronic Records Management Working Group (ERMWG), which is, 1.1 standing for the goal in the Government Managing Records Directive, which is to manage electronically all permanent records by the end of 2019. We stood up this working group; a group of the right people, the right organizations, and came up with how we would actually capture or automate records within the National Archives. We created this document, which is just recently signed. It's the Electronic Corporate Records Management Specification. What it does is it lays out in a high level the requirements needed for these eventual IT investments for the replacement to the share drives. How do you capture email stitching? How do you capture chats? How do you capture text messages? How do you capture voice messages? What about websites? What about social media? What about special media, where you have video, and audio? How do you capture video and digital pictures? How do you capture those? We laid out this specification, which really was written in IT-speak, and it's directed towards the IT environment that says, \"Okay, we need to purchase these kinds of tools.\" Tools alone will not solve the problem. However, this is one aspect of, \"Here's the tools, or the requirements for the tools.\" And what you can do is you can look across those requirements, and you could say, \"Okay. I need to have a way to capture this, and this, and this.” Maybe there's a tool that can do multiple functions and actually save money, save time, and it can capture other things. For example, some products are out there that can capture a website, they can capture social media, and they can actually capture text messages. You can look across the requirements and you can see, \"Oh, okay.\" It doesn't have to be one product that captures everything. It could be multiple products. I think it's a very innovative approach, but what we're working on with that, too, is the records management strategy. We have a draft of that—I don’t think it's going to be ready by the time I leave— that talks about the other policy issues and the human part, where you've got the people issues, the different policies, the training, and the implementation. You have to bring those pieces together. Yes, I would really love to see NARA taking some of these—working with some vendors, do some pilot testing, and see, \"How would this work?\" Because other agencies are hungry for it. They're hungry for that Enterprise Content and Records Management (ECRM) specification. They need that direction; they need something. I know, from the Federal Records Council, which I attend, they're just dying to have anything from NARA that can just kind of show them a path of, \"How do you get to 2019? What does it look like? What does success look like? How do you deal with such a big problem, and how do you break it up?\" Our ECRM specification actually kind of breaks up the elephant into chunks that can be solved." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "How have cutbacks and sequestration affected your approach to creating this type of guidance?" }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "This is where NARA has to do a better job—and it is true—that automation done right saves a lot of money. Period. You know, if you look at the email system that we have, there's nobody printing and filing. It's all handled for them. I'm sure they've saved a lot of money by using this new approach. NARA was very intelligent in how they picked the vendor for this system. For example, it has low storage costs. There's only one instance of the email in the system. If you're sending around a bunch of PowerPoint slides, or you're sending around these big attachments, it's not killing the system because there's only one instance of the email in the archive. It's all the metadata that actually is there, that shows everybody that got the email, and all that kind of stuff. It's very sophisticated in how it works. It's not only that you've got the automation, but you've got the right automation, and you've got something that actually does save money because it has low storage costs. That's why that working in a lab, being very careful—because, you know, contractors, they want to make money. They want to send you something that, \"Oh yeah, I've got this big system, and it can do everything for you, and it's a miracle worker,\" but then it's millions, and millions, and millions of dollars. That's where we've got to get more sophisticated in looking at different methods. Actually, things are more advanced. Probably the biggest surprise to me in working at NARA was on the 2019 goal, where I was a little skeptical about, \"How can you solve this problem?\" Now, I know, absolutely, it's solvable. I've been looking at some of the vendors, seeing how it can work. Once you can see how it works, it really opens up your mind to these new approaches. It was even more simple, for example, in capturing social media than I could have ever imagined. For NARA itself, I think it’s key, particularly Agency Services and Corporate Records Management, to really know what's out there as solutions, and to experiment with them." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I think a lab approach to all the records management to inform and teach them as they go out to agencies would be a wonderful idea as well. |M|S. THIAN: I think so, because people are coming to you. People are saying, \"Well…What about this?|Col3|Col4| |---|---|---|---| |What about that?\" Then, you either have people saying, \"Well, I can't commit to one.\" And another is|||| |like, \"Can you just give me a list so we can go out and look?\" I had people asking me questions. I said,|||| |\"Well, you know, here's some that we came across. Here's four of them. Take a look at them, and go see|||| |what you think.\" But to not know which four, to||even give a name for somebody? We need that kind of|| sharing. I don't know if we have to—I mean, certainly, we've got to make sure that the contractors are not participating in those discussions, because you're assessing different projects and things. You have to be fair and open, and we definitely encourage that, because that's how you get the best deal and everything; but people are desperate, and we've got only a few years before 2019." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes, very true. And the last one, on technology. One last question, the penultimate question is, is there anything more that you would like to say about corporate records management issues and technology? I know we talked a lot about it. Is there any final thing you'd like to say regarding that?" }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "Just encouraging the lab concept, because I do know that we have to do some pilot testing and experimenting. There's a lot of automation issues that are going to be coming up; case management is going to be one of those. It's going to be very interesting. I think corporate records management will be embedded in that process, which is very good. Corporate records management is now a member of the Investment Review Board, so that any IT system that is purchased from now on must have the records management functionality; in other words, you can execute disposition; you can do legal holds; you can manage the records throughout the life cycle. We're moving in the right direction, but there is more to be done." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Are there any final words of wisdom, anecdotes, or stories that you'd like to impart before you leave?" }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "I would definitely say that NARA wants to be the model agency. I think that's very impressive. A lot has been accomplished under David Ferriero as the Archivist. He's really committed to it. From what I see, upper management, like Jay Bosanko is terrific. He's the senior agency official for records management. I've been really impressed with the whole management team; Deb Wall, particularly. I think they are really moving NARA in the right direction. It's really been impressive to me. I've never had that kind of support for the records management program. I would just say for them to keep on doing; but it's a process. It takes a lot to be a records officer. The skill level is—and they recognize this—that they're going to have more advanced training for records managers. But it's a tough job. You have to be able to be a change agent. You have to know a lot about technology. You have to know about people and processes. It is an exciting challenge—very challenging—and at least at NARA, thank God that you've got senior support, which is fantastic." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yeah. I think one of the most difficult problems as well is to be able to predict the future in some ways, to know where we're going to be headed with technology." }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "That's true, but things happen at lightning speed. And what a person might have done years ago—that you know, you have, now, one person probably doing three, and four, and five jobs. The only way you can do that is with automation. You think about some of the processes that really have been innovative over the last several years. Everybody has a smartphone. It just made you more efficient, right? I mean, you do a lot of—you have a lot of activities and work with that. That's where it's moving. It's moving where your mobile phone, you're going to be able to do a lot of work on the mobile phone. Things will be made easier for people. So, embrace technology, for sure, and we need to keep up with it and not fall behind. It does take a commitment, and you do need to have processes in place where, from now on, that records are captured with any type of new system. For me, my words of wisdom really is that records management is a business asset, and I think if people look at it more as being a business asset, they wouldn't think it as being foreign. Like, \"Oh, that's just what those people from NARA are requiring us to do.\" Your mission records, your mission business asset that we're trying to help you manage—and yes, of course, we at the - - have to follow the law, and all that kind of stuff, but it's really for you, and this is how you can use these records. This is how you can be transparent; this is how you can be accountable. I think that whole accountability piece needs to be there." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "I think that we've come to an end. I'd like to thank you very much for service, and for your time today." }, { "speaker": "MS. THIAN", "text": "Thank you. It's been a pleasure." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "This is Jack Kabrel. Today is Friday October 14th, 2016. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Kenneth Thibodeau. This interview is part of a National Archives and Records Administration’s History Office Oral History Project. Welcome, Ken, and thank you for your time today." }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Glad to do it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "We’d like to tap into your expertise about the history of the Electronic Records Archive (ERA) project. Can you please provide a brief overview of your career in one or two minute or so—the arc of your career with the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "It had different phases. I was hired originally by the National Archives in 1975 in what was called theMachine-Readable Archives Division, and I stayed there for three years until I was offered the position of Records Manager at the National Institute of Health (NIH). That was 1978, and I stayed there for ten years. It was a great place to work, but after ten years, I kind of got to the position where I couldn’t think of anything else major I wanted to accomplish there. By pure coincidence, I learned that NARA was deciding it needed to ramp up its support for electronic records, and so I applied for the job of the Director of the new division they were creating, which was the Center for Electronic Records. I got that job at the very end of 1988. I was in that position until 1995 when I actually went on detail from NARA to the Department of Defense to head their Records Management Task Force. While I was there NARA reorganized, and I came back and was put in the position of Deputy Director for Modern Records Programs. I was in that position for basically three years until 1998 when I started the ERA Project and then became Director of the ERA Program Management Office a couple years later and stayed there until—it was late 2008. I made a commitment to the Chief Information Officer of NARA that I would stay with ERA at least until it was operational, and then when it became operational, the next major thing we faced was deploying the second system to support the George W. Bush Presidential Library. That was such a big thing, because we had to do that right; I decided I would stay on until we had that running. Then I reached an agreement with the Chief Information Officer that I would withdraw gradually, so we took part of the ERA program, which was the research component, and created a separate organization called the Center for Advanced Systems and Technology, which was IT research. The original idea was that operation would eventually be expanded to become the computer engineering aspect of NARA. The CIO retired, and her successor did not agree to that. I stayed in that research position until I retired at the end of 2010. That was my career at NARA." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "That early part of your career when you first came into NARA—can you talk about how everything that led up to actually being involved in the ERA helped you to prepare for the ERA? Everything including your education as well as your experiences in and out of NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Essentially my entire career led to ERA in that, when I was doing my dissertation research as a grad student, I wanted to do some statistical analysis. At that point there were no statistical packages available to do time series analysis, which is what I wanted to do. I decided to learn computer programming so I could write my own program. I took some computer science courses and then found that fascinating, so I wound up getting a couple postdocs inComputer Science and Quantitative Methods. I had, kind of a split personality, because I really love history. The thing about history is, it never ends. The more you study, the more complex questions you have to ask about history. Ultimately there’s always a subjective element in your interpretation of history. However, with computers, you either get it right or you don’t. The program works, or it doesn’t work. I like that aspect of computers. It was kind of sort of playing for me, because it was well-defined and very logical. Then, the National Archives posted the position in the Machine-Readable Archives Division, and I thought I can get to watch history happen in the federal government and pursue my love of computers at the same time. It worked out very well, because once I came on NARA, I was assigned to work with all the, or many of the big science agencies and my doctorate’s actually in the history of science, so it was a pleasure. My responsibility is what we called pre-accessioning, which is to get the permanent electronic records from the agency into the National Archives. I worked so much with NIH that eventually they decided they wanted to hire me. One of the Records Manager’s responsibilities at NIH was oversight of office automation. I was still very heavily involved in computers at NIH, and obviously when I came back to NARA as head of the Center for Electronic Records, still a total focus on electronic records—there was a bit of change, because—it was very strange for me. NARA did not expect division directors in the National Archives to be involved in budget, and my management training is that two basic things of management are staff and budget. It was very clear the center was under-resourced, and I was able to learn through various contacts that the agency really didn’t intend to put a lot of resources into it. I decided you’re the manager; that’s your responsibility to make sure you get the resources, and we were able to, in that five or six years, to get the budget from about one million to over three and a half million, and we were able to expand our productivity tremendously. In terms of preservation work, we expanded our productivity by over 1,000%; even got a government-wide award for doing that, and—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "If I may interrupt and ask a question—at this point, one of your jobs was to drag NARA into the future?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Yeah. [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "How did you go about doing that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "You have to have a certain amount of patience. You have to also respect other people’s position and perspective. My total experience with NARA is, it’s an under-resourced agency, and it’s full of people who are very dedicated to what they’re doing and are competent professionals. However, their viewpoint is very much conditioned by not having enough resources to do their job and not having the training to go about it. One thing I would fault NARA on for my entire career is, they never really recognized that when you promote someone to a management position, management is a different profession, and you really need to train people to be professionals in that area and generally they don’t. They just think management’s a personal capability. First thing at NIH, as soon as I got into a supervisory position, they put me in a management program—a development program—that lasted several years. I had some schooling in how to work in an organization and work with people to convince them that your needs were valid and that they should support you. I was able to find people in various parts of NARA including budget and obviously the people I worked for and I was able to convince them to support me and support the increase in the budget. It wasn’t always easy, because, for example, the first year I was there it took more than six months to figure out what the budget of my division was, because no one expected me to want to know that. Most other division directors in the National Archives—their budget is mainly staff and archive supplies like boxes and folders, which are centrally purchased, so they really didn’t have much cause to be worried about budget. In the computer operation, you had to pay for your computers, you had to pay for your contracts and all that. So it was very important. After nine months at NARA, the head of the National Archives calls me down to her office and says “You’ve got $50,000 in your budget, and I haven’t seen one word on how you plan to spend it. I want a plan in two weeks.” I really wanted to ask, “How would I have known this money was in my budget?” I bit my tongue, came back within two weeks with a plan, and was told, “Oh, well, I decided I need that money to buy more shelving for paper records.” I had several experiences of that in NARA. You don’t get mad; you don’t express your anger. You figure out a way to go back and work with them and get their support elsewhere, and it was much more important to get the support in the Congressional budget to ask for real increases rather than diversion of $50,000 here and there. That was an absolutely essential element in the ERA program, because we knew from the get-go that we were going to need a lot more money than NARA had ever dreamed of getting for electronic records." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And the time period we’re talking about would be about what?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "This period was 1988, or 1989 actually, through—I think we achieved the three million dollars around 1992 or 1993. Then things literally went to hell, because of the_Armstrong_vs._Executive_ _Office of the President_litigationthat we got absorbed in after the Federal government lost the case. For several years, basically, all our money went to handling court orders that came down in that case." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Let me just backtrack to 1988. NARA had a mindset of a culture of paper?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "How were you able to convince those who believed in the culture of paper that electronic records were here, and they’re coming, and we should address that to the tune of three million dollars a decade later?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Patiently would be the word. You know, step-by-step you make your case, and for example when I came, I learned that they were still using technology that had been set up in the early 1970s. By 1988, that was really obsolete technology, but NARA had not had the resources to keep up with the time. It was very labor-intensive. They had to write a separate program for every single file of electronic records that came in, which was labor-intensive. Because of the cutbacks during the Reagan Administration—they only had about 13 staff I think—and they were only bringing in a few hundred files a year. You’re just losing ground constantly. So I said, you know, we really need increases in productivity, and the only way we’re going to get that is through automating using current technology. I told the staff early on that we’ve got to ramp up to where we’re handling thousands of files a year, and once we get there, we’re going to raise the target to tens of thousands of files. They looked at me like you’re crazy. We’re never going to get there. Four years later, we were—we actually brought in ten thousand files, and the only way I learned about it was the end of the year when I saw the statistics. We had developed the capabilities to do that, so it wasn’t traumatic for the staff, because we had developed two systems in the meantime, one to handle preservation, and one to handle accessioning, which like I said, thousand-fold increase in productivity. The staff didn’t have to do what they used to do with paper and rulers. They got the computers to do that work. We did it sort of piecemeal. I think I was very lucky in the sense that Trudy Peterson who was then head of the Office of the National Archives was one of the exceptions at NARA. She had had an early period of working in the Machine-Readable Archives Division. She knew that we really had to get on top of electronic records, and she was supportive, and I think that—the people above her liked me, because they had hired me. The two of us were able to work gently with them to get incremental increases over those four years." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Interesting. What was the size of your staff?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "When I got there, there were seventeen full-time employees (FTE) including four vacancies, and I looked at that chart, and I thought, good, I can bring in some computer people, because we didn’t have any professional computer people on the staff. We had archivists and archives technicians, but my first day on the job I lost those four vacancies. That was a quick lesson that I’ve got to really pay attention to resources and do whatever I can to get additional staff. Also, as soon as I got to know the staff, the archives technicians were the people who were writing the computer programs, and they were pretty routine programs where you just changed a few things for differences in each of the files that came in. I thought they understand what a computer program is, and they’re doing their jobs very effectively, so I worked with personnel to get their jobs reclassified as computer programmers. As technicians, they basically couldn’t get beyond a five, but as programmers they could go to, in a career ladder up to a GS-11. When that got through, it really motivated the staff, and I’m happy to say that a couple of those people who were fours and fives when I came in subsequently went on to become 13’s and 14’s in technical positions in other agencies. As a manager you’ve got to make sure your staff understands that you support them, and you want them to have good careers even if it means leaving. That was part of the secret of being able to improve productivity and get people to change the way they did their jobs without feeling threatened." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Can you take us from 1988 and address the changing technological advances that led us up to ERA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "The first one was actually inspired by the National Archives of France, because I met my French counterpart and went over to see their operation. They had developed this system—engineers had developed it where instead of having—the first thing you do in digital preservation is, because in those days you could not trust any digital media; they’re very fragile. They’re very sensitive to temperature and humidity changes, even to airborne chemicals. So the first thing NARA did and still does is, when you get something in, immediately copy it onto a physical medium that you can trust for some number of years. That was the program that people were writing to make those copies, and then you do 100% review byte-by-byte to make sure the copy is a perfect copy. If you have lost something, you know exactly what was lost. The French had a system that did exactly that, and they explained their system. I came back and said, “Okay, we’re going to get a system like that.” There weren’t any. You couldn’t buy one, so we contracted to develop one. I have always been fascinated with structured data, and so the second step in the accessioning was once we got the copy, they would do a dump, which would be to print the contents of the files out onto paper, and then the archivist would sit down with a ruler and look at the data and see if it matched what the data was supposed to be. If the first nine characters of every record should be a Social Security number, you check if everything in the first nine columns of the first 30 records are numbers. If the next field is supposed to be a name, you check if they look like names. They were doing this manually. I pointed out to them, what you’re doing is a statistically invalid routine, because there’s no guarantee that if the first 30 records are okay, the next several thousand are also okay. It’s not a random sample. So we developed a computer program which would do exactly that; you tell the computer what the data’s supposed to look like, and then tell it to read the data and see if it conforms. We could get very precise on that, because we could not only say is it supposed to be numbers? Is it supposed to be letters? If you had a two-digit or two-byte field that’s supposed to be states, is it one of the 50 recognized two-letter codes for states? If you have fields that are dates, is the data actually within the date range that the agency told you it should be? If you have a field that codes for occupation, you also feed it all the codes and say, “Do you find any codes in this field that aren’t in the code book?” We were able to know a lot more about the accessions that were coming in, because we automated that. Those two perceptions at least for structured data and in all cases for the physical survival were without question basic requirements we were going to build into the ERA system." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And was the coming technology able to help speed along that process?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Oh, yeah. In fact, we were disappointed, because we did find one company that had a system that was a lot like the preservation system we wanted, except they’d have to make a number of adaptations, because we were more demanding than most of their customers. They just decided—they loaned us the system for six months that we actually used and said, “Yeah, we love it, but here’s the things we need,” and they just decided they didn’t want to make any changes. We had to go out with an open competition, which actually wound up being extremely lucky for us, because within three months of awarding that contract to a company in New York called Mueller Media Conversions, NARA assigned to the Center the responsibility for handling the consequences for the government’s losingthe PROFS case. The PROFS case, which was named after the IBM system that was in use in the White House, was an attempt to keep the Reagan White House—to force them to keep their back-up tapes in the PROFS System. That was the system that Olive North had used to create his notes that he had shredded on paper. The plaintiffs were savvy enough about what was going on in the White House to realize that he may have shredded the paper, but he probably has no access to the back-up tapes and most, if not all, of his notes are probably still on the back-up tapes. The Federal government fought that; it was in the court for four years and two weeks. Before the end of the first Bush administration, the court reached its decision, the Federal government lost, and NARA was saddled with over 15,000 volumes of digital stuff coming out of the White House, mostly computer tapes, but also hard drives taken out of people’s computers and some other weird media. What nobody knew in the public was that when the Clinton administration came in, there were no working personal computers in the entire executive office of the government, because we had taken all the hard drives from the National Security Council as part of the settlement of that lawsuit, and in the meantime, the FBI was doing an investigation of the allegations that people in the Bush White House had illegally looked into Bill Clinton’s passport files as a student to try to dig up political dirt on him. So they seized all the other hard drives in the White House. When the Clinton people came in, they were back to ink on paper, because they didn’t have any computers to use. That transfer of all that stuff from the PROFS case, when Trudy Peterson became the Acting Archivist, she decided we should handle it, because even though the responsibility of NARA would have been in the Office of Presidential Records those people had no experience and no capability to deal with electronic records. Responsibility was transferred to us, and that became our life for more than three years. That was so much bigger than everything the National Archives had accumulated in 30 years." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So how did you solve the problem of the hard drive and back-ups?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "It was horrendous to tell you the truth, and my wife who also worked for NARA can tell you for three years every day we’d be walking in from the garage at Archives 2, and I would say, “You know, I have to say this out loud—I hate my job; I do not want to be here. I’m wasting my life, and the only reason I’m staying here is to protect my staff, because if I weren’t dealing with the lawyers and the judge, they’d have to be.” It was kind of amazing, because when we got that stuff, I had no one in my entire division who had the clearance to touch National Security Council (NSC) records. They’re all classified. We had some people with some low-level clearances, but nothing approaching what we needed. I actually asked NARA, “Can you temporarily assign some people from the Declassification Division who have the necessary clearances to work with us until I can get some clearances for my staff?” I was accused of playing a game. I thought, how is this a game? You’ve assigned us responsibility for these records, and I have no one who’s legally able to deal with them. My request was turned down flat. Fortunately, since this was the White House, NARA’s oversight agency in that area—the CIA—worked with us. They were very helpful to us. They allowed us to configure a system, which we literally threw together, to copy the NSC tapes, but the system was configured so that there were no printers, and there was no ability to display data from the tapes on the screen. We could never see what the data was that we were handling, but the computer could tell us if it had managed to make a copy. First it has to tell us if it can read it physically, then it makes a copy, it does the comparison, and it would tell us if the copy was 100% successful. We were fortunate, because Mueller Media—I actually called them up and said, “You’ve got this set of requirements to develop a preservation system for us, but I need you as soon as possible to just configure stuff that we can copy tapes in-house, because at that point we were using an outside computer service bureau that there is no way we could send classified records to them, and I wouldn’t trust presidential records of any kind being shipped back and forth from the National Archives to a contractor. Mueller Media came through and got us a cobbled-together system within a few weeks, and the CIA was able to certify that nobody can see any data that’s on these tapes. It was astounding the work the staff did, because we encountered a lot of problems, and they couldn’t see the data, so they couldn’t know what the real problems were. They could kind of figure out what the nature of the technical problems were. One really strange example is, we were preservingstuff on 3480 tape cartridges. A lot of theNSC’s files were on old tape reels, and in principle a tape cartridge could handle about 60% more data than a reel of tape. We were finding cases where, when we’re copying stuff from a tape, we’d get an error message that’d say the cartridge is full. Okay, why is it that with 60% capacity, you can’t copy the whole tape onto this cartridge? This stumped us for a while, until finally one of the staff said, “You know, I vaguely remember reading a few years ago that on the tape cartridges, the gaps between files are actually—where there’s no data; it’s just a gap so that the computer knows I’ve ended one file—is bigger. It turned out that on the tapes from the NSC, they were back-ups of emails, so there were a lot of very, very small files and a whole lot of interfile gaps. That was the reason we couldn’t make the copies. The staff had this kind of expertise that really came into play, and we were able to successfully copy everything to 99.996% of perfection. Where it wasn’t perfection was for really dumb reasons. It turned out the National Security Council was using tapes that should have been discarded years ago; tapes that had been read so often that there were portions of the tapes that were transparent, so there was obviously no data on that part. There were tapes that had broken and been scotched taped back together. They didn’t have the money to go out and buy new reels of tapes, which you’re talking about a $13 item at that point. We did our job, and the court was able to dismiss the case in the Federal government’s favor. The PROFS casehad a double impact on us, and it was another case where NARA doesn’t appreciate the importance of budget. We absorbed several million dollars of work from that case, and we didn’t get any money to cover it. It got so bad that in the third year, at the end of the first fiscal quarter, I had to issue a stop work order to my staff, because we had run out of money handling the court case. I’d say, “You can’t do any of our regular work that involves spending money like sending a tape to the computer center to be copied, because they charge us for that, and we’re out of money. We can’t do it.” That did get NARA’s attention, and they had in the meantime cut my budget but they—at least at that point they restored some of the funds so we could keep working. Again, it reinforced the primary responsibility is to make sure you can get the resources you need to do your job, which is something I carried into the ERA program from the very beginning. The other big lesson was, up until that case, NARA’s focus on electronic records was entirely on Federal records. The only electronic records that had ever come to a Presidential Library was a data file of donors to President Carter’s campaign, which weren’t even Federal government records. That was a deeded gift. When we saw what came out of the Reagan and first Bush White House, clearly, Presidential records were going to be the big thing in the future, because as I said, that transfer from Reagan and first Bush was bigger than everything NARA had accumulated since 1970 in electronic records. That was really how the ERA program got started, because I was Deputy Director for Modern Records Programs, which was not a very challenging job. I was getting bored. I also had tremendous loyalty back to the Center for Electronic Records, and so I got together with Bob Chaddock who was an engineer on the staff, and the most impressive engineer I’ve ever worked with, who was in the Center for Electronic Records. He had done incredible work on the PROFS case in helping us to succeed in dealing with that. We said things are not going to work the way they’re going and NARA’s got to realize that it has to buckle down. It has to get resources for electronic records, and it has to do things differently than it’s been doing up to now. The two of us agreed that we would develop the case for that, and we were both—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And what time period was this? Was this post-Reagan and Bush 41?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Yes, this was 1998. And we both actually felt that we might wind up losing our jobs, because we were going to tell NARA that they were on the verge of really screwing up. But we thought, we both really care about this, and so we’re going to do it. It wound up—I think it was August of 1998—I asked for a meeting with John Carlin, the Archivist, in which I presented him with three bar charts. The first bar chart covered the history of accessions of electronic records from 1970 to 2004.2004, when the Bush and Reagan stuff came over. It had shown our increase from a few hundred files a year up to 10,000 or so a year, which is very impressive, because that 10,000 bar was way above everything that came before it. The second bar chart added one more bar to that, which was what had come over from Reagan and Bush. That bar was so high that everything else almost receded into the X-axis. The only thing that got a little bit above the X-axis was the 10,000 files, which was obviously—this is huge compared to everything we had dealt with before. The third bar chart added our projection of what we could expect out of the Clinton White House. We actually had projected based on what we could learn from NARA staff who were working with the White House, coming out of Clinton, there’d be something. Now let me give you a figure—for first Bush and Reagan, it was roughly a quarter of a million files of electronic records. Our projection for Clinton, because we didn’t have as good data as we’d like to, but our projection is going to be somewhere between 10 and 40 million. I went to Carlin with the lower estimate. That third bar chart had the 10 million, which made all the Bush and Reagan stuff go back into the X-axis. I said, “The problem with this, Mr. Carlin, is if you take the systems we have in the Center for Electronic Records, and you expand them 100 times, which means we need 100 more staff, because those were all PC-based, and you have one person per system,” I said, “You will encounter critical mission failure, because the first thing you do with digital records is, you copy them onto media that you trust. But with a volume of 10 million files, before we finish copying them, the tapes we’re using will exceed their lifespan, and we’re going to have to start recopying before we finish the first copy. This is just not going to work.” And John—I guess a lightbulb when off—at that point, authorized me and Bob toconstitute the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) project, because I said the other problem we have is, we can’t tell you right now what would be a solution. There was nothing in NARA’s past that was sufficient in terms of technology, and we don’t know anyone else in the world who’s dealing with this. We need to do some research about what are the possibilities. So the first ERA project is actually pure research. Is it possible to build a system that can expand every four or eight years by several orders of magnitude, and do the archival work? John was really savvy on it—he was so impressed by that presentation that he took my three bar charts and had them blown up into posters. He went up on the Hill for his 1999 budget hearing, and he starts by saying, “Gentlemen, before I talk to you about the money we need for ’99, I’m giving you a head’s up that in 2000, I’m coming back, and I’m going to be asking for $100 million for electronic records.” He showed them the three bar charts. This is why we need this money. That was savvy, because If he had just gone in and said, “I need a 100 million dollar increase,” which is like 25% of NARA’s budget at that point, that would have been a huge problem. By doing it this way, we had a year in between to inform the Congress and the OMB of why we needed this money. I think that was a good way to go, and we wound up getting the money. Does that answer your last question?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes that does, actually. It’s quite fascinating to learn what one individual, whether it be yourself or John Carlin, can do to an entire program like ERA." }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Yeah. As I said, Chaddock was—I was just so lucky he was working for me, and it was interesting, because when he applied for the job as a computer engineer working for us several years earlier, the Branch Chief wasn’t even going to interview him. I just said to her, “You’ve got to interview this guy.” He came in, and we did a joint interview, and as soon as he left the room, the Branch Chief just turned to me and said, “Well clearly we’ve got to hire him. Thank you for forcing me to interview him.” He’s a just absolutely solid engineer, but also an engineer who knows how to work in organizations. He had worked in the Department of Defense before he came to us. He knew how to build up organizational context, so when Carlin authorized the research program, and he actually diverted about a million dollars of money from other operations to support the research program, I said, - - Bob, you’ve got to go—first of all, see if you can find someone else in government who’s got a big system that maybe we could—obviously we’re not going to copy anybody else’s system, because there’s no other archives—but we can learn about things about big systems that could be valuable to us. We also knew that there were aspects of what NARA needed to do that were not only beyond the state of the art of the technology, but that even computer science couldn’t give you a clue of what you should be doing. They said also be looking around at the research the government is doing to see if there’s lessons we can learn from existing research. And—" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Did you look outside the government?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "No, not at that point. You start close to home, because we figured if we can find a government agency that’s doing something that could help us, we can probably get them to give us some advice for free as opposed to, you go outside the government, and you’re going to have to pay for it, and you’re immediately in acquisitions channels. That takes longer than just talking to colleagues in the government. Bob contacted several agencies and had to come back to me and say, “Ken, the only system I found that’s on the scale we’re operating is over at NASA, at Goddard. It’s basically irrelevant for two reasons. One is, even though it’s handling huge quantities of data and huge numbers of files coming in constantly, it’s one datatype. It’s all stuff coming down from one satellite, whereas at the National Archives, you’re dealing with every possible type of file you can imagine, because somebody in the government has it, and there are places in the government that has computer stuff that nobody else in the world has. A fundamental requirement for NARA is tremendous diversity of data types. And he said, “The second reason why it’s not applicable to us is, the cost of that system is bigger than NARA’s budget nationwide for everything we do. We couldn’t find a model, but fortunately Bob found a research program called Doc-T that was “distributed object computation testbed,” which was a collaboration between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Patent and Trademark Office. Defense’s real interest was in distributed computing, because they’re a worldwide organization; they could see the value in being able to have computational needs met in systems that are spread across the world, but they function as if they were a single coherent system. They wound up collaborating with Patent and Trademark, because Patent was going to complete automation, and it’s a—the patent system alone is a huge recordkeeping system, which has very complex data in it. You get not only text but mechanical drawings, mathematical equations, and chemical formulas. Already at that time they were getting entire genomic sequences being filed as patents. They provided a good test corpus of unclassified records that could be used in this research. Bob immediately saw this could be a good ally of NARA, because the Patent Office keeps its records for 70 years. They have a digital preservation problem, because if you’re going ten years or more, you’ve got the preservation problem. They weren’t addressing that aspect, so we went to them and said, “If we give you a little more money, will you look into the long-term implications of how you keep these patent records readable and authentic over decades?” Their reaction was, “Yeah, if you give us more money, we’ll extend the contract to do that.” That’s how we got in contact with theSan Diego Supercomputer Center,which turned out to be very lucky for us, because once the scientists and engineers out there understood our problem, they got really interested in it to the point where a couple years later one of them said to me, “You know, Ken, you don’t give us much money at all, but you give us the most complex problems we’re facing.” I thought, well this is wonderful, because engineers love problems. That developed into a very productive research activity. I think we extended the funding of that by like 3%. And we got some allies in the computer field, and I thought you know, PR value, just having National Archives be seen in company with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center gives us credibility in the technical field that there’s no way we could accomplish that on our own. After a couple years, I said to Bob, “DARPA has been kind enough to us that they’ve extended this contract twice just for us, because their research is done. We need to find another partner that will be willing and have the vested interest in working with us over the long term.” So Bob started looking around and started cultivating a relationship with the National Science Foundation (NSF), and parallel to that, thanks to contacts I had in the Defense Department, and some contacts he had, we also developed a relationship with the computer science program at the Army Research Lab. With the National Science Foundation, it took over two years to actually get an agreement with them, and the way Bob and I worked, he would do all the legwork to set it up, and then I would go and meet with my counterpart, and we’d have a nice meeting in which we agreed to be partners, and we would shake hands. Then the official stuff would follow, the interagency agreements. He sets it up with the cyber infrastructure program at NSF, and I go over to meet with my counterpart, and it’s a very good meeting. This guy was one of these computer scientists who just loves challenges, and so I thought this was going to be fun working with him. After we shook hands, I said to him, “You know, if we’re going to be partners, we need to be able to be up front with us, and if we have any kind of problems in our partnership, we need to be able to put them on the table and work them out.” He said, “Well certainly.” And he gives me this look and says, “Well Ken, but is there something that’s troubling you right now?” I said, “It’s just one little thing. Why did it take so long to get this partnership?” He said, “Well that’s easy. Think about it, Ken. Advanced cyber infrastructure—National Archives—there’s no way these two things have anything in common.” The only rationale we could figure out of why you guys wanted to work with us was, you were actually a front for the intelligence community, and we’ve been burned by them before, and there’s no way we’re going to allow that to happen again.” And I said, “Okay, but what changed your mind?” He said, “Oh that was easy. As soon as you told us how much money you had, we said oh, there’s no way they go that low.” That became a very good partnership. We were able to keep our contacts with the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and even when people from there moved to other institutions, we were able to ride other NSF programs to keep that contact alive. We still maintain this model we had set up with DARPA that we wouldfund at most 10% of the cost of the research to have them address the archival issues, and in addition to not having to pay for a full research project ourselves, we didn’t have to worry about developing the competence to manage computer research, because all of our partners already had programs that did that. We didn’t have to develop any overhead at NARA to do that as well as any knowledge about how to do it. We relied on people who had been in the business for decades, and that proved very valuable to us, but it also—the more partners we had in government—the more people who were recognizing their long-term problems were important problems. When we go to the White House to say we need money to deal with this, they start looking at who do we ask if these guys are credible? When they turn around, it’s oh, most of the major players in this field are collaborating with the National Archives. Clearly there’s something real here. We wound up getting a really good reception at the White House. In fact, one of the things Bob and I decided early on was, let’s not only work with other agencies; let’s ride their coattails in the sense that, look at where the government is investing money in computer research, because there’s a good chance that that’s where the government’s going to be going in the future. Then if we know about it ahead of time, NARA will be better prepared to deal with the new technologies when they start using them. It was fairly easy to do that, because for decades the White House had produced something that used to be called the Blue Book until the second Bush administration. The Blue Book was the government got all the big agencies that were investing in computer research together and said, “We’re going to come up with one plan for the government’s investment in IT research, because we’re not going to have NASA and Defense spending money on the same thing. We’re not going to waste money that way. We’re going to coordinate all this.” That document would tell you every year where the government’s three billion dollars in IT R&D was going, and we would just look at that and say okay, where are the ones that seem most relevant to NARA’s interest? We would form partnerships that way. By doing that, we started asking questions of people at the White House about that process, and they eventually invited us to become observers on the committee that developed that plan, which was nice, because you get a lot more insight when you sit at the table than you do just from the final report that comes out. After a couple years, the White House decided, we really like NARA being here, because unlike everybody else—they’re trying to get resources for their own mission—like us, NARA has a government-wide perspective. Even though we’re a tiny agency, since there were similarities in the way we look at the whole situation, they eventually made us a full-fledged member of the committee that established that budget, so we got to vote equally with the Department of Defense, NASA, NIH, Department of Energy—all the big guns in IT research. That gave us credibility that, like I say, you couldn’t get that by yourself no matter what you accomplished. To have the powerhouses in the computer field in government, to be one of them is just a really good position to be in. It developed even beyond that, because there were times in the second half of George W’s administration, when the White House actually asked us to co-sponsor events with them, events on computer science research, which again, tells the world these people are significant players in this field. I think that kind of stuff helped when it came time to go to the Hill and ask for money. It also helped with OMB that if we’re working with the science and technology policy office in the White House in this area, we have credibility when we’re asking for money for computers. So that was a good thing." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes, and it also lets the community understand that we’re no longer just a paper organization. We’re thinking far ahead as well." }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Oh yeah. It gave us contacts outside the government as well, because the White House gets big guns like Bob Kahn, one of the co-inventors of the internet—they get people like that to advise them. So we get in contact with people like that, which further helps, because they have contacts. It puts you in a very good network." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "This gives us a really good background so far, Ken. I’m going into ERA; is there anything else you’d like to say about this part of it before we start getting into the Xs and Os of the ERA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "That’s a good question, because what this brings us to is, after our first year and a half of research, what we asked the San Diego Supercomputer Center to do for us is, can you figure out a conceptual architecture for a computer system? This is not an implementation. We’re not talking about what equipment or software. What are the design principles you use when you start to actually work out the details? Can you figure out an architecture for a system that we have to anticipate is going to be constantly growing by orders of magnitude in terms of data volumes, but also a system that has to be able to evolve over decades? No matter where technology goes, we’ve got to be able to keep up with it, both in terms of having a very effective and efficient system, but also being able to take the stuff that’s coming from other systems around the government. They articulated what was a very elegant conceptual architecture within about 18 months and I asked Reagan Moore, the head of that research team, to come in and brief NARA management on this proposal. The context that I went to Carlin to ask for the briefing was that we now think this is possible, and we’d like to bring in a world-class computer scientist to explain to you why it is possible to build the kind of system that NARA needs. John agreed to that, and so I forget what John called the committee of all the office heads at that time, but anyway, he agreed to have Reagan come in and brief them. The result of Reagan’s briefing is they all agreed, yeah, we should move this from research into actual system development. That lit the transition from ERA as a pure research project into a system development activity. That would have been about 2000." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Before we get into that next step, tell us how important John Carlin was in this whole process?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Actually it was kind of interesting, because there’s this personal story here. It was clear to me in both his case and his successor Alan Weinstein that the well had been poisoned before they got to NARA, that they did not see me as an asset. In fact, in the case of Weinstein, in his Senate hearing for confirmation, he was saying things about ERA that were very misinformed, and in listening to it I thought—and I know who misinformed him—it was no one in NARA. I have enough contacts around, after twenty-some years, enough contacts in the government to know where he was getting this line. I thought, in both cases, I’ve got to convince these gentlemen that they really can use me to the advantage of this agency, because I’ll do whatever I can. Like most archivists at NARA, I believe in the mission, and the first time I had a meeting with Carlin, it confirmed my suspicion. His body language was very distant. He kept his distance until I did that briefing with the three bar charts, and then he quickly realized that the situation was the way I described it, and that I was a person who could help him do that. I just told a lot of friends of mine, I don’t care that he came in, even if he wanted to fire me, he’s the guy who got me my first hundred million. Once I had convinced him of the case, there was no question of his support. He was really very solid. I certainly regretted his leaving NARA. Once he had overcome some initial bias based on third-hand data, we had developed a very good working relationship, including the point when John decided to start a new push to improve the records management for electronic records throughout the government. I recommended a former Air Force captain who had worked for me when I was in the Pentagon, that I thought was the guy who will do the job for you. John interviewed him and immediately decided, yeah, I could use a lot more like him, because having been former military he’s going to get the job done. This was Daryl Prescott. Daryl did get 19 other agencies to work with NARA on what are the requirements for managing electronic records. Then he shepherded that requirements document to become a standard issued by the object management group. So John—I’m just saying this to illustrate how we wound up being a pretty good team—John with his background as a former government executive and a Governor of Kansas knew how to work in a big government organization, in terms of working with the White House and working with Congress to get resources. If we had had someone without that background at that point, I don’t think we would have been so successful. John had a real executive’s mentality, and he had the ability to act on it. With Weinstein it was kind of funny, because as I said, I listened to his testimony, and I thought I’ve got to really correct the misimpressions that he has. I waited a little while once he came on, because I figured I need to get to know something about this man and how I should approach him. When I finally thought I could formulate a message that I think he’ll be able to appreciate, I asked for a one-on-one meeting with him. I started with my spiel, and within two minutes he cuts me off. He goes, “Ken, just stop talking.” He said, “Now I don’t know anything about computers, but I have three sons who do. I know that what you’re doing is absolutely going by the book,” which was the absolute truth. I mean, I don’t know if he knew the details behind it, but when Carlin authorized us to start the development, the first thing we did was go out and order all the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards about systems development, and we hired a contractor as a management company that was incredibly expert in this area, especially in, not only in systems development in terms of the technology, but also in how you do it in government, because we have no experience with this. We’re going to bring in people who know how to do it, and we’re going to look at the textbooks that tell you how to do it. Somehow, one of Weinstein’s sons, based on his reporting of what he had learned of how we were going about it told him, “They’re doing it the way you should do it.” So he says to me at this point, “Since you’re doing this the way you should, I figured out that my responsibility is to get you money, and I’m going to do that.” So Alan became a very good supporter as well and got us a few hundred more million. That worked out very well." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So now, take us into that next step of actual hands-on development of ERA. You have some money, we’re going forward. What do we do next?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "I had spent a year at the Pentagon. Basically, for me, it was R&R. In handling the PROFS case as I mentioned, it was miserable for me. I was totally burned out after three years of that, and I needed to get away from lawyers and judges. I considered retiring, because they were offering a buyout at that point, and I talked to one of my best friends who had taken an earlier buyout, and he said, “Well the one lesson I would tell you, Ken, is don’t retire unless you know what you want to do in retirement.” I said, “I’m so burned out, I don’t even know who I am anymore, much less what I want to do.” He said, “Well, the last thing you want to do is retire.” It happened that I was talking to some people in DoD. DoD came to a point where they realized that as a result of personal computers, they had lost institutional control over their records. It had devolved to the desktop. They started out this initiative—the Records Management Taskforce—to figure out a way to manage electronic records. The department could actually be in control, not the individual at the desk. I found that a very interesting activity, and so I got to know the people and talked to them. I thought I could go over and do some studies for them. That would be relaxing for me, then I’d get recharged, and be able to come back to NARA. When I said this to them, their response immediately was, “Oh good, we need a director.” I said, “No, no, I don’t want to direct. I just want to come over and do some....” “No, no, no, we want you as director.” So I wound up being the director. When I got over there, I was introduced to a methodology the department uses called Integrated Process and Product Development; IPPD. It’s a very flexible methodology, but it has two fundamental canons. One of them is that when you’re developing a new system—and DoD had first developed this just after World War II for the manufactured weapons systems like airplanes and tanks—you need simultaneously to define the process that you’re going to use as well as the product that comes out of that process. That’s canon number one. Canon number two is you involve all your stakeholders throughout the entire process. My experience at NIH had prepared me for that where, if you’re developing a computer system, you especially have to have very rich communications with your users, because you really need to understand their use. I saw too many computer systems at NIH that did things for people, but they were so short of their potential that it was sad. Or some I saw where they had this computer system they used until they got into a crunch, and then they wouldn’t even bother turning the terminals on. They’d go back to their typewriters, because they knew how to deal with short deadlines using typewriters. The records management branch at NIH eventually became essentially a front-end for system development where if you know someone’s records, you know what their business is, and you have a good inkling of how they’re going about their business. We would use that knowledge to work with the clients for the technologists to develop their requirements in a way that would really optimally tap the potential of the technology, because we also understood a lot about the technology, which the end-user didn’t, and they couldn’t—a lot of times they wouldn’t be stating requirements, because they didn’t realize technology could help them with that. As I found with a lot of archivists, archivists don’t think in systems terms. The way they express their needs is often meaningless to computer people who they think in systems terms all the time. I’ve been convinced my whole career that you can’t—if you want to have a really good computer system, you engage the people who are going to use it. You engage them thoroughly. I brought that method into NARA, and NARA was fine with us doing it. We created integrated product and process teams for all the major aspects of the system. Also because of all your stakeholders, we started early on to engage the entire community. For example, I sent staff out to every region of NARA, and we asked the managers in the regional offices, “Would you identify some of your most important customers and ask them to come in and meet with us so that we can understand their perspective of what they would like NARA to do for them?” We did similar things in Washington, and also as we went along, we had two major drafts of the ERA requirement documents. We published notices in the Federal Register that said, “We have these drafts; if you’re interested in commenting on it, we’d love to hear what you say. We’ve posted the draft on our website; you can just download it, and any comment you care to give us, we’d love to get.” So we exposed ourselves to the whole world so that we could get some feedback. We also sponsored a couple conferences where we told government people in the Washington area, “Come on in. We’ll tell you what our plans are, and we’d like to hear your reaction to those plans. If you’re interested, we’d really be glad to send staff out to your agency to talk to you more specifically about your needs.” Obviously targeting records managers is a major component there. We also had a conference we called Industry Day where we told the IT industry if you think you might be interested in a contract with NARA, come on in. We’ll give several talks about what we’re planning on doing, and we’d like to hear from you. If you’re interested, we will agree to have you come in one company at a time in a private session where we’ll sign a non-disclosure agreement that we won’t tell anyone what you told us. You can tell us how you think you could help us with our problem. We had probably 20 companies come in one-on-one to talk to us in that mode. That gave us a very good sense of what the industry thought they could do for us and what they couldn’t do. Until we finalized that requirements document, we had this very extensive dialog with NARA staff, with agency people, with people in the public and with the IT industry so we had an integrated perspective on what ERA should be like and could be like. I think that was really essential. It probably unfortunately led to one major mistake we made in that, when we actually awarded the contracts, because I believe in user engagement, we insisted that we keep the NARA staff engaged. Well, once you’ve got a contract, you got problems with having people outside the government involved, because it’s confidentiality that’s required under acquisitions. We kept NARA teams or created new teams in place to work with Lockheed and Harris so that they would fully understand what we were trying to do. The problem we had is neither we nor Lockheed adequately managed that interaction to the point where—there’s a phrase in IT where a lot of users want to pave a cow path. My engineers came back to me in ERA and said, “Ken, they’re not paving the cow path. They’re mechanizing the cow.” They got so far into the weeds that we shouldn’t have gone into that level of detail. We should have stayed at a higher functional level. Unfortunately, for me, my engineers were split. Some of them thought, well this is fine. Others thought, no, the system’s going to get bogged down on all these tiny little details, which it did. That’s why we had the one experience of the three-month delay and a 25% cost overrun." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Can you explain that a little bit further?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "From my perspective, the biggest mistake I made early on was the first Project Manager I hired who was a very bright and very articulate young man who was an archivist, and I thought this is good. He’s been trained as a project manager, but he has experience as an archivist, so he really knows NARA’s business. A few months after hiring him, he came in and said, “You know Ken, you’re doing this wrong. You’re trying to develop a system to preserve electronic records, and all the advice is, that’s not a business process. You need to automate an entire process, and the process begins with record scheduling.” Because nothing comes to the National Archives except off schedules, pretty much. I thought, well, there’s that school of thought, but there’s also a lot of recent government publications that say don’t do grand designs. Grand designs fail, just the way the FBI failed on three attempts spending millions of dollars—billions actually—trying to automate its case files. I thought if we go into record scheduling, we’re expanding the scope of ERA so much and making it so much more complicated, because then you’ve got to involve more units of NARA, that really didn’t want to do it. I said to him, I thought the guy’s smart and aggressive, and if you can convince NARA’s management that we should do it, that’s what we’ll do. And he succeeded in convincing NARA’s management. In that first go-around, we were not developing an electronic records system; we were developing a system to automate the process of scheduling and appraisal. The problem that came up is this, there’s an old saying, “Converts are the worst kind.” We had several of the appraisal archivists who were on that IPPT who basically wanted every last detail of the way they did things in paper replicated in the computer system. My thinking, originally, is you automate the—I’m forgetting the form number, but - - the form on which agencies develop their records schedules. You fix it so that the agencies can create that form online, submit it online. The approvals can all be done online. But the staff insisted that at every step on the way, we want this automated; we want this button in this part of the screen; we want this business rule imposed by the computer as opposed to having a staff member looking at the schedule and saying, “Well this is the problem with what you’re proposing. Have the computer recognize as many problems as possible, and automatically flag them.” I had actually gone to NARA management early on and said, “Look, I fully believe in engaging the staff, but we have to do this carefully, because once these—up at that point, there’s no automated support whatsoever for appraisal and scheduling. Nothing. These people have no concept of what it’s going to be like, and I guarantee once we automate something, they’re going to start looking at their work very differently, and within a year or two they’re going to want changes.” Management bought that and said, “Yes,” but they never communicated that to the staff. We got hung up on these details. One example of that—we never had quite as much money as we needed, but we had good funding. Early on, Lockheed came to me and said, “You said in your requirements document you want a rules engine.” A rules engine is a piece of software that you can feed business rules into, and you say, “If this happens, stop the process, or if that happens, tell the person who’s doing it that that’s wrong, and they can’t go further until they fix it,” and stuff like that. They said, “But we’ve looked at what you’re trying to do in this first increment, and there’s only two business rules that need to be built into the system for the first increment. It will cost us a quarter of a million dollars to buy a rules engine, but we could code those two rules for a couple thousand. Just hard-code them. So it’s your choice, Ken. What do you want to do?” I said, “Well, I don’t have enough money, so let’s hold off on the rules engine till we get down the road and we have a lot of rules.” Lockheed never came back to me and said, because of what the appraisal archivists were demanding, that they wound up with several hundred rules that they hard-coded, which of course means whenever the user thinks well, no, you didn’t get it right, and then they’ve got to go back and rewrite software. So that was what really was driving up the costs on that first increment. Like I said, if I had it to do over again, I would not have let the pitch to management occur. I would have said nope, we’ve developed the system to preserve electronic records, because that is a sub-process. Even though there’s a business decision before it, the decision is simply, this is permanent, and here’s when it should come in, and I can implement that, as we had done in our accessioning system." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "How come you took a secondary role in that and didn’t push for the preservation to supersede anything else?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "It goes back to what I said early on. I respect other people’s positions. Unless I’ve concluded that there’s something wrong with the person or they’re dumb or extremely biased or there’s some issue, if you come with a credible background to me, and you show signs of intelligence, I’m going to respect you. I don’t necessarily think I have the answers to everything. In fact, as a manager, your responsibility is to get the best out of everyone who works for you. And one of the worst mistakes you could possibly make is to think you know better than the people who work for you, because no matter how smart you are, collectively they have more intelligence than you do. It doesn’t mean groupthink; it just means—and especially in the IT area—even if you’re a top-notch computer engineer or scientist, when you get into management, you can’t keep up with the technology as well as the people beneath you who are actually dealing with it on a day-to-day basis, because management’s a different kind of activity. If you’re smart, you rely on the smart people who work for you. It’s one of my fundamental principles. I don’t necessarily endorse it, but I thought I’m not necessarily smarter than other top managers in NARA, so I’ll let him make the case." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Could you ever imagine at the time that the preservation aspect may be in jeopardy?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "No. Because it would be delayed, but we had planned five increments of development, so it would be the second or possibly the third. Iit wasn’t completely pushed aside, because the architecture had to provide for preservation. The basic system architecture that Lockheed had actually reflected very well the concept that San Diego had come up with in terms of a system that was capable of evolving over time and of handling an amazing variety of different data types. It’s just that we weren’t using that capability of the architecture in the first increment." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Do you want to visit the contracts or selections of 2003, 2004 between Harris and LMC?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "There’s not too much I can say about that award because of acquisition rules. There’s so much that’s confidential. We followed the FAR, the Federal Acquisition Regulations, for how you conduct that kind of a competition, and so everything the competitors tell you including the identity of the ones who didn’t get the contract—all that’s confidential. We had a team of people from around NARA evaluate the proposals and make the recommendations. There were actually some of the companies that had come in and talked to us one-on-one that we were disappointed didn’t submit proposals, because we thought they had a really good grasp, but they decided it wasn’t in their business interest. We decided to do the competition, because what we’re doing was so new and different. GAO had recommended that we do that, and we thought yeah, that’s good advice, because it’d be good to see two different approaches within the limited timeframe. You’re not going to have two systems developed, you’re just going to have two contractors work on it for a year to see who can do the best job. In the course of that competition, both companies had strengths. I think in retrospect, to put it globally, Harris would have been probably more sensitive to NARA’s needs, but Lockheed came forward with a richer panoply of what they were offering us in terms of technical capabilities and corporate resources that were behind it. And I think the competition was a very good thing, not only for what it did in itself, but it also gave NARA staff more exposure to what might happen so that again, they were well informed about what the future might bring." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Before getting into the ERA system development with Lockheed from 2005 to 2011, we’ll go into the early phase and then the mid to late phases or whatever that you were a part of. Tell us a little about the selection of the NARA team at this point. How did that occur? How did we know who was going to be a good fit or who we should hire or who we, or what needs - -?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "And you’re talking about the team that was the staff of the ERA program?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Early on when we first started, my first three or four hires, we actually didn’t have a lot of candidates, because within NARA, I think there was a lot of skepticism that this thing would actually really happen, so people weren’t applying. There was an early opening I made for a communications person, because as I’d said, we realized from the very beginning, you’ve got to have communications with all your stakeholders. Frankly we had no one apply for that position who really had a background in communications with stakeholders, and so we just took the person who looked best among the candidates, but it wasn’t what we would have liked. After that, especially after we got our first hundred million, then there wasn’t a problem of recruiting people. My priorities had to be in the hiring that we needed technically strong people, because that’s where NARA was weakest. Also because I thought it was better to do what we did do, which was have the NARA offices send their staff on rotation to us for three months, six months, or a year so that they would go back to their units being able to explain to their colleagues what was going on and furthering this thing. We were fully engaged with NARA; we weren’t off somewhere doing our own thing." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So various units within the National Archives would be on three-month details?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Three to six, in some cases a year, depending on what the Division Director or Branch Chief was willing to agree to. Some of those people who came we wound up hiring permanently, which was nice, because we had already worked with them for a while and knew their capabilities. Also, I didn’t want to build up the overhead too much, so, immediately, once we were authorized to go ahead with development, we hired a contractor to handle a lot of the program management aspects so that we could bring in people when we needed them. They didn’t have to necessarily be permanent employees or civil servants. We got that contract with ICE, which was Integrated Computer Engineering. We got some top-notch talent who had a lot of experience in major systems development so that we could hit the ground running." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So very interesting to know. Getting into the early phases of Lockheed Martin, I’m not sure exactly how long you stayed with the National Archives, but would you speak a little bit about those early—that early phase and the mid-to-late phases if you can?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Well, I stayed through the first two increments. The first increment was designed for the Office of the National Archives, and it’s major functionality was in support of appraisal and scheduling. The second increment was designed to be the system for the George W. Bush Presidential Library, and obviously we learned lessons as we went along. As I said, we had this problem of not properly shepherding the users, so they got too far in the weeds on the first go-round. But I can’t say that embarrasses me in the least. When you look around the Federal government, at places like the FBI, the IRS, the Census Bureau, any number of others that spent, in each case, more than a billion dollars on computer system development, and it went down the drain. They had nothing in the end. We had a seven-year development in which in one year we had a 25% cost overrun and a three-month delay in delivery, which is in comparison to those other efforts for an organization that had never done this before, we did very well. Obviously—and actually some of the best engineers we had early on on the management contractor told me, “What you’re trying to do, if three years from now you get a system that you can turn on and it doesn’t crash five or six times an hour, you will have done very well.” These were people with experience in big systems, and we had a system that had problems when we did turn it on, but it still handled the basic workload. We learned a lot of lessons in that first experience. We had a major problem with Lockheed in that they didn’t clue us in early enough that they were slipping in schedule. When they finally came in and said they were going to be three months late, it was like pulling teeth trying to get the details out of them. I said, “Okay, you’re saying you can’t meet the requirements. What percentage of the requirements can you meet?” It turned out to be a very small percentage. They should have alerted us early on that that kind of stuff was happening, because then we could have worked together to hopefully solve the problem. It wouldn’t have been all that easy, because doing things in government is complex, and for example we had a Contract Officer at the time who did not understand the difference between contracting and contract execution. For example, he was furious at me, because I allowed my engineers to meet with Lockheed’s engineers without his presence, because that’s a contract negotiation. No, no, no, the contract’s in place. What the engineers are doing is fulfilling the contract, and my engineers are there to guide so that we’re making sure that Lockheed’s doing what it’s supposed to do. We’re not renegotiating the contract. That’s one of the complexities of being in government. Different Contract Officers play that game in different ways, and ours was a real old-school, the contractor-is-the-enemy attitude towards things,which made life more difficult than it should be. Anyway, we got through that and we got a system that worked. Then, the big thing on the horizon was the Bush White House (43), because we probably had poorer data from that White House than any prior administration in terms of what was coming. We were just based on looking at what had happened prior to that, we were extrapolating it’s got to be above 100 million. One of the problems was, they were under several lawsuits about missing emails. There were—I think one of the lawsuits asserted there were five million missing emails, and there was a problem, because a lot of Bush White House people were actually using computers at the Republican National Committee rather than government computers to do government work. The White House lawyers were very sensitive, and what kept happening was any time we found anyone who would tell us what would be coming, so that we could actually plan realistically, as soon as the lawyers found that out, they cut off dialog. It wound up being pretty ironic, because just a few weeks before the end of the administration, we had a kind of showdown meeting at the White House, and we had our lawyers, Justice lawyers, our technical people, White House technical people all sitting in a room planning for the transfer. President Bush waltzes into the room and casually says, “Well, what’s going on here?” People explained to him what this meeting was about, and he said, “Yeah, can you believe it? We’re being sued over the loss of five million emails. What’s five million emails? We’re going to give you 300 million.” That was the first number we had out of the White House from the President’s own lips. That was two weeks before we had to go live. Fortunately, our guess of something in the nature of 100 million was at least within the right order of magnitude. It turned out after we eliminated duplicates there were only like 283 million. But close enough for government work." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So that was a real test for you then, for ERA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Actually it was a test in many ways, because Presidential Libraries in many ways had often been considered a thorn in NARA’s side. Each library tends to be pretty independent, because the people who run the libraries are connected with the former President. That gives them a leg up. Also the Office of Presidential Records had had the experience where NARA would develop a computer system, basically develop it for the Office of the National Archives, and then hand it to the Presidential Libraries and say, “Here, use this.” Well, because of the differences in the law, the Presidential Records business process is fundamentally different than the National Archives business process. They don’t do records schedules. They get one accession every four or eight years, and it’s huge. Then nothing practically ever gets added to it. It’s a very different business process, and they’ve been burned in several cases where they were just handed a system that was not appropriate for what they needed to do. So, in our case, they were very skeptical. Their experience was, we were developing this system for the National Archives, which we were at the time. They expected once again that they’d be at the back end of things. I was fortunate, because I had hired an archivist Ken Hawkins, who had no background in electronic records. He was an absolutely solid archivist in terms of archival knowledge and understanding NARA’s mission and a lot of the holdings and all that, and really good communication skills. I assigned him to work with Presidential Libraries. After a couple years, he and I were chatting about the situation. He said, “Now Ken, don’t tell anyone else I told you this, but a lot of my friends, they are frequently expressing sympathy that I have to work with the Presidential Libraries people. What they don’t know is once you get to work with them, it’s really a pleasure.” Once they realized that we really wanted to help them, and it took a while to convince them of that, but once they realized we’re really here for you, they were very good to work with. They also realized as Sam McClure used to say, with what’s going to come over from the Bush White House, if you can’t deliver a system to us, we’re dead. There’s no way we can handle that. Absolutely there’s nothing they could do. He said, “On the other hand we also are quite aware that if you do deliver a system we’re dead, because we’re going to have so much work.” And we had to appreciate that. There’s no precedent for handling this kind of volume in Presidential Libraries, you haven’t had a system that really is designed for your workflow. You’ve had some things cobbled together that help you out, and—but we really took them to heart and we’re going to give you something that really helps you. They were skeptical. I don’t blame them. They had good grounds for being skeptical, but we were able to work together. There was a really funny incident that happened very late in the game. Eight months before the end of the administration, a couple of the Lockheed engineers asked for a meeting with me, and I thought well, this is unusual, because usually I’m just meeting with Lockheed managers. Normally they don’t allow their engineers to come in a room without a manager present. This group of three engineers came over to talk to me, and their pitch was, “You’re facing a huge problem just getting the stuff from the White House into the ERA system. If you do it the way NARA has always done it, which is they write it out on tape, and then you bring the tapes in and load the stuff on your system. That’s going to take years at the very least, just because of the physical process, plus you’ve got this inventory management problem of all these tapes that are coming out of the White House, coming to you, and you’ve got to make sure you know what every one of them is and what stage you’re processing it is.” Having been in the PROFS case with 15,000 volumes there were times where, where is that particular tape? Have we dealt with it? Have we not? That kind of problem comes up all the time. That’s going to be a nightmare. The big issue was taking years to do that, because the Presidential Records people were telling us, “Look, you have to assume that a half hour after Obama is sworn in, we’re getting requests for Bush records, and those requests are either coming from President Bush or his close associates, or they’re coming from the current White House, or they’re coming from the Congress, and we’ve got to be in position to respond to those requests. Years isn’t going to do it.” The engineers went through a couple other scenarios; here’s a way you could do it; here’s a way, and this is why they fail. Okay, we have a potential solution for you. Okay, what’s that solution? We get the White House to allow us to go into their computer center and attach our servers to their system, and we just, using the system bus, copy the stuff over to our servers, and when a server gets full, we dis-attach it and ship it to West Virginia, and as soon as you attach it to the ERA system, the stuff is available. In the meantime, we’ve got a second server that’s loading up and their plan was let’s have three of these so that there could be one’s at the White House, one’s at the ERA system, and one might be in transit. You’ve got that, it’s musical chairs with one extra chair so no one ever falls on the ground. I thought, yeah, technologically that makes sense. It’s certainly a lot quicker than any other option. If I wererunning the White House computer center, would I let some other agency come in and attach stuff tomy system bus? Absolutely not. I’d throw you out of my office. I thought, technologically, it’s so superior to any other option that it’s worth trying. I contacted the Office of Presidential Libraries and said, “I need you to set up a meeting between Lockheed engineers and White House engineers.” “Oh no, that can’t happen. They don’t know how to deal with people at the White House. We have to deal with these people year after year, decade after decade. We have good working relationships, so we don’t want this screwed up. We’ll take their questions.” I said, “No, you can’t do that.” “Why not?” I said, “Because first of all, you would have no clue of what they’re saying in response. And secondly, you wouldn’t be able to formulate any follow up questions, because this is entirely technical matters.” Well, I finally convinced them that Lockheed engineers can go to the White House on one condition. They come down, and we give them the ground rules for their behavior when they go over there and we go with them. So I sent the Lockheed engineer down to the Presidential Libraries to meet with the Deputy Director, and what she didn’t know and I didn’t adequately appreciate was this engineer had previously worked at NSA. He knew government. He knew national security, and he also was very good at conversation. After her meeting with him, there was no question. “Yes, I’ll take him over to the White House, and we’ll have this meeting.” I still don’t know how he did it, but he convinced the White House to allow us to attach our servers to their system bus. Not only that, they gave us a room so we could have our equipment and our people in it so we wouldn’t have to worry about being in conflict with their people either over motion or space or anything. Then, not only that, but when we started operations, the Lockheed engineer said, “Ah, their system bus is really too slow. We can’t move the stuff as fast as we’d like to.” They agreed to upgrade the system so that we could copy the stuff more quickly. The result of all that was we were able to transfer 300 million files from the White House to NARA and get basically item-level control over all that stuff within eight months. In those eight months, we encountered 65 million problems, and we solved all but 50,000 of them. The 50,000 we couldn’t solve were cases where our system detected malware, and I had our security engineers from NARA, from the ERA program, and from Lockheed look at a couple of them, and their conclusion was that it wasn’t actually viruses; that what was there was a trace of a virus that the White House system had actually eliminated, which makes sense, because if they hadn’t eliminated it, it would have caused real problems for their system. We couldn’t take the chance with those 50,000 cases of bringing them up and see if it’s just a trace as opposed to real malware, because if it crashes our system we’re in trouble. We said we’re going to set those aside and when things aren’t as hectic, we’ll look at them. 50,000 out of 65 million isn’t too bad and getting item-level controls. By the end of that period, the 23 archivists in Presidential Libraries who would use the system were issuing on average 1,000 queries a month. Which tells me the system was really useful to them, because you don’t issue 1,000 queries if you’re not getting results that are useful. Most of those queries were iterative in that, if you get a request from the Congress, “I want everything from the Bush White House about this particular event,” what you want to do is make sure you give the Congress everything they ask for, nothing they didn’t ask for, and nothing that would be subject to executive privilege. It’s a tightrope to do that. The archivists would typically sit down and put in the query, “I’m looking for stuff about this event,” and get back a couple hundred thousand hits. They could start looking at them and saying “Well, this stuff is relevant, and that isn’t.” Then they could reformulate their query to get a smaller set. This is actually a basic problem with keyword searching or string searching in computers, that it is very high on precision in the sense that, if you ask for everything about X, you’re going to get everything about X. The problem because of the vagaries of natural language, is you’ll be lucky if you get 50% of what’s really relevant, and that’s called recall. It’s like when NARA was doing the discovery on the tobacco litigation, the lawyers discovered there 23 different ways that tobacco is spelled. If you get TI back, is that the Tobacco Institute, or is it Texas Instruments? It’s that kind of problem—they’re not technical problems; they’re language problems. We had designed this system to allow this kind of iteration. You find something that you say, no, that’s not really what I want. We make it easier for you to reformulate the question, and it goes back and gives you a better set. The fact that they were doing on average each person about 1,000 a month told us this system is working. That’s my greatest pride from my entire career in NARA that I was able to put the George Bush system in place, get it working and doing what they needed to do their jobs." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Is that the way the system runs today?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "It’s really from feedback from them that they were happy." }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "I don’t know, since I left in 2011. I haven’t really kept abreast of it. And the top personnel in Presidential Libraries have all left since then too. Although I hear, because I talk to Meg occasionally and a few other people from NARA, that things are still going well." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Ken Hawkins is actually still doing the Presidential - -, so he’s doing that today. So apparently he does enjoy himself." }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "That’s good. I have talked to Ken, but probably over a year ago. And that’s going to be déjà vu all over again in the sense that our projections early on, where with Obama you’re talking about billions of records. I had thought we would reach a limit, because there’s only what, 3500 or so employees in the Executive Office of the President, and so how many emails can each employee generate or read? That was before any White House started using social media. The Obama people came in and immediately started using social media, which means you’re getting millions of responses. So I wish them well. I hope they can modify that original design to handle the additional volume and to help them with automating their work as well." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Is there anything more you want to say about the ERA system before we get into the final stage, which I’m looking at as a what worked well and what didn’t work well in retrospect—is there anything more you want to say about this and maybe take us up to the time you left in 2011?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Well, I think I’ve basically told you in terms of the ERA system itself, the main things that I think worked well and the ones that didn’t. I think keeping people engaged through the whole process is essential. I think if we hadn’t done that, we would have failed in what we were trying to do. I’m very comfortable, and I’m still—one of the reasons I retired is I wanted to get back to professional work rather than management work, and so I’m still very heavily involved in digital preservation. With the hindsight of being out of NARA for six years now, the system architecture is a good architecture for preservation. I was just at the International Council of Archives Congress in Seoul last month and was asked point blank, “Doesn’t ERA have preservation problems?” I said, “Well of course it has preservation problems, but it has the same preservation problems the whole world does. This is a moving target, and you’ve got to have a system that moves all the time to deal with that. Fortunately we have a system that basically can. I mean, more work has to be done to realize the potential in an actual implementation, but that will always be the case until technology stops changing. The only thing I didn’t mention is, what’s really a huge issue in ERA is NARA’s corporate culture. NARA has always amazed me, because I’ve been familiar with NARA since the mid-70s. The personnel change entirely, but the corporate culture at least had not changed by 2011. We actually had on our program management contractor staff an expert in—I forget what the exact field is—facilitating business processes in an organization, getting people to work together optimally. She used to do a briefing about passive aggression in NARA and backstabbing and all that kind of stuff. She was good enough that when she was doing this briefing to NARA staff, they’d be sitting there laughing. At the end of the briefing, they would say yeah, you’ve really described us exactly the way we are. This woman is amazing that she can communicate, and these people aren’t insulted, because they recognize it’s not an individual problem, it’s a corporate culture problem. I said before, NIH was an incredible place to work. I got some major assignments at NIH from the director and the top management, like figure out the impact of the Privacy Act on NIH grant programs, which at that point was an 11 billion dollar a year program. Or design local area networks for NIH, which is an interesting assignment to give a records manager. When NIH gave you an assignment, they gave you support and they gave you whatever resources they could to support your assignment. When I went to the Pentagon, my friends from Defense were amazed that I’d do that. They said, “When a military officer is assigned to the Pentagon, after that they get an assignment that’s considered cushy, because working at the Pentagon is considered as bad as being on the battlefield. And it’s because it’s something they call Pentagon Wars that everybody over there is out for their own turf. One thing I learned being over there is, I’d rather have people in my face every day of the week than on my back once a month. If you’re in my face, I know what your problem is, and there’s a chance we can work it out. If you’re stabbing me in the back, I don’t even know you’re unhappy. And so many people do that at NARA, and so many people—I mean, it may be different today, but at least by 2007 it was true. There were people who had no competence whatsoever in the field of computers but thought they knew better than me and my staff." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Why do you think that that was such a way with, or is such a way with the National Archives, that corporate mentality?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "The old description—and this was not mine; this was a description that was around for decades—NARA is an agency of self-employed professionals. I mean, there’s a good part of that, and there’s a bad part of that. The good part is, NARA has very dedicated professional staff who work very hard. There’s tremendous levels of competency and expertise in that staff. But in an environment which has always been resource-deprived, there’s a basic sense that no one else understands what I’m doing, and certainly no one else knows as well what I’m doing. It pervades the organization. There’s a distrust—it’s just—you have to assume it’s there all the time, no matter what people tell you to your face. Like I say, I find it fascinating, because I don’t understand it. When I came back to NARA after ten years at NIH, I really didn’t worry about it my first three years, because Machine-Readable Archives was a world to itself,and we had very little dealings with the rest of NARA. I didn’t really experience it, and we were in a building five blocks away from the National Archives. When I came back, people started telling me about passive aggression. My reaction was, I can understand that as a concept, but I just have no idea how you go about being passively aggressive. Three years later, my God, I’m doing it. I’ve become part of this culture. This is the way people behave. It’s self-defeating in a lot of ways. It’s obviously very defensive, but you can do so much more if people could really collaborate and trust other people. One very good example of this—when we brought in our computer—ICE—to help us with the setting up the program management office, they were doing everything by the books, largely following a DoD model. In terms of what are the particular competencies you need independent verification and validation and testing, security—all these special disciplines that only occur when you’re doing system development, and we spent the better part of a year figuring out what this office should be like, and then I brought them into John Carlin’s management group to brief them on, “this is what we need to have.” Instead of a reaction that, okay, these are top-notch professionals telling NARA how to staff up to do this right, the reaction was, oh, this is just empire building. Which caught me off guard, because I had to say, well, in a sense it is, because I’m asking for like 25 more people, but I’m asking for them, because these experts that have a lot of experience have told me, have made the case, this is what you need. Several, not all of them around the table—fortunately not Carlin—they didn’t hear that. They heard, oh, they want more staff. It’s sad, but ..." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yeah, that does sound counterproductive, unfortunately, and sometimes it’s difficult to get out from under it. Like you said you were becoming a part of that environment." }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Yeah. I’m fortunate, because I’m fairly thick-skinned, so it hardly ever bothered me personally. But you have to be aware of it, because it affects how you operate." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Do you have any regrets with your time at the National Archive?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "There’s a certain sense, you know, 22 years was too long to spend there, but now that I’m out of it, having helped NARA get over the PROFS case, like I said, get the case eventually dismissed in our favor; having gotten NARA to really take electronic records seriously to acquiring and investing hundreds of millions of dollars in it, and even though it’s probably still a paper mindset, there was a huge difference between when I arrived in ’88 and ’98 in terms of accepting electronic records as a reality—a real challenge and a reality we had to deal with. It was a huge conversion in that period of time. So I’m glad to have been helping NARA to move along that way." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Where do you see NARA - -? Where do you see ERA 2.0 going? Or where would you like it to go in the future of ERA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "Well, if I had any influence, the future would be more in the original direction of actually implementing preservation capabilities, and in my concept, preserving electronic records goes all the way to delivering them to people 10, 20, 50 years from now. In electronic records, you cannot divorce access from preservation. You do preservation to provide access, and you have to presume that people are going to want access to current technology. They don’t want to use obsolete technology. That remains a challenge that the longer we delay addressing that, the harder it’s going to be. We’ll be playing catch-up." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. Is there any last words you’d like to say here, Ken, about your time or thinking of any other stories you’d like to impart that you maybe forgot?" }, { "speaker": "MR. THIBODEAU", "text": "I think I’ve probably depleted my stock for now. [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Well, it’s been wonderful chatting with you, I appreciate your time today, Ken. You’re a value to the National Archives, and now everybody will know it. National Archives History Office 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW Washington DC 20408" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. JACK KABREL", "text": "This is Jack Kabrel. Today is Monday, July 25, 2016. I am conducting an oral history with Stan Tozeski. This interview is part of the National Archives and Record Administration's History Office Oral History Project. Welcome to Waltham once again, Stan. Good to have you back. And we'd like to start this interview. Please provide a brief overview of your career with the National Archives in one or two minutes." }, { "speaker": "MR. STANLEY TOZESKI", "text": "Okay. Well, my career with the National Archives kind of started while I was at West Point. I had no archival training at all before going to West Point, and they immediately sent me to Washington because the National Archives was training other archives people from all over the country. I was able to get right into the first basic Archives administration course, and I went back there over the years; got to know a few people, and a few of the offices over there. So, I had kind of a familiarity with National Archives while I was at West Point. Then, I was offered a position here in Waltham and transferredfrom the Military Academy to the regional branch here. That was my first introduction to the National Archives as an employee. I started here, transferred over, and there were only three people in the office: myself, Jim Owens, and a technician. They had me into do truly archival work—but most of the people who were involved were genealogy and research assistants. When the Regional Archives expanded, they were looking for people to come in and work with the records, catch up on the description backlog, and so on. Anyway, when I started, I did for the first months, maybe in the year, did a lot of work for genealogy in the Reference Room; fetching microfilm and getting out the bound volumes for researchers, and so forth. I never did the truly archival work; I did mostly genealogical assistance. As the staff expanded I was able to get away from the public operation there, and just work on things in the back room, which I was really hired to do. I came into a GS-11 here because it was a promotion from my GS-10 at the Military Academy. I just gradually became an assistant to Jim Owens, and just anything to do with the Archives branch. It wasn't assistant director at the time, but it was getting into just the support for a lot of the things that were necessary to be done, and just didn't have the staff or time to do." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "So, the years that you worked with the Nation Archives would be 1977?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "January of '77." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And until January … ?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "January of '01, 2001. So, it was 24 years." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Wow. That's quite a career. Take us back to before you came to the National Archives. Let's talk a little bit about your education, and then your decisions after your education, which led you, eventually, to the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Okay. My education was a Bachelor's of Arts in History from Clark University in Worcester, and then after that, a Master of Arts in History from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. I took the Federal Service entrance exam, and after some active duty military time, I was able to get a position at the U.S. Army, right down the street here in personnel administration—human resources today. I worked there for six years, doing all sorts of personnel hiring and recruitment; I just didn't want anything to do with a personnel office. After six years, I realized that wasn't where I really wanted to be, and I was starting to look around the Federal Times for positions where I could use my history background. Sure enough, after six years at the labs, a position opened up at West Point. It was formerly a National Archives archivist there; a fellow named Joe O'Donnell, who came from Washington to West Point. He passed away, and they were looking for someone to replace him. I didn't have any training in archives and so forth, but I had the two degrees and I interviewed for the position. A librarian up there said,\"No, you can do this job,\"and so forth. \"Your background is such that we're confident that you can do it.\" I was apprehensive, of course, at first. We left for West Point in the summer of 1969—in the heat of summer of 1969—and entered there as a GS-9 archivist. Took a downgrade from my personnel position to go there, and I remained there for seven and a half years. The archivist of the military academy was the librarian. He was a three-hatter: he was archivist, historian, and librarian at the Academy. I was dead-ended at my position. I had gotten a promotion to the GS-10 but that's all I was going to go, there. Then, because I had been contacting the National Archives over the years—John Scroggins and Roseanne Butler, and soon, and so forth. They approached me to say, \"Would you be interested in going? We're expanding our branch up in Waltham.\" Knowing that I was in Massachusetts, they said, \"Would you be interested in going back there with a GS-11? That sounded pretty good. So, he said, \"Sure, we did.\" So, the first years were good. There was a little bit of everything archival there. They had all types of records: textual records, paper records; everything except electronic records. Experience there was very good. Military history was my thing, so I was happy there, but the opportunity to come back to Massachusetts where the promotion was enough to get me here." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Did you learn to become an archivist, not having much archival background before you got here?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Yeah, they had people on the set. The archives was part of a library at West Point, and there was a special collections library there, and the archives were under the special collections at the time. He didn't know much about archives; he was a real book guy. Then the librarians, and the assistant librarians, didn't know much about archives on their own, so I was kind of on my own. They sent me regularly to Washington, for any kind of training that the National Archives was offering, or that the Army was offering. I picked up things on my own, through osmosis, and so forth; between contacts in Washington, and getting into the business of learning the academy system. One thing they wanted me to do when I got there was to finish up a preliminary inventory that Joe O'Donnell had started, but didn't do much work on. I was told when I got there that the primary job was to get that inventory up, which I did. The Academy's Archives were really a special archive under the National Archives. They were allowed to remain at West Point—a special agreement with the archivists, and the archivists of the Army. Later on, that was followed by the Naval Academy doing the same thing, and the Air Force Academy. Anyway, they were the first, and this was back in 1953, I think. The fellow that was a librarian at West Point, this guy named Sydney Forman who was pretty well known in the history field as well. Between the daily routine, reference routine and records management routine, and all of the other enjoyable things that went on at West Point, I was able to pick up some archival skills, and so I did not come to the National Archives totally unprepared. I was a much better archivist in 1977 than I was in 1969." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What kind of formal training did you have?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Well, I attended the institutes—the basics of archival administration while I was working for the Army. There were special classes in preservation management, disaster planning, and that sort of thing. While I had some of them at West Point, I continued to do that when I came here at Waltham. When I got here, the more advanced archives administration, for example. Eventually, I got to go to some special courses for archivists that weren't at the entry-level; they were something at the higher level. Then I got to go to the assistant directors' meetings. You got some special training there, you got to meet people, you got to walk around various offices. It worked out very nicely." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Describe your first day on the job with the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "I remember it very well. I had a migraine. I had to go to downtown Boston—this was the first day out of the country, there. I hated coming to Boston. I had to come down to get sworn in by the GSA. I remember coming in from the north, 93 or whatever it was, and there was terrible, terrible traffic. It was probably typical daily traffic, but I had never experienced it before. I got to GSA; sworn in, I had such a night. I turned around and came home. I never got here the first day. I said, \"This is not a good sign.\" But the next day, I was better when I came back. That was my first day. I had met Jim a couple of times, while he was attending the Archives' directors' meetings in Washington, so I knew of Jim, and I didn't know of anybody else here." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What was your role here at this time? You were hired, at that point, in January 1977?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Yeah. As a general assistant to Jim Owens. I think, as I said, most of it was anticipating getting in there and doing truly backroom archives work in the stacks. Initially, I had to go learn how this operated, and there was a lot of genealogy involved at first. My role was typically research room, reference room, and working with the public." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "You also had to work with the Federal Records Center, which was a huge presence here, right?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Uh huh." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What was that like? Did you know much about the Federal Records Center? And how it interacts with the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Well, yes. I got to know them very easily. I got to know the people, the archivists in this side of the building and so forth. We'd work with them getting records transferred to the Archives. I had no problem at all with theRecords Center people." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Describe some of your functions that you've formed over your time at the National Archives; the various groups that you met—you mentioned genealogy. Describe other organizations and groups that you worked with. |Col1|ur clientele included academics; you know, professors who were doing research o| |---|---| ||dents were coming all the time. So, there were some academics. I was a membe| |of the Council of America's Military Past (CAMP), and a lot of the people in this area were interested in|| |post-artillery forts. And there were quite a few of them that were looking for records on military|| |facilities in New England. They pushed the researchers to me and I was able to assist them, because I got|| |to know the records, and so forth.|| program, initially with the volunteer program, but I was never involved too much in going out and speaking to school groups, or rotary clubs, and so on, and so on. Jim and others pretty much took care of that. My clientele were mostly visitors to the facility, here." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And what would you say your daily activities were? You pretty much were processing archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Yes, which I enjoyed doing. I enjoyed working in the backroom, getting my hands dirty. That was always the part of the day you could pick and show the work, but just preservation work, and then doing description work, and it actually ended up into the National Archives A1 system, or whatever it's called now. I enjoyed doing that. There were some things that were kind of left undone when I arrived here. The court records, for example, were not in inventory. So, Jim wanted me to do aRecord Group 21, finish up on that, which I did. And all that stuff was put in over the years. I think that was one of my major accomplishments. But between doing the daily reference letters, people walk in, and the phone calls, and doing the work with the actual records in the back room, I liked to vary my day; I just got tired of doing the same thing all day long." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Describe some of the collections that you dealt with." }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "I enjoyed all the military records. The Navy yards, and the Navy facilities, like torpedo stations, and whatever else was in the New England area. Boston area, army bases, First Naval District, and so on. I enjoyed working with military records, so I tried to do most of those, and a lot of those come up from Washington. The court records were very interesting. I was amazed at how much information was in the court records. I got to know them very well, all the New England cases within the courts. I never had any law training, or legal training, at all and I just got to work with the records and saw how much information was in the court system records, and I got to enjoy working with those as well. That got a lot of business from the public; lawyers looking for cases, people coming in looking for naturalization records and things like that. |Col1|g collections; some are small collections. As the records were regionalized, and they'd be in| |---|---| ||boxes and so forth. That was always something I could look forward to. I'd say, \"Well, I can| |do this. I can't do everything. I'll do the preservation work, the description work, and so forth.\" Because|| |there was an ending. That was always doable in a certain period of time. But others were continuous,|| |long term things, never-en||" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Any historical surprises did you unearth?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "I can't think of any right now, but like I said, there were an awful lot records and an awful lot of information in the court records, of all different kinds, and it was always—you know, even the routine equity cases, and law cases, and so forth had names I remembered from the past, and product names that I remembered. So, it was always kind of fun to get the files out for that." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Compare—and contrast as well—your experiences with the West Point Archives and the National Archives. How were the two similar, and how were they different?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Well, scope alone, the National Archives is so huge, and the entire country—you just didn't have the little campus and post of West Point, and so forth. We had records at West Point that went back to 1802, but they were mostly academy records. There were some post records there as well. But they were kind of the same records you get. You know, photographs, bound volumes, loose papers; you know, physically, the same type of records but so much fewer of them at West Point. The overwhelming amount of records that were in this building, for example, between the non-permanent records and the ones we had in the Archives, I said, \"Wow, this is amazing.\" And this is just New England. The size of the collections itself, and the area and the scope of the collection were much, much different so forth. And so many more people at West Point didn't have anybody to turn toward to get the onsite assistance. But the National Archives, not only here, but in Washington, the contacts and so forth, you can go for help and assistance, or a call or so forth. It would help me out. We didn't have that at West Point. So, I would say, between the assistance available, training available, that was two big differences there to the two facilities." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Describe for me the social atmosphere of Waltham, Massachusetts in January 1977. And if you can, address it through the years and how, maybe, they changed or not changed up until your retirement of January 2001." }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Well, social environment." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Social environment. People that have come here; the regional administrators, the directors. Did you interact? Were you like a family unit? Were there issues that you had between you? Was it like a family? Any stories that you want to impart about the environment within this building?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Well, in '77, when I first came here, the director was Wendell Evans. I think he was out of Washington for a while. I didn't have too much to do with the director. Just Jim—just the three people in our office—and that was it. I don’t remember it being a very active, socially, at that time. But as the staff at the Archives grew, and staff at the Records Center was growing, also, the change in directors—it depended. Matt Teasley was here for a while. And then when we separated from GSA, other people came in. I think, socially, if you mean by gatherings, and parties, I think Diane LeBlanc brought that in. And I don't know whether a lot of it was her own fondness for bringing things in, and having events, and so forth, or whether she was directed to do that in Washington. I always thought it was show business, you know? I had participated and enjoyed everything that went on, but some of the things I thought were kind of infringing on my time, from being more productive and working with the records that needed to be worked on. There were open houses, and that sort of thing, which Jim mostly handled that. But we all had to take part, and so forth. So, I think by the time I left here, it was a lot more social, a lot more activities going on. There wasn't any bowling league, or off-post activities, if you will, or offsite activities. There was much more going on 2001 than 1977. And, of course, I enjoyed working with all of them. I don't remember disliking anybody." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. During your time with the National Archives was from '77, and even before, from '69 with West Point until 2001. During that time, there were lots of technological changes. Can you address the pros, cons; what happened during that period?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Well, the computer came. That was a big thing. I'll always remember, the word was, National Archives was pretty slow computerizing their records on the computer and on the Internet, and so forth. So, they were slow in coming around. Personally, I had no computer training except for one—something that the local civil service thing sponsored downtown. I was totally lost. I just did not get computer work and electronic anything. And so, I was not able to do things. But I'll put it this way: it was not required at the time anyway. I could do a lot by hand, filling out forms, and so forth. I did not have to input it onto a computer or into a databank of any kind. By the time I left, they were getting really into theswing of things. Fortunately, we had Helen Engel here on the staff, and she did a lot of the input work directly, but she used to computers, and so on, and so forth. I, personally, was not. I think I could handle an email or that sort of thing, but that's it. I didn't know anything beyond that. So, I could have been probably more—I didn't know how to go out and use a laptop, for example, if we were out on a site someplace. Didn't know anything about it. I said, \"I'm going to get my entire career here without having to deal with computers.\"My wife has always asked me on that, and she said, \"You almost did that.\" I said, \"Well, yes, I did.\" I wish it was more, for me, that I had done more, perhaps. But I was not comfortable with it; I never got a really good comprehension of the whole business of computerization, and all the things that were involved. Technologically, that was the bigger change. I did leave- before getting really heavily involved, and other people didn't tell her. But I mean, Joni, for example. All the stuff that wasn't able to be put in by hand, Joan was able to put into the A1." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Archival-wise, do you think that technology is a good thing or a bad thing?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Well, I guess as far as quick access and ready access, you know, a lot of the time, so much of the stuff is now online, apparently. The business next door has dropped considerably, I understand, so people are able to do things from home. For the genies (genealogy), who would have to come here to use the records, and now you can go online and get the information, because it's a part of the thing they’re used to doing. Some things are never going to be in the computer, and they will have to come here for the bound volumes, or the case files, and so forth that the computer won't make much difference for those people. I think, generally speaking, the computer age—which was a little late in coming to the National Archives—is now here. I am not sure what the Archives has done the last 15 years, but I am sure they have done more of it." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Two major components of the regional archives is having microfilm and outreach. Those two things, at the present time, are both non-existent at this point in Waltham. Do you think we can justify the existence of being regional archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Well, you have allthe elite, original records that are stillhere, or wherever, and they're not going to be online, or microfilmed or anything in the near future. So, we've got lots of records in the backroom, there. Someone's going to have to get them out and take care of them. The outreach part, yeah, I was never a fan of outreach. People who are more comfortable doing it, speaking to groups and so forth—Jim being one of them, but even Walter when he was here, and others—that outreach was done in a number of ways; some major ways and some very minor ways. I think, certainly, it is going to be people who are doing historical work and needing, certainly there's many people who are doing historical work and needing properly cared for and properly described historical records to use. There is no room in Washington. They're still regionalizing records. Is that true, I presume, that records are still coming from Washington?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Directly to the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "A lot of those records have not been truly processed and described, and so forth. There's work still to be done here, so I would say so. The outreach, that can be done. Diane was really into outreach a lot. And Jim went along with it, to a certain extent. But I kind of just stayed in the back room, where I was happier." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What would you say Stan Tozeski's legacy would be here?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Legacy? Well, legacy is a catchy, catchy word to use. I think my description work, which I enjoyed doing, I think I did a good job on that. So, any of the description and processing of the collections would be up there." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "If you had to change one thing regarding the National Archives itself, what would you change?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "No, I can't weigh n." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "What should they do a better job at?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "For people like myself, or the public at home?" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "The National Archives as a whole. What should they be doing a better job at?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Well, I don’t think they should try to compete with some of the other people in some of the same business—your Library of Congress and other—I always got the feeling that the National Archives, sometimes, wanted to get on the bandwagon, which other people were already doing and had been doing for a long time, just to say, \"Look, we can do it, too.\" You know? I guess you can understand some of that, but as long as they realize that this involvement and a lot of stuff wasn't truly in line with the National Archives mission takes time, and staff, and money, and so forth. Maybe, narrowing this scope of activities and to eliminate a lot of the distractions that can come from competition with the other assistance. The National Archives, is supposed to to have the best qualified people, and most knowledgeable people, and there are a lot of smaller archival activities going on all over the country that could use self-publication, maybe that National Archives could put out, or a workshop they could give someplace, and so on. So, the advisory system's function would remain. I don't know whether it would change anything. 15 years out of the game, I'm not sure what they would be doing for the past 15 years." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "If you had to do it all over again, what would you change? Would you change anything?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Career advancement, and so forth? No, I don't think so." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Okay. Before we end this interview, two more questions; the next one being, tell us a little bit about your post-NARA career?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Yeah. That was something that I fell into. One of the West Point people—a librarian at West Point, who also was a rare book appraiser—who was contracted to go to Atlantic Union College up here in Massachusetts. They had a private collection there that they wanted appraised for insurance purposes. They also needed it to be processed. There was a professor there working on the collection, and he had passed away, and they were looking for someone to come in and just take over. It wasn't a very large collection, but it needed a lot of work. It was a collection that was related to a Dutchman who ran an escape network over in Europe during the war. He had a fast-inning career, just what the History Channel had been looking for, a hired historian. They asked him, when they went to do the appraisal, if he knew any archivists that could clean the collection up, and finish the job that this professor was doing. It was not so much an archives as a manuscript collection, but it was a combination. Alan Mahon, recommended me. I had to deal with the people, and they said, \"You know, we just want someone to come in and clean this up.\" They had all kinds of big plans for institutes, and so on, and so forth, which kind of went by the wayside after the college closed. But that was an interesting collection with a little bit of everything in it. There were books. There were photographs. There were all kinds of archival-related awards, and artifacts and so forth. I worked there for five years, part-time, just a couple of days a month. |I was able to preserve, arrange, describe, and service their small collection there. This professor was|Col2|Col3|Col4|Col5| |---|---|---|---|---| |kind of a Schindler guy. He rescued over 1,000 people; Jews w|ho escaped from the Gestapo, they had|||| |down allied airmen who were rescued by the underground, and so forth, and they would get them out||||| |to Spain, or Switzerland, or Portugal. It was a fascinating story. It ended up at Stanford, in California,||||| |because the college ran out of the money; so did the foundation that hired me. Now, the book is being||||| |published in Amsterdam in November. They're going to have a big Dutch publisher thing about that,||||| |because the guy was Dutch. Anyway, it was a collection that I couldn't get too involved in it, but I knew||||| |everything that they wanted done. I could clean, preserve, describe, box, arrange, and I completed par||||t| |of an inventory for them, and then they just closed the whole shop down.||||| |||||| |That was fun. It wa||||| |Col1|0-mile drive. That was one thing about West Point. You mic atmosphere. Your clients were cadets, staff| |---|---| ||public—but you could do so much there. As a civilian| |employee, I was privileged to utilize some of the facilities that were reserved for—everything for the|| |cadets—but civil employees could do some things as well. It was nice being out at a college campus at|| |Atlantic Union, too; same thing going on. Thinking about it, I should have really gone to a college|| |campus, although I did enjoy it here. This has changed quite a bit, incidentally; the building itself has|| |changed in recent years.||" }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "And additions to it." }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Finally, the last question: Is there anything more to add? Any anecdotes that you can recall?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "I was thinking about that. Nothing major. Kind of routine, humdrum affair in the backroom, for the most part. I'm afraid I don't have anything in the way of exciting activities, or discoveries, or—let me look at some of the notes I put down here. You were asking about membership, and so forth. I did belong to quite a few regional activities, and as an archivist, the Council on an abandoned military post and a company of military historians, Boston Area Archives Troop, and that sort of thing.The Academy actually got me a membership at the Society of American Archivists (SAA). While I was there, I was an SAA member, but it was through the Military Academy. After leaving there, I did not retain my membership." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Do you think those memberships helped you in the work that you were able to do?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Oh, sure. The context alone—and then, of course, you were readily able to tell them what we had, here, especially these military guys. As a result, we got quite a bit of statistics about these guys coming in and using our paper records. So, that was good. It all worked out well. That was a nice social thing as well, because there were these periodic meetings of these groups, that was nice to go to, to kind of show the flag." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Did you ever meet any celebrities or important military individuals in your time?" }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Well, when I was working at West Point, we went over to the Roosevelt Library for the dedication of their Eleanor Roosevelt wing. That day, Dag Hammarskjöld was there, and Nelson Rockefeller and Marian Anderson. That was the biggest day, with the biggest names. When I was at West Point, also, they were filming a movie, MacArthur, which Gregory Peck, and that was nice. I just missed Barbara Streisand there; \"Funny Girl.\" She was across the river in Cold Spring, but she spent a lot of time at Trophy Point filming that movie, \"Funny Girl.\" There was Jimmy Cagney at West Point. There was the Archbishop. Yeah, there was a lot of show business. A lot of big names at West Point; not so many here." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "Jimmy Cagney. Wow." }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "Yeah. He had an estate up the river from West Point, and he went to speak to the cadets, and I was in the back row, of course. But that was nice. The Yankees and the Mets used to come up to play the Army baseball team. I had to go up there and sit in the grandstand, and watch that. Those were historic events, there, for the Academy. But here, it was really much more business and less bigshots, more or less." }, { "speaker": "MR. KABREL", "text": "It sounds like a very interesting career, Stan. Thank you very much for your interview, and for your time with the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "MR. TOZESKI", "text": "You're quite welcome. # \\L ### ,~,~~ ~\"' ~ ## - ## - ## ~ ~ **_;g-:--+..** **l**" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MS. REBECCA BRENNER", "text": "This is Rebecca Brenner and Jessie Kratz here at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum. We’re about to conduct an oral history of former Archivist of the United States, Don Wilson. Today’s date is August 20, 2015. Mr. Wilson, what was your background in?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DON WILSON", "text": "Well my background was pretty much Presidential Libraries. My education was community college, Kansas University for a year, and then transferred to Washington University where I thought I was going to be a lawyer and they had the three/four plan during those years, three years undergraduate and four years of law school. I got sidetracked in history and stayed there, and then was given a National Defense Scholarship to the University of Cincinnati, and there I went straight through for my PhD. I got a Master’s and a PhD because they made you split it. So I received the PhD in 1972, but I finished my roles and everything in 1968, went back to Kansas, to the Kansas State Historical Society, where I was curator of my own dissertation collection. I was a manuscripts curator at the beginning of my career, and while there I pretty much did all of my research and wrote my dissertation on the first governor of Kansas." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What exactly was your dissertation?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "It was Charles Robinson of Kansas, the first governor of Kansas, and he was a free-state activist—part of the abolitionists’ movement and came into Kansas and then was elected first governor of the State of Kansas. That was later published by the University of Kansas Press. And so my early, well actually my early emphasis was 19th Century American West. I was kind of a second generation James Monaghan student. He was one of the early writers in the West." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What were your interactions with the National Archives before becoming involved with the Presidential Libraries?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "I left Kansas and when LBJ left office, as he used to say, he wanted his library to be fully staffed, and so by creating an additional staff for his library, basically they created other positions in other Presidential Libraries. So in 1969, shortly after, well it was actually three weeks after Eisenhower’s death, I went to the Eisenhower library. I was hired as the historian at the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene. I graduated from Abilene High School. So I was kind of going home in that sense. They used to say that Eisenhower’s class was the class that stars fell on because of all of the generals and other things. We used to call our class also the stars fell on us. And Marlin Fitzwater was a classmate, he was former press secretary of Reagan and Bush, and we had several judges, ministers—it was a special class, small, maybe 120 in our class. But at any rate, I went back to Abilene, and eventually I became the associate deputy director of the Eisenhower Library. In 1978 I was hired as the Associate Director of the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison, which was kind of the Harvard of historical community in that period. And so I went up there as the Associate Director and was there when they moved the museum. We were on campus of the University of Wisconsin. We were the American History Library for the University of Wisconsin. And during that time we acquired property through the legislature, and developed the museum—began development—I wasn’t there for all of it, but began development of the museum downtown, which was separated from the campus. But they had several historic sites around the state, and it was a great experience. It was a tough time budget-wise and economically, but it was an interesting time at a big agency. So from there I was asked to come back, well, they did a national search for the Director of the Ford Presidential Library. Because it was going to be located at Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids—it was only split because the President wanted it split—but because it was at Ann Arbor they wanted to have an association with the university. Therefore, they were really wanting a PhD who could be on the faculty, or adjunct faculty with the University of Michigan. And so, I was interviewed. I was encouraged by the Archives to pursue it. I really didn’t know if I wanted to be the Director of a Presidential Library where he wasn’t elected President, but I had also been there before—before I went to Wisconsin in fact, the Office of Presidential Libraries was trying to get me to take a Nixon project. And after due consideration and deliberation, and part of the reason was that I was close to the Eisenhower family. David and I had become close when he was doing his research. We’re about the same age. And he was doing his research at the Presidential Library on his grandfather and in fact he and Julie would be in Abilene, and David and I would play golf. And they celebrated one Thanksgiving with us because they couldn’t get out of the town. It was snowing. But anyway, we had a good relationship, and so the Presidential Library really wanted me to become Director, and I just looked at it and I said I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in litigation and I didn’t see a great future there. So I turned it down and went to Wisconsin instead. In 1980, ’81, they began looking for a permanent Director of the Ford Library. Again I was encouraged to rejoin the National Archives. And so I can recall going to New York City to interview with President Ford. I mean, I’m a kid from Kansas. I had never been to New York [laughter]. At this point in my life I was 32. So I went to New York. I remember staying at the Holiday Inn, which was a long ways away from the hotel where I was being interviewed. David Matthews, who was the former secretary of HEW under President Ford, and was the former president of the University of Alabama. David wasn’t much older than I was. But at any rate, he was kind of the rising star of the Republican group, kind of the new candidate, good looking, very smart, but David was a little tedious in his academic ways [laughter] and couldn’t quite get into the popular, you know, political realm. A very bright guy and a wonderful man who was a friend of mine. But he was the head of the National Search Committee for President Ford. And so I went over to meet with President Ford and David Matthews, I can’t remember the hotel, the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, which was blowing my mind any way going into that, and then going up to see the former President at the same time. And so I went in, and I got there a little early, thank goodness, and David and the President were conversing inside. And so the Secret Service just kind of held me in the hallway. And it was really good because they were cutups. I mean they were joking and laughing and had me laughing and basically put me in a pretty relaxed mood. And I’ve always had that associated with the Secret Service agents, you know, they were crazy people, but and back in those days they would stay with a President. They wouldn’t rotate them around very much. If they roomed with a former President that was pretty much the group that stayed with. So any way, when I went into the interview meeting I still had my doubts, but I became really convinced of what the President wanted with his library and how involved he would be and the relationship with the university. And David was good at convincing me there too, and I emerged saying this is a real opportunity and—" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] What exactly did he want for his library?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Well, it was interesting. He wanted to look forward and to look at public affairs, and to look at different aspects of what was going on in the country, and how could he have a role, not personally, because he was an individual who had no ego. President Ford was one of these rare individuals in political life that was self-deprecating and but could also play a role with the library and try to solve public problems. And I know term limits was a big issue during that time, and the budget. He was always a big person on the budget and national defense, he served for 25 in the Armed Services. And so he had these expectations and these ideas and this philosophy that was really intriguing, plus the challenge of a split facility was intriguing too—the campus of the university, a major university in the heart of the Grand Rapids, and downtown to be a part of that whole community. So it worked out eventually. It was the President’s decision to determine finally who was hired—with the Archivist’s approval—but it’s the President’s choice. I mean I certainly always felt that way as Archivist, because you had to have the Foundation happy, and you had to have the former President who was living happy, or you were doomed to failure. So I did accept eventually, and became the first permanent Director of the library, and on the eve of the dedication of the museum, which was an interesting experience. So, I moved to Ann Arbor and part of that was to be an associate, or an adjunct professor at the University of Michigan. So, we really kind of built the library up. We had a pretty small staff at the time and I think it is still small, and part of it was because we were divided. And so you had a really challenging situation staff-wise with some of your staff here and some of it over in Grand Rapids. I made a lot of trips across the state. About once a week or so I would drive from Ann Arbor to Grand Rapids, 162 miles I think it was—" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] Could you speak to the process of deciding which materials to bring to the library?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Sure, a lot of the materials coming to the library automatically from the White House. I mean, anything that was in the White House goes to the Presidential Library basically. And then whatever the President’s personal papers are also in the transfer. Of course this is in the shadows of Watergate, and what I discovered, interestingly enough, is you had an entirely different kind of record beginning the with Ford library. You had, say with the Roosevelt Library, a lot of diaries, a lot of personal experiences, a lot of personal papers that were included with the Presidential Library materials. We saw that at Eisenhower too, his diaries, his other things that were maintained. But when you got to the Ford papers, by and large, they were bureaucratic. They were decision papers. They were things written by his staff that had approval, disapproval, further discussion. It was no less valuable in many ways, but you had to learn to look at them differently and appreciate them differently than the kind of the personal papers of the President that were more common in the older Presidential Libraries. And a good example is Dick Cheney’s papers—I don’t have any. He said, “If the President wanted to know something he would ask me and I’d give it to him. I wouldn’t write anything down.” And that was the fallout of Watergate. I think you had a real loss of history in the circumstance—Dick Cheney is just one example, but a lot of them, now of course he ended up having some personal papers with the University of Wyoming, but they weren’t necessarily White House papers. And they weren’t necessarily reflecting that he was the Chief of Staff. And so he didn’t feel that he had a policy position, and he didn’t necessarily write down a lot of things that might come across his desk, or determinations—" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] What year did you say it was when you became the Director?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "1981." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "And I spent four years in Ann Arbor, and then in 1985 the curator left. He was kind of the Deputy Director as well. And so I moved to Grand Rapids and based out of Grand Rapids because in Ann Arbor we were pretty well integrated into the university, and we still had some integration issues over in Grand Rapids. And I think everybody felt in the end that it was probably better if I was in Grand Rapids. About a year after I was in Grand Rapids the process of selecting the next Archivist of the United States started bubbling and I was approached by some Reagan people. Actually it was Charles Palm, who was the Associate Director of the Hoover Institution. Charles and I had been friends for a number of years. We kind of came up through the Archives together and then he left the training program and went to the Hoover Institution as the archivist. But he was very close with a lot of the Reagan California group, Shultz, Secretary of State Shultz, Ed Meese—what I call the California group. And they were the ones most concerned about who was going to be that first Archivist named, mainly because of the library, you know. They didn’t want any problems going through Congress with the Presidential Library. I’m giving you a lot inside stuff here." }, { "speaker": "JESSIE KRATZ", "text": "Oh that’s what we want." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "[Laughter]." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Thank you." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "And it was interesting because earlier, I think it was late ’86, early ’87, Ed Meese visited the campus, spoke at the University of Michigan, met with President Ford and me, and—" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] Just for clarification, you were then meeting with Ford and Reagan?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Ford and Meese." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Ford and Ed Meese." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "He was the Attorney General at the time. And he was kind of taking the point on a lot of the Presidential Libraries, I mean he is also a great friend of the Archives. Bob Warner and he had also had a good relationship. And you know, and in all fairness, I would say Bob was kind of a mentor to me. I had of course, during that time, turned him down for a couple of positions in the Archives, including the after the death of an archivist [laughter] at one point. And—" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] When was that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "’85." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Okay, so we haven’t gotten there yet really." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "So I was very happy being the Director of the Ford Presidential Library. It was an ideal job. I mean you couldn’t ask for a better President to work with, for one, who was not there all the time, but still available. I never had any issues in the field because nobody would challenge it. If the President wanted that we were going to get that—not that we were asking for anything, we wouldn’t do that, but they weren’t going to go after me, making demands on my time, or my staff, from the Archives, because they weren’t going to chance upsetting the President in any way. And that’s true of any of the Presidential Libraries. But President Ford was great to work with. He was one of these people who would immediately put you at ease. And to go back to the first interview. He immediately put me at ease going into that interview. It was just very relaxed. There wasn’t any tension at all. It was just here’s who I am, what I am. And yet, only later did I realize there was always this formality about him. And there was, I think it was the Dutch Reformed background—that whole Dutch Reformed idea—the kind of background that he grew up in in Grand Rapids. And there is always kind of you got so close, but you didn’t, you know? And maybe it’s like most Presidents. They typecast you early on—you are the Archivist and that’s what you’re going to be. I didn’t play golf with President Ford. I didn’t go to dinner at his house necessarily. But he never put you at any discomfort. It was always, “Oh you’re doing a great job. I really appreciate what you’re doing. I like what you’re doing.” And we’d sit down and go over the budget each year and he would have ideas—the idea that he was not extremely bright is wrong. He was extremely bright and he had a terrific memory. And we’d sit down and go over a budget and he said “but Don last year this budget was reflected here and it was this amount.” And that’s 25 years on the Armed Services committee I’m sure, in Congress. But you never tried to pull one over on him either, because he was very direct. He was very open. And he expected you to be very direct and open too. And so we had a great relationship. I wasn’t all that close with Betty. She had her own thing going at the Betty Ford Clinic. And so she wasn’t too involved in the library although the other First Ladies did a number of programs. And one of the things that really challenged me on those programs and doing a lot of programming was the Johnson Library, and primarily Harry Middleton who was Director of the library there, who was my idol and one I always looked up to. He is also a fellow Kansan in the end, but I always thought that if Harry could do that I can do that. If Harry can have this I can do it better, or we can do it, you know, it was always a competition there I guess, with what was going on at the Johnson Library. So we’d do a lot of that and she [Betty] would participate in something like that. But he was the principal [Gerald] and this was his thing. And he had such a tremendous loyalty among his White House staff and he brought such great people into the White House. Phil Buchan, who was his general counsel, and his law school roommate I think, and later a partner in law up in Grand Rapids. Buchan had moved to DC, but Phil was an interesting, and a very strong member of that inner group. But he was surrounded with very strong people. At the time very young people. And a lot of them ended up being in several administrations, including Rumsfeld and others." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Could we pause for a second? Around 1985, 1986, how did the National Archives becoming an independent agency influence your work with the Presidential Libraries?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "That was really the leadership of Bob Warner. Bob really was the driving force in independence. The independence issue was all over Watergate. And GSA’s handling the tapes. There was a large cry from the historical agencies and organizations for independence. Bob built on that, and developed a lot of congressional inroads there, and GSA was kind of their own worst enemy on a lot of these issues. It’s interesting to note that the National Archives is the only independent agency created by the Reagan administration. I was of course out in Grand Rapids so I wasn’t intimately involved, although Bob kept me well informed on what was going on. And part of the agreement he came up with and the deal he made was that he would step down as Archivist once independence was achieved." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "How exactly did that deal work? Was that his official deal or—" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "[Interposing] He cut that deal, yeah. And part of it being, you know, Bob is perceived by a lot that current Reagan administration as being more of a Democrat than a Republican, although it really didn’t come into play all that much. I think Bob really wanted to step down too. He kind of took this on as a challenge. And he wanted to go back the University of Michigan. That was his love. And so that was playing into it. Independence was 1985, and then when he stepped down, Frank Burke became Acting Archivist. Frank’s still living isn’t he?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "So you were almost in DC at this point. How did you come to DC?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "That’s in 1986, the movement began in earnest for the appointment of a new Archivist, the first Presidentially-appointed archivist. Now the legislation was very tricky and cumbersome at the time, because the Senate really wanted a term, and most of the organizations wanted a term. The House wouldn’t accept a term. And so it was supposed to be more like a judgeship, more like the FBI Director, you know, that it would be a 10 year term or something that—" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] Can you speak to the conversation about whether it should be a term, like why did the House have that opinion?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Ah, you know, I don’t know why they had to have it, although the House has always kind of been much more, I guess, in terms of the Executive Branch, jealous of any kind of thing like that. They wanted to make sure there wasn’t somebody locked in necessarily. And so the language of the legislation really said that it shall not necessarily step down at the end of an administration, which came to haunt me later. Shall not necessarily step down but may be removed at the pleasure of the President, or serves at the pleasure of the President. So that was an interesting example there. It really came down to the California group who was very concerned about Reagan’s legacy. And they knew they had to have a professional appointment and the legislation also addressed being professional, or a professionally qualified person. So that became a real challenge then. And frankly speaking, there probably weren’t a lot of academics out there at the time who would be acceptable to the Republican or conservative base. They were mostly pretty liberal leaning, people in academia. I mean that’s just always been the case, not anything wrong with that, it’s just that’s how the academia worked. My background was pretty much all public history. I mean I’ve been on faculties, but I never was permanent faculty or anything. And so, now interestingly enough, one of the big challenges there was the fact that I was Director of the Ford library, seeking an appointment with Reagan. And there was a lot of unfriendly blood between the Reagan and Ford people within the party." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "For clarification, why exactly was that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Well that goes back to the 1976 election and the conference where Reagan challenged him, and Ford was convinced he cost him the election. And in 1980, of course he was asked to be the Vice President and turned it down, which is how Bush became Vice President. The Reagan people were a little offended by that. They—" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] Does that animosity carry over into the Presidential Libraries?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "I don’t see it. No. I mean I never saw it. And in fact that was pretty well healed later on. But, as an example, when I went to President Ford and said, “I’m being more or less recruited by the gallant array of Reagan people to have my name put in nomination for Archivist of the United States.” And I remember the day very clearly. He was in his office at the library and we were at the museum at that time. And he sat there, and he was smoking his pipe, and he kind of looked at me and he said, “Don, I think you’d be a great Archivist.” He said, “I’d hate to lose you, but I think it would be a good thing for the Archives.” But he said just one, one word of caution. He said, “Do you really want to get into bed with those bastards?” [laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "But you know, that was his take. There was still a sense of I don’t trust him back then. Well, then this progressed, and in many ways I was, you know, really happy being out there away from all the intrigue. And I kept thinking to myself, how am I going to tell my wife? This is not the Secretary of State, no this is not the Secretary of Defense. What is all the conflict about? And what is all the angst over here? Well it turned out a lot of it was within the White House, because Donald Regan was Chief of Staff. And Regan didn’t like the California people and he was saying, “I’m running the White House. This is my appointment.” And so Bill Bennett had put forth John Agresto. And John, at the time, I think was Deputy Director of the National Endowment for Humanities. And John was Bill Bennett’s deputy when he was NEH, I believe. Well, the Detroit Press, News of Detroit, I guess the Detroit Free Press, one of them, it was a big Detroit paper, announced in 1986 that I was going to be the nominee. Well the next day it came out John Agresto had been nominated. So it was betwixt really John Agresto and myself. John Agresto had never been in an Archives in his life, I don’t think. It was very much political in that sense." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Was he a PHD historian? Did he say?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "I think he was a political scientist. I can’t remember. I think he had a PhD. But I don’t know. I don’t recall. At any rate I never met him. But, I had built up this idea—you think you’re going to go there and then bam it’s just gone. Well I resolved to myself—you got a great job. I’m happy out here. We love Grand Rapids. You know, I could retire here. I’m only 43 years old. And so I thought it was over. And I had a lot of supporters going to bat for me in the Archives, and all of the SAA, AHA were all backing me. I mean they had all had resolutions out there, and so they were incensed about this and I just kind of sat back, I was out of the limelight, fine. And so Agresto’s name went forward and met with a whole lot of opposition. And Senator Mathias and Senator Eagleton of Missouri, led the charge against it. And after about nine months of this Agresto withdrew. They weren’t going to confirm him. And all of a sudden Don Regan was out. He was no longer Chief of Staff. Howard Baker became Chief of Staff. Howard Baker and President Ford were very close. So Howard Baker calls Ford and it says, “what about Don Wilson?” President Ford said basically the same stuff. And next thing I knew in August, 1987 I was nominated without any opposition. So then the whole confirmation process started, and thank goodness I don’t know how anybody goes through that process, I mean I couldn’t have done it if I had been someplace else. But I was already a part of the Archives. So it wasn’t like I had to change anything, or move to Washington, or do anything different during that whole process, because there was a lot of preparation. There was the whole FBI background checks, all of this had to happen. So I was nominated in August and the hearings were set for November, I guess early November. Of course Congress was in recess. And so I had a lot of prep work to do, and a lot of prep work was being done. John Fawcett, who was head of Presidential Libraries, and Claudine Weiher who was the Deputy Archivist, spent a lot of time prepping me. And I had worked with John for years. And I knew Claudine as well. There is no question she was going to stay as Deputy Archivist. And she was a very tough woman, and a dragon lady as she was known in the Archives—" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] So what was the office of Archivist of the United States like when you got there?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Very interesting. The whole confirmation process actually went very smoothly. It turns out Senator Sasser was the head of the General Affairs Committee. My wife is from Tennessee. My wife’s uncle was a former law partner with Sasser. And so I breezed through the confirmation. I mean it was a love fest. Nancy Kassebaum was my patron. She introduced me from the Senate and Bob Dole supported me because I was from Kansas. And so I think my confirmation lasted 25 minutes. I was there with three judges and went right through it. So that was not a problem, and then they wanted to do a fairly big deal at the swearing in since I was the first Archivist appointed, we did a rather awe-inspiring swearing in. Reagan was there. I don’t know if you’ve seen the picture—" }, { "speaker": "MS. Kratz", "text": "[Interposing] I’ve seen the picture." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "And it was a major event, a major event in my life, certainly. It was the first time I met President Reagan. I was not political. I was not an activist. I mean obviously I had been typecast early, I mean Eisenhower, Ford, and if I had served those Presidents I was obviously okay with Reagan. Their only real concern was making sure that they had a professional person they could send to the Hill that was not going to be challenged on the Presidential Library. And, because there had been a lot of conflict over Presidential Libraries coming out of Watergate, coming out of the construction of the Johnson library—that was this huge thing and then the Kennedy Library, a huge thing. Senator Chiles in Florida was really the archenemy of the Archives, or rather the Presidential Libraries. Most of the rest of Congress would never challenge it because they thought well, I may have one someday if the egos came into play, or have a role in one. But Senator Chiles was really always after it. And that’s why you had the Presidential Libraries Act amendment in 1986. That was Chiles supporting that, which limited the size and put a number of other things on the Presidential Libraries. But it couldn’t take place until after Bush—" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] With all of your experience up to that point, what was your opinion of the Presidential Libraries Act amendment?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Well I found it rather limiting, it went too far as a lot of legislation does. I thought there was probably a need for some clarification, but on the other hand you these were built with private funds entirely. Yeah, they’re staffed, as they have to be, with National Archives employees. But they are facets of it that evolved that don’t necessarily require that. And I think it put a lot of restrictions, now I got to admit, as Archivist I expanded some of those. I admit I interpreted some of those like net versus gross square feet. We made the decision very early that we would determine the net, not gross, in terms of size limitation. That made a huge difference. It would have been entirely too restrictive. You couldn’t put the papers in place that was gross square feet of 72,000. It wouldn’t have worked. And then the idea that we could separate some functions—throw it onto the university rather than have it all be exclusive in the National Archives, as the Reagan is, because of where it’s built, but beginning with Bush some of that was determined earlier. And the interpretation of the law was that you build a conference center that housed the Foundation and don’t put that in the library. That’s part of the Foundation. And you build this public policy program school. That’s part of the university. It’s not part of the archives." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "So, and feel free to add anything if you wish, but I think we’re at the point where you’ve become Archivist of the United States, and I was just wondering what were some of your original impressions of the culture of the agency? What was your daily routine like?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Well this all pre-computer, or certainly pre-electronic record, shall I say, in 1987. When I went in 1987 interesting fact there was not a fax machine in the whole archives system. And this is fax, you know. We put in fax machines in as one of the first things for communications purposes. So there was always a lag in communications in the field. And having spent most of my career in the field, I brought that field perspective into the National Archives. That wasn’t always welcomed. So there were challenges from the beginning with some of the older staff who looked down on Presidential Libraries and the Record Centers. They thought those weren’t central to the mission of the National Archives. You know, the main mission was the National Archives corpus in DC, military records, Charters of Freedom and all of this stuff, which are all very important, but I think I bought a new perspective. And it was challenged. There had to be some shuffling around. The frustrating thing about government is you can’t fire people. You just shuffle them. But we had a pretty good nucleus of a team. The real challenges were separating from GSA. And I guess, as I always say, in a lot of talks I have given we made mistakes. There is no question. But I am very proud of what we accomplished, a lot of which is never going to really be considered germane. But you know, from security systems, from hiring independent contractors to do certain things, to all of these things had to be dealt with. And on top of that we saw a real opportunity a year and a half into my tenure—we needed space, terribly, we needed space. We saw an opportunity that was through a window about like this to get a new National Archives building. And I will give credit to Jim Megronigle, who was the head of administration at the time, who had the relationship with Steny Hoyer, as a Maryland constituent, to take advantage of that. And I can remember the day—it was when we could bond. It wasn’t appropriation. It was bonding for $40 Million—I can’t remember the figure now, pretty significant at the time—to build an Archives II. And I can remember the day very clearly that I said to do it, “Let’s go for it.” What have we got to lose, except for a lot of money and some patrons? But we did, largely through the help of Congressman Hoyer who wanted it in his district. It became reality, but that bonding ceased after we did it. I mean there wasn’t any more of those kind of public building activities. That’s not well known particularly, and what they told us was a need perceived by Congress was a fight that we had to take to them. So that was one of the early challenges, but a lot of the small issues of fleet management and trying to become an independent agency was huge. And even though we were a small agency. It’s still a small agency. It’s one of the smallest in the Federal government. We were starting in many ways from ground zero. And we still had to work with GSA. We still had to work with a lot of the people over there. And many of them were very good to work with. But it didn’t always translate to the top that way because there was jealousies. There was hurt that they took away their little flower, you know, because toilet paper and [laughter] and warehouses aren’t very glamorous. Presidential Libraries are pretty glamorous in their mind." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "In that climate of transition, how were the interactions between the National Archives as an agency with other Federal government agencies?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Challenging because a lot of them we had to get to take it seriously, and a lot of that was in records management, and trying to make sure that we achieved good records management policies. Now, one of the differences, well one of the things I brought in, and Bob Warner was pretty high on this too, but he was really wrapped up in independence and didn’t get a lot done. But I felt as an independent agency we needed to take our place alongside the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress as a major part of the cultural and historical legacy of the country. We had not been perceived that way at all. And public programming is very important to me. Educational programs is very important. These are high priorities to me, and not everybody liked that. A lot of people didn’t like that. And so we gradually, in the beginning, had some real opportunities, one with the bicentennial and the Bill of Rights, and first the bicentennial and the Constitution—and working with some pretty powerful commission people on that. We gained some traction there. Jim Billington had not been there very long. He was at the Library of Congress at that point. And I had a good working relationship with Jim. We got along well. He gave me a lot of good advice and good thoughts, and couldn’t believe that I was so naive and young [laughter] coming into the Washington environment. He understood the Washington environment far more than I did. I learned later but never did get over the naivety, the fact that they could make allegations. I didn’t do that. What do you mean? Go ahead and go after me. I didn’t do anything." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What exactly was that Washington insider culture then?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Oh it was getting rough. If you were on top they were going after you in some way or the other. I mean they wanted to take down the person on top. And you had a sense, a growing sense, and part of this came through Iran contra. Part of it came as a result of Watergate. Part of it was the whole congressional environment up there was starting to change. It hadn’t when I first got there. You still had some really class act people up there. Senator Kassebaum, Senator Mark Hatfield was terrific. You had Lindy Boggs. Congressman Boggs was one of strongest supporters, and one of my strongest supporters. You had a lot of people who really cared about the National Archives, who cared about our records, who cared about our heritage. But you had this other element that who sought what and when. Everything was evidenced, and that was an environment that I had a hard time dealing with, particularly with Presidential records. There are a lot of stories related to that. But I mean, that’s where I was really attacked, and in electronic records. It was all brand new. I mean I can remember Frank Burke was set on having a super computer. I’m not a techie. And in fact, I won’t even show you my cell phone. MS. BRENNER [Laughter]." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "There was just a sixth sense that you had to look at, that this was moving so fast, that if we put in a huge computer system to handle the records it was going to be outdated without two years. And so I did make the decision to go with the PCs, the standalones, and then gradually develop the electronic records area. But I left it to the experts to say what. It was nothing but instinct that said don’t put in a super computer. They had already looked at various options and I killed it. That’s one of the first things I did, besides putting in fax machines. And so we were just beginning to struggle with that whole environment and working with other agencies to try to come up with solutions because they were creating, you know, well what is a record? Well that’s a good question. I always had a feeling that something had to rise to the level of a record and not everything that was on the computer is a record. Not every email is a record. We had some judges at the time that felt that everything was a record because it might show who knew what and when they knew it. The investigative reporters, I mean the National Security Archives was after me from day one over access to records. Coming out of the Presidential Library experience I think probably made a difference in my perspective on that. I never agreed with the idea that everything Nixon did was a record. His funeral plans, that’s not an official record. His daughter’s wedding plans, that’s not an official record, even though they might be in his desk or something like that. And that’s what they were trying to create—an environment that everything was a record. And I opposed that. I testified—remember the movie came out with the Kennedy assassination. And there was this whole movement about opening everything from the First Lady Lady Bird Johnson’s diaries to Caroline, you know all of these things, and I said no. I wrote an op-ed piece in the _New York Times_ or _Washington Post,_ I don’t remember where it went. But an op-ed piece saying look you can’t do that. You’re losing history if you do that. If you can’t guarantee some privacy, some restrictions that says we’re going to take this but we’re going to put a restriction of 20 years after the death, or protect the reputations and the names of people who might be included in that kind of record, then they aren’t going to keep it. You’re going to lose it. And you’re going to lose history. So I guess part of that comes down to my philosophy as Archivist which was we were a cultural institution as much as we were a warehouse." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Who opposed your philosophy on that and why?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Well most of the journalists, particularly the investigative journalists opposed that. They wanted immediate access or certainly within a short period of time. You had some members of Congress who just by nature wanted to further restrict the Executive Branch in any way they could. Some historians who, particularly those writing the Nixon, wanted immediate access, or they should have immediate access, not everybody [laughter], the academic, you know, club. So you had a lot of this going on. And one of my favorite sayings was you get four historians in a room, you get seven different opinions. And on that note, my best constituency, the most supportive constituency I had were the genealogists. They were grateful for everything we did, anything we could give them. They were always there supporting me, whether it be letters to Congress, or on the Hill. And a lot of them were pretty wealthy, pretty sophisticated, certainly well-educated hobbyists basically, in many cases. But tremendous support from the genealogy community in general, as a whole." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What parts of being Archivist did you most enjoy?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "I most enjoyed trying to make a difference with a perception of the Archives, as a cultural agency. I enjoyed working with the staff. And I enjoyed building up the field. The Regional Archives was very important to me because that’s where we really interacted with the American people most. They didn’t have to come to Washington, DC, and look at the records. Giving them some more respect and thought, and I think we did a pretty good job of creating a good working environment out there. And even the Record Centers, I’d visit a lot of Record Centers. They played an important role, and I had to go out there and tell them that. And to see their faces light up was very rewarding on that. Taking the Bill of Rights out to the people, a very controversial move on my part. Mostly because I didn’t want Philip Morris to do it." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Who is he?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Philip Morris, the company." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Philip Morris the cigarette company, but it wasn’t the cigarette company. It was Kraft Foods. But everybody focused of the cigarettes. And I was really ahead of my time, and believed strongly in public-private partnerships, that in order to accomplish anything we couldn’t rely on appropriations alone, that we needed to build some partnerships. Well they approached me on this idea and they wanted to take a copy of the Bill of Rights out to the American people and make it available to every classroom. And we reached millions of children with it. We reached millions of schools. And there was this whole public exhibit that traveled around the country. And hundreds of thousands of people visited during the Bill of Rights centennial. And we took $500,000.00 in order to do it, and they paid for all of it. Now we ended up not using any of our copies of the Bill of Rights. We used the Virginia copy, because they supported this. So the Virginia State allowed their copy to be used, but we authorized the program going into schools. I think it was a great program. I’m still proud of it, even though I got criticized strongly in Congress—" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] And what was Congress’ opposition to the traveling Bill of Rights?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "That I took money from Philip Morris." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Did this play into your decision to want to have a Foundation for the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And what was your role in that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "[Laughter] Interestingly enough [laughter], I wanted to create a National Archives Foundation. And the one who came to me with the idea of how to create it was Karl Rove. [Laughter] Most people aren’t going to like that. This is before Karl became very political. And at the time he had a direct mail company in Texas. And Karl was providing services to all of the big museums, state museums, and organizations and historical companies, various non-profits, and was very successful at it. He came to it through the Johnson Library connections, because he was based in Austin Texas. So Karl came to me with the idea of creating a National Archives Foundation so he could get some resources to help build it up. And I thought it was a good idea, and I still do. Well, you know obviously it has been. So we drew up a charter but before that, I had created the Presidential Library Advisory Committee. Talk about the opposition giving themselves clout. But it was a clout and from my experience with Presidential Libraries I said these people can really help us with Congress and help us gain all kinds of activity. And if we can get it working together and seeing the common elements of all Presidential Libraries, rather than these fiefdoms out here, if we can have an organization that brings them together, I think it could be powerful. And I would say, that’s probably one of my most successful ventures in the Archives, was the creation of that. I got David Eisenhower. I got Caroline Kennedy, Ambassador Kennedy now. I got one of the Hoover grandsons. We had Johnson, the head of CNN, the former head of CNN. I can’t remember his first name, but he was a Johnson, no relation, but he was the president of CNN at the time. He was president of the Foundation down there too. And from the Eisenhower we had of course David. We had every library represented. And I convened them and we met twice a year. And we’d meet at one of the Presidential Libraries and they would host it. I can remember the meeting in Johnson library, and I took Caroline Kennedy out to buy her cowboy boots. She wanted to know where to buy cowboy boots. So I said come with me. [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "And we got them thinking collectively. We got them to work together. So it was a very powerful group, and we would meet, and they would talk, and they would come out of those meetings amazed at how much they had in common and how common their issues were, and I think that’s where we really kind of laid the ground work for a lot of projects—well one of the first things was the joint exhibits that would travel around, and the other major public/private partnership was World War II 50th anniversary. I got USAA to put $1 million to travel the exhibit around and it went to all of the Presidential Libraries, as well as a couple of other places. But General McDermott was the head of USAA at the time and that was a great program. I didn’t get as criticized on that one as I did on the first one. But you know, it was ironic that one of the criticism was, well a Federal agency shouldn’t do that. You know now the Smithsonian is taking money from Orkin to put on an insect exhibit. Talk about cause marketing. And you know the Library of Congress has all kinds of private support. And so, you know I think that’s now an accepted fact. It’s just it was brand new at the time." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Was that before or after the decision to create Archives II?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Oh that was after. Archives II was early in the administration. By the time we started that wasn’t actually signed off on until ’90 or ’91—" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] I’m just trying to see the timeline in my head. Did they relate to each other at all or—" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "[Interposing] No, no, no. They didn’t cross. Archives II wasn’t controversial in a sense, other than the way we funded it, and how we got it through. And that was kind of under the radar as well. I don’t think anybody argued with the fact that we didn’t need the space, or that there wasn’t a need for additional archives facilities. We were overflowing downtown. But, and I was there for the groundbreaking. But I wasn’t there for the dedication so—" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] You’ve mentioned some, but what would you say were the high points or successes of your tenure as Archivist?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Well one—I think we laid all the groundwork for becoming an independent agency. Two— the higher visibility of the National Archives public programming and a recognition that we were a major cultural agency. Three—some of the education programs had a tremendous impact during the centennial years. World War II was an important conscious-raising activity. We got a lot of visibility for that. Certifying the 27 amendment [laughter], again, under the radar, because it was so controversial, particularly among certain members of Congress. This is one of the original 12 Bill of Rights, actually the 12th Bill of Right that was never passed at the time, during the original constitutional struggle. And so it lingered for over 200 years with five states approving, seven didn’t take action at the time. So it was one of the two. When this issue came up and kind of laid there for a long time and then there began to get rumblings of controversy because Congress kept raising the pay. And then interestingly, a graduate student at the University of Texas wrote this as a senior paper I think, or at least a classroom paper, arguing that this amendment was still alive. He got a C on his paper. So obviously his professor didn’t agree with him. And so he really started pushing it with some legislatures and creating a stir about it, and several state legislatures started taking it up and began passing it. I think at the time 23 states had maybe passed it or 18 states had passed it. So between 1987 and ’91 about 15 other states took it up and passed it, because they were angry with the Congress by and large. So what happened was all of a sudden when Michigan passed it as the 38th state, two-thirds had approved the amendment. The controversy was, had it died? Was it still legal? Because some states had to go back over 200 years to say they had passed it, the original states. Three or four other states passed it immediately thereafter, but Michigan was the 38th state. It didn’t help that I came Archivist out of Michigan. That was used against me. It had nothing to do with it. My dilemma—and you had constitutionalists speaking for both sides of it, and some of the most powerful said yeah, it’s still valid. Others argued against it. Senator Byrd had started a Resolution in Congress saying that it was dead. Tom Foley, Speaker of the House at the time, had kind of come out against it but nothing had actually taken place. And so, it became an issue because by executive order legislation, normally it would have been a function of the Secretary of State, but with the creation of the National Archives that function was delegated to the Archivist of the United States to certify an amendment once a proper number of states had passed the resolution. That it was therefore a valid constitutional amendment. Well my problem was I couldn’t take a side—some said you’ve had succession by these southern states in the Civil War and that meant they gave up all their rights and it was no longer valid. The states would have to pass it again. But of course it wasn’t while they were succeeded. It was passed while they were a state. You had others arguing that there is an implied deadline to constitutional amendments, which there now is but there wasn’t at the time. I think that came out in 1938 or ’39. And then you had several of these kind of arguments that said no this would be invalid. And Senator Byrd’s position was that it was up to Congress to decide. And so at one point I wrote that article in the _New York Times,_ and it was the only time I made front page of the _USA_ _Today_ . But at one point Senator Byrd ordered me up to the Hill for a meeting with some legal counsel and I went up. And he held the meeting in the appropriations room of the Senate, sending me a subtle message, not so subtle message, and lectured me on the Constitution and senatorial rights, and senatorial courtesy that I should be aware of. And I listened patiently and calmly and said, “Yes, sir, yes sir,” and went back certified it because if I didn’t I was interpreting the Constitution. If I did, then I was just simply following through on what was then in place. And it was up to the Senate and the House to take other action. And that kind of implied that if Congress wanted to take other action they are certainly free to do so. But I have an obligation and a commitment, something I have to do. Legal counsel all agreed that this needed to be signed and so I did. And so I’m proud of that. Not many Archivists can say I was part of the Constitution. And that was a highlight." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What was the signing ceremony like?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Very low key, in my office with about six people there. And we didn’t even take a photograph. Did we?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "We finally found a couple in—" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "[Interposing] Oh did you?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "—in your papers at the Bush Library." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "They were down there." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "We found some, yeah. We found a couple." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Well thank goodness. I remember that I kept, I’m going to have to write them because I don’t have them." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "To what extent—" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "[Interposing] I kept them in my papers—I’ll be darned." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "To what did you receive criticism after you signed?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Not much, I had a lot of people come out and say that’s the right thing, Constitution scholars, that’s the right thing to do. And it kind of died then. And in Congress they said it is part of the Constitution now. And so it became a non-issue. Tom Foley kind of backed off completely. Senator Byrd probably always held it against me. But he was already senile. I don’t know if I should have said that. [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Just sort of a side question, what was Senator Byrd like? Dealing with him? Obviously a controversial figure for a very long time." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Well he was pontificating, arrogant, self-anointed scholar of the Constitution. But a powerful force to be reckoned with in the Senate because he’d been there for so long. And, you could, probably better to ask the FBI, or CIA, or somebody like that who has satellite agencies in West Virginia that question. I didn’t have that many problems with him other than that." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "I was just curious. Thank you. But—" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "[Interposing] I had far, a far more controversial person in my mind was Senator Ted Stevens. That’s why we have the Alaska Record Center. And that was, you know, we weren’t particularly in favor of that. But that was pretty much imposed." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "That’s closed now." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Is it closed now?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "It got closed this last year." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Yeah, and I figured, I could understand the rationale, but because people traveling would have to go to Seattle to do anything. But it was tough to manage, and it was tough to open up. And we had to scrape some budget money out to do it, and it was pretty small, even in its prime. We opened another one in Western New York. Again, a congressional mandate, and another proud thing, one of the proudest things I think I can say of my administration was I had no schedule C’s. There were no political appointees in the National Archives, except me." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Going back to the—" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "[Interposing] That didn’t last. [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Going back to the amendment for a second, did you consult with the President of the United States at all? Was there any—" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "[Interposing] I consulted the White House counsel." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "He said do what you need to do but as far as we’re concerned, it’s legal. I mean that helped, but I didn’t take direction very well at all. It was interesting. Another proud moment I had was at the end of the administration, the Bush administration. And this came up at the end of the Reagan administration. I’ve only been in office a year, a little over a year. Was I supposed to resign? And there were some people who thought I was a political appointee and that I should turn in my resignation. It was never requested. It was never a question by the Bush administration. And so I went through the first term without controversy and it was just assumed. Nobody ever raised the question are we going to appoint a new Archivist? It was it was good. At the end of the Bush administration when Clinton won the election almost immediately there was a call for me to resign, mostly by Senate staffers, and Senator Glenn’s committee. One of the biggest problems I had was Senator Glenn was he didn’t have a clue what was going on. His staff was running it, there was an oversight committee. And they tried to run the agency. They told me who I had to fire, but I didn’t, and that’s why they went after me. But the day after the election the story came out about, if you look at the paper, “absentee Archivist.” I mean I was accused of being an absentee; that I had turned to Claudine, which was not true. But because I was visiting our 33 sites I was supposedly not running the show, which was all a planted story. I had also been out with a knee surgery. So I can remember begin called up to the hill by the Senate oversight staff and trying to explain this story. Well they planted the story. I was on crutches, and they made me come up to the Hill and lecture me on how I should have listened to their advice on who should be the Deputy Archivist, and who should be the head of the administration. They didn’t like Jim Megronigle. They didn’t like Claudine because they were independent. They were civil servants. They couldn’t touch them. I was supposed to unilaterally fire them for some trumped up reason. There was no reason to give other than they didn’t like them. [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "I’m a bit confused actually, about whether the National Archives is partisan or not. I have heard both sides." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Well I think, let me continue then, because I was really under the gun and, right after the election I was in this dilemma. I didn’t really want to continue serving in that kind of environment. At the same time if I resigned I politicized the agency because it meant each future Archivist would have to resign under a new administration. Basically, they can interpret it that way. If I didn’t resign, I was going to get a handful of trouble. They weren’t going to sit back." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "For clarification, where was this trouble coming from and why?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Mostly from the Senate’s oversight committee staff. And you know some on the House, but not much on the House. Mostly Wolfe wasn’t a problem. But the Senate was. And I was asked point blank to resign at one point, and I said no. I can’t. And so they turned the IG on me and said “okay, you’ve falsified travel information.” I did not falsify, I had gone to Texas to look at the Bush, and they said I had met with the President, and cut a deal or something. First of all it was at the end of the administration and they were turning over of the tapes and the computer stuff. Well at that point Ray Mosley was the Acting Deputy Director. And Ray had really worked with the White House people and our legal counsel, and worked out the agreement for turning over the White House—I can’t remember the particular, it was sensitive records. And were they Presidential records, or were they agency records? That was at the heart of the controversy. At that point I was living fairly closely, and Ray was clear out in Maryland. They finally reached agreement the night before the swearing in, or the inauguration, I guess. And so at 11:00 at night I went down and signed the agreement. I said “is this what I’m supposed to sign?” “Yeah.” Everything has been worked out. Well then they claimed that there was some collusion, like I had a meeting with the President to work out the—like the President is going to call me up there and say well you may want to make sure that these White House records are not archived, which was ludicrous, but, enough of it got traction that the critics could claim that I was doing something wrong. Then I was approached later and asked to go down to Texas A&M to help with the Bush Library. And of course then I had to cut a deal. I had protected the President from the Iran Contra records in exchange for being named Executive Director, which wasn’t true because the university hired me. I can’t imagine going through it again, but it was a very tough time when I had to go through a public deposition and the press was invited into my deposition, which was almost unheard of. I mean we could reject it, but I didn’t have anything to hide. So I didn’t object. But the National Security Agency was suing, National Security Archives was suing me. And at that point they wouldn’t give me counsel, for conflict of interest, I think it was. And so I had no legal counsel. I had to go out and hire my legal counsel, which was Fred Fielding upon the recommendation of a friend of mine, who was very expensive. And it was all based on a lot of the charges by the IG, which weren’t true. And they were later proved not to be true. I mean it just didn’t happen. The timing was out of sequence and everything else. Frankly it cost me a lot of money to be Archivist of the United States. My wife was furious. And so it hounded me all the way—even first year of my tenure down there I had to come up for a Justice Department sit in on deposition that I had to give to the IG, who was hand-picked by—well I think the worst legacy of the Carter administration was the IG system. It enables Congress to do all kinds of things in the Executive Branch, because they don’t report to anybody, except for Senate staffers on the hill. And so they create these false things, but at any rate after the deposition, the four hour deposition, with the Justice Department sitting in, they said there is nothing here. We aren’t doing anything. And it was a civil thing. It wasn’t criminal. It was civil. So it was dropped and that was it. Did I ever get an apology? Did I ever get any compensation? No. But at least it was done. And at one point, I remember my legal counsel saying do you want to fight this to preserve your reputation or just get it over with? And I said get it over with. My legacy would be what my legacy is. And you know, I know what I did. I can look at myself in the mirror every day and I feel good about what I did. And I know I didn’t do anything illegal or dishonest. But beyond that, I’m not going to spend years fighting the bureaucracy to do it. And at that point I had some pretty strong enemies in the Archives who were feeding this." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Well it doesn’t mean anything from an intern who was born around the time that this happened, but I’m sorry that you had to go through that." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Well it was. I had, I had five great years as Archivist and six months of hell. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I’ve had a very privileged career. And to go down there and then finish up building the Brush Library was a great sinecure. That eliminated all the pain because the Bushes were so great to work with. I do a class at the University of Virginia about working with the Presidential families from my experience. And I talk about the insider view—I had a rare privilege to work with former Presidents and really get to know the characters. And what you had with President Bush was again, a person with no ego, like Ford, and there were many comparisons. But unlike Ford, who had this kind of formality to him, I was embraced as part of the family with the Bush’s. I was always Mrs. Bush’s archivist. I don’t know if you know, but that was her pet name for me. And to have the privilege of working, and he so appreciated everything we did. And he was just a class act. He was the last of an era, the last of a generation of politicians, and he said “Don, don’t, never use the word legacy around me.” “Give the other person credit and never be a braggadocio,” as he used to say. And he said, “I’m not worried about my place in history. It’ll take care of itself and I’ll be judged however. I won’t be here to worry about it.” And similarly with President Ford, I got to go back and give you one example of, well there are two poignant, or one poignant in my career—Ford and Carter used to do what I call the Jimmy and Gerry show because Carter and Ford became very close because of the Sadat trip, the funeral trip. And they all of a sudden realized that even though they were bitter political enemies they realized they shared so much. And they became very close friends. I never had the appreciation for Jimmy Carter that I had for Gerald Ford, mostly because Carter had a bigger ego than, he still does—he thought he was the only one that could solve the Middle East’s problems and a lot of these things. But they became good friends, and one of the trips up there to Grand Rapids, President Carter and President Ford, and President Ford asked me to take him through the exhibit, and I did. He got to the Oval Office recreation. And we walked into the Oval Office and I started to talk and turned to him and there was just a solemnness to them. And I looked at them both and I decided that I won’t say a word. And it seemed like 15 minutes. It was probably four or five minutes. And I looked back at them and tears were in both their eyes. And I just got chills, it was so poignant at that point, and I just turned and walked out and led them out through the rest of the exhibit. But what it meant for both of them to be President of the United States and their shared experience, it was just so moving at the time. I will never forget that. And another example of another poignant moment with Ford was, Fred Friendly, who used to be president of CBS News, for years he was president of CBS News. He came out and he did a constitutional—as he retired he did these constitutional forums and he did one for the Ford Library at the time in the 80s. And he came to the museum and I took him through the museum. And when we got to the Nixon pardon, and he looked at it for about a couple minutes, he just stared. And he turned to me and he said “Don, I got to tell you something. I was adamantly opposed to pardoning Richard Nixon, and I took Gerry Ford to all kinds of levels of criticism and broadcast, and we really pounced on him.” And this was, this was in ’87 or ’86. And he said, “But you know, I got to admit, I was wrong. Gerry Ford was right. He had to heal the country. And the only way to do that was to pardon Richard Nixon.” I thought man, is that some revelation. And then, another is, Brent Scowcroft, General Scowcroft was on the Foundation and was very close to Gerry Ford and to President Bush, he was President Bush’s closest friend. He still is. I mean he is his closest friend. But he was also very close to President Ford. And we were planning the exhibit. We were still building a component. And I think it was Mayaguez. It was the Mayaguez Crisis. And of course Scowcroft was with the National Security Council, so he was very involved in the Mayaguez episode, and I said well General Scowcroft I got a real problem here. I said, President Ford said this was the timetable that his happened here and here, and your papers and you indicate that it was this, and there was a time difference of maybe four or five hours or something like this. And he looked at me and he said “Don, President Ford said that? The President is always right.” [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Go with President Ford. So it was a wonderful experience. And with President Bush, it was a very hands on experience with building the library. And he hated to raise money. He said, “I’ve spent my whole, political life raising money. I don’t want to do it anymore. You got to raise the money.” And, but it wasn’t hard, because I, they knew I was representing him. And, we raised $50 Million in three years and built the library." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Okay, you just shared a few, but I was, and by asking are there any anecdotes that would be valuable?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Well I got a few with President Bush because they’re so funny. And one of them, and it’s not even necessarily first hand because, well it’s first hand from one of the sources, but at the end of the administration, I wasn’t at the meeting, but there is always a meeting and I would subsequently do a lot of them. But there was always a meeting with the Department of Army for funeral plans. They’ve got to lay out the operation for planning inevitably the funeral. And so they met in the White House, and it was Barbara Bush and her Chief of Staff and the President, and the Colonel who was in charge of the plans for the funeral. And he said, Now Mr. President, this is a delicate thing to try to have to do, but we have to do this as part of the requirements.” And this is all a result of after the Kennedy assassination. They weren’t ready and so they had to be planning all this stuff. So, we always referred to him as Colonel Death. [Laughter] But I can’t remember what his real name was. So he was telling me this fairly soon after the meeting, he said, “I just need to request of you some of your thoughts.” President Bush sat there and he kind of thought for a minute and he said, “I want to be buried at sea. A burial at sea for a state funeral.” [Laughter] You know, and his mouth kind of dropped and there was just this dead silence for about 20 seconds. And finally he looked and Mrs. Bush and said, “George, the hell you are!” And Bush said, “I guess not.” [Laughter] And so they originally had decided on Kennebunkport and Robin’s had been moved there, and they had plots. Well it was about ’96 or ’97, I was invited down to Houston right after Nixon’s funeral, and President and Mrs. Bush had been at Nixon’s funeral. And so there was this black tie affair at the MD Anderson Center and there were only two things that President Bush would do, one is Points of Light and two is MD Anderson Cancer Center in terms of being an honorary board member. So we were down to that and I was at the table with President and Mrs. Bush and four or five other people, and I was sitting across the table from Mrs. Bush and about a half an hour into the dinner somebody had asked her about the funeral and she looks over at me and she said, “Don, we need to talk. George needs to be buried in College Station at the library.” And I said, “Well Ms. Bush, we can discuss that but this wasn’t really the forum I thought was appropriate to discuss funeral plans.” And, so the President kind of looked up a little sheepishly and said, “Barbara was quite taken by the ceremony out there.” And he said “maybe you need to come down next week to the office and we’ll talk about this.” So I did and it turns out they decided they wanted to create a plot at the library. Well as the Executive Director of the Foundation of the library at the time, I had the responsibility to design and build the whole thing, but in order to do so we had to get a bill passed by legislators because it sits on state land. Well, interestingly the governor at the time was his son. And I said, “You’ve cleared all this right? You’ve explained it to the family and everything.” He said, “Don’t worry about it.” [Laughter] So the bill is introduced and it’s by affirmation but then it goes to the governor for signature. And the phone rings one day in my office, and I pick it up the phone and he says, “Don.” I recognized his voice and I said, “Yes governor.”" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Laughter]." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "And he said, “What the hell is this?” [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Laughter]." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "I said, “You mean your father and mother haven’t talked to you about it?” He said, “No. This is the first I heard of it.” [Laughter] I said, “It is okay governor. You can sign it though. This is what they want.” He said, “All right, I just didn’t know what the hell was going on.” And so I had to become a certified cemetery keeper in order to build the cemetery I guess. And also because they transferred Robin’s remains down there, and that’s a long story with Robin." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Well based on your extensive experiences with the Presidents and with the Archives, what words of wisdom can you share with us?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Well I think you just have to take life as it comes, and take advantage of it. I’ve been blessed. I was very fortunate. I’m very proud to be the first Presidentially-appointed Archivist. I think the Archives has a lot of challenges ahead of it. I was being sued every other day practically, and not as personally, but as Archivist because of electronic records issues, I think those are still out there, email, you know. What rises to the level of record? I think Presidential papers are a real controversy and it’s a fine line there about what’s personal, and what’s private, and what’s public. And I think a lot of thought has to be given to that over time, and I can’t imagine why anybody wants to run for that office now, personally, but I think that to be Archivist of the United States now is a real challenge because of the atmosphere in Washington generally. And everything is criminalized. If you disagree with someone, the first thing they want to do is criminalize it, rather than try to reach a core compromise. I was fortunate I think, in the early years, that we had some real statesmen up there who would work together. Tip O'Neill was more partisan but he would work with you and you had both sides of the aisle working together. One of the interesting things, the first Foundation board meeting we had, and the President wanted several Democrats on there, and one of them was Tip O’Neill. He was on the Foundation. And we met at Kennebunkport. This was right after I became Executive Director of the Foundation. We met at Kennebunkport at the big hotel there and they talked about raising the money for the library and other things. And Speaker O’Neill stepped out into the hallway and motioned me out there. And he said, “Don, you know I’m a great admirer of George Bush. I want to give you a check for $2,000.00 for the library. It’s not going to be a big check but it’s a token, I want to be the first. I want to be the first to contribute.” And I thought man that speaks volumes about what their relationship was. It was interesting, Gerry Ford didn’t have any enemies. I really don’t think he had any enemies on the Hill because was there for so long and had been admired for many things, and even afterwards he had very few. Except one, and that was Schlesinger, Secretary of Energy Schlesinger. He found him arrogant and pompous. I had recommended him once for a speaker and he said, “No, anybody but James. I don’t want him. I had enough to deal with him for the administration.” And with President Bush there were critics, Mitchell being one of them, who really kind of sideswiped him on the tax thing, and blasted him afterwards for raising taxes, and he broke his pledge because that is what was best for the country. He had to do it, raise taxes. And Mitchell said, “No new taxes,” and made political hay out of it. But I think the whole atmosphere kind of changed and was changing a little bit, and the Reagan administration helped create a level of tension. But after Newt Gingrich was elected to the House—the so-called Gingrich Revolution, Congress became so split and so partisan. And I always to this day thank God I wasn’t there during that time because it would have been almost impossible. I think subsequent Archivists have done a remarkable job in building the budget. When I left office I think our budget was $120 Million. I don’t know what it is $400 Million, $500 Million now or something like that. I don’t think staff has increased that much. We had about 2,800 employees. It’s probably maybe 3,000." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "3,000." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "So it’s a heck of a burden to carry and the number of records, pages of records has probably quadrupled since I left office. So it’s a horrendous task and I wouldn’t criticize, or I wouldn’t second guess any of my successors because they have to deal with a whole set of problems I never dealt with. But I’m very proud of my association with the National Archives. I spent 20 years with the National Archives, and it was very fortunate that even kind of forced out, I can retire [laughter] glad 20 years early. And I was a Presidential appointee." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "[Interposing] Thank you so much for your time." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "You’re welcome." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "And anything else you want to add?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Not right now, we’ll probably talk more over lunch." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Sounds great." }, { "speaker": "MR. WILSON", "text": "Anything else will be off record! ##### National Archives History Office ##### 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW ##### Washington DC 20408" }, { "speaker": "Tel", "text": "(202) 35 7-5243" }, { "speaker": "Email", "text": "archi ##### ves.historian@nara.gov ##### DEED OF GIFT TO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN I, b ~ u.) , 'J ~ b~o ##### hereby give to the National Archives History Office the recordings and ##### transcripts of ##### my interviews conducted on ,411~ **o.st** **_().o,_** **ae>l5** . ##### I authorize the National Archives History Office to use the recordings and transcripts in such a ##### manner as may best serve the historical objectives of ##### their oral history program. ##### In making this gift I voluntarily convey ownership of ##### the recording and transcripts to the public ##### domain. ##### Donor NATIONAL ARCHIVES _and_ RECORDS ADMINISTRATION 700 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE. NW WASHINGTON. DC 20408 - 0001 _www._ _archives.gov_" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MS. REBECCA WATFORD", "text": "I am Rebecca Watford. I am an intern in the history office at the Washington, DC National Archives. Today is November 8, 2017. I am with James Zeender, who is a registrar with the National Archives in DC, and we are in the B5 Conference Room. So how did you come to work at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "Wow, that's a good question. I was a, I believe, a junior at Catholic University here in Washington, DC and studying Political Science. My mother at the time was working in the library at the University of Maryland at College Park. She saw a posting for a position here at the National Archives. She called me up and said, are you interested in this, and I was, so I followed up on that. Some months later, I was working at the National Archives. That position was in the Office of Presidential Libraries. And so I was there for a while before I moved on." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "So did you finish your degree at Catholic University while you were working here?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "I did. I did." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "And just stayed here for the rest of your life." }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "Well, no, I did have a little interval. I was, like I said, I think I started in '79 and graduated from Catholic University late in 1980. And then, I went to Boston and was in Boston for a year, I'd say a year and a half. And then, I came back to the Archives and back to the Office of Presidential Libraries. Then, sometime in 1983, I was working in Presidential Libraries when my supervisor, Doug Thurman, the late Doug Thurman, very good man, good friend, had talked to Dr. Jim O'Neill, who was the assistant archivist for Presidential Libraries at the time, and was Chairman of the National Archives Committee for the 50th Anniversary of the National Archives. There was a big exhibition planned, and they needed a registrar, or someone to collect the and care for the items to be in that exhibition. Doug mentioned me as a possibility, and I got drafted into working on that exhibit. Kind of opened my eyes to the world of exhibitions and the opportunity to work with a lot of people throughout the agency. And so I was essentially on loan for that year, and then transferred over to exhibitions, permanently, sometime in 1985." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "And you've been a registrar since then?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "I've been registrar ever since. I started out probably when I transferred, I was probably a GS-5 or 6, but I remained a registrar all that time, but the position has kind of grown in scope and responsibility since then." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "What aspects of the work do you enjoy?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "Well, I think I eluded to just there—it's—of course, there is a direct access to the archive's records and artifacts and artwork, and being able to just be up close to them. With an interest in history and knowing all the stories that are associated with them, that could be very special. But it's also the opportunity to work with other individuals here at the National Archives, in the Presidential Libraries, in the Field Offices. As registrar, the other major responsibility I have is for loans from the National Archives to other museums, and so I'm able to work with other institutions and staff, individuals in other museums. So it's both that access, that up-close access, and the opportunity with a great variety of people." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "What's a typical day in your unit?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "For myself, or for the unit?" }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "For you." }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "There isn't one. That's another thing that I think makes my job challenging and interesting is yes, there is a fair amount of routine activity having to do with processing archival and museum materials for exhibition or for loan for exhibition, but it's also the things that come out of the blue; questions, the contact for another loan, a new loan to go. Maybe sometimes it's Japan, maybe it's Presidential Library. But it's usually something—there's always something new. And that's why I get up in the morning and come here." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "What interesting discoveries have you made through your work?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "Well, that's hard to answer. But I'll tell you, I wouldn't exactly call it a discovery, but the end result, I think, was rewarding. Many years ago, I forget the context, but there was an archivist here by the name Dr. Milton Gustafson, who was our Diplomatic Archives Specialist, and he was in charge of, I guess it was civil textual records reference. And we were out at College Park at Archives II, and for some reason Milt said he wanted to take me into the stacks and show me something, show me a document. So we went into a stack, it was probably Stack 250, and he knew exactly where the records were. We walked down the row and he pulled a volume of State Department records. It was a series with miscellaneous letters, and he opened the volume and it was a letter from President John Adams to his Secretary of State, commenting on a passport application from a French philosopher. And Adams wrote back saying, \"We have too many French philosophers as it is.\" And so I think that was one of the things—my reaction to that came on several different levels; one was just the insight that I got into what it was, what the archives had, what records might reveal, and I'll leave it at that. Then stepping back and looking, what else was there, not at the moment, but over the years as I stood back, and I saw that this was part of a larger series that covered the State Department from 1789 going forward. And in those, I don't know, probably 20 or so volumes was chock full of original letters written and signed by George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. I'm sure there are others. But those, as far as I can tell, the Presidential letters tended to peter out and ended up going somewhere else, but they're not in that series so much. But there they were, this incredible series of letters, and they were in a regular stack area. I think it was Pat Anderson, who was an archivist at Archives II at that time, and we talked about moving them into the vault. And that happened sometime within a few months. Today those letters are—they're on microfilm, but they're in the process of being digitized and will be available in our catalog." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "What was your degree in? I don't believe you said." }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "Political Science." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "How do you use your Political Science degree in archival work?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "Well, I mean, I would say the most important thing is having an understanding of the American Political system, the form of the United States Government, and how all that works, and how that is translated in the records themselves." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "What were your impressions of the agency when you started working here?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "I'll go back a little bit further." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "My father was a Professor of European History, taught at Catholic University. He actually went to Catholic University himself, back in the 1930s. And then, was invited by Catholic University to come teach in 1959. I was born in '58, and he was then teaching at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. In 1959, he accepted the position at Catholic University and the whole family moved down here. But growing up, first in D.C., and then in the Maryland suburbs, my parents would bring us downtown to see the monuments and the museums. And I don't have a precise memory of the first time I came to the archives, what I have a memory of is driving down Constitution Avenue, probably in the backseat of my parents' car, and looking up at those awesome neo-classical buildings on Constitution Avenue, of course, including the National Archives. I thought to myself then, and I was just a youngster, that it would be really cool to work there someday. So—and I'm sorry, refresh me again what the original question was?" }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "What was your impression of the agency when you began your career?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "When I started? Okay. Well, okay. So as a young child, I thought it was a pretty cool place to begin with. And so when I got the phone call from my mother, I was eager to apply. I knew, obviously, that the Declaration and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were there, but I didn't have a very deep understanding of what else was there at the National Archives, or what people did at the National Archives. And that's, really, something I've come to, you know, just learn over the years. But I knew that it was impressive looking, basically, and that it would be a good place to work." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "What would you say was the most significant turning point in your career?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "The most significant..." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Turning points." }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "Turning points. Well, I think the first one was that opportunity to work on the 50th anniversary exhibit, which opened in 1984, and opened my eyes to the broader National Archives. And that I had the opportunity to work with curators at the Presidential Libraries that then existed. Of course, there are many fewer than there are today. So I would say that's one, but I would also, at the same time, it was a turning point. It was a turning point, not so much for me, but for the institution, was the whole independence from General Services Administration, which was all going on at that time, that I was—little Jim Zeender was busy working on exhibits. But the senior managers in the agency were focused on the independence movement, and which finally resulted in the 1984 act. And then, officially, I think we transferred some time in 1985. So those two linked together were very big. I would say the next major one would be—again, this is not so much me, it’s more Presidential Library, I mean, NARA as a whole—It's just the overall growth of Presidential Libraries which, when I started, I think there were maybe five or six at the most, and today we have twice that number. And so that institution has evolved a great deal in all that time. Another turning point, obviously, was the renovation of the Natural Archives building. I can remember back to 1985, there was something called the Shepley Bulfinch Study, which was an architectural firm that was hired to prepare a proposal on what would be the best use of the National Archives building here on the mall. Basically, they outlined a plan that, 20 years later, we've implemented. That was to maximize the public use of the building, leveraging its location here on the mall. And so that study set things in motion. Just to sketch it out a little bit further, the plan called for gutting six levels of stacks, which would be used for an expanded exhibition space, auditorium, conference rooms, et cetera. So it was going to be necessary to move a lot of records out of the building. So the first thing that had to be done was to have a new building, that process got started in the early 90s, we were building Archives 2 and then by, I think, '93, '94, we were moving records out there. And then along came—this is another track that, kind of, helped expedite the process, at least from my perspective, was that a conserver here noticed some deterioration on the glass of—I forget if it was the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. And so people took that very seriously, and it eventually—we realized that we're going to have to do a re-encasement of the charters. That merged with the need to renovate the building as a whole. With that, the vision of the original Shepley Bulfinch plan came together and we have the building that we have today. With a beautiful, permanent exhibit space for the public vaults and temporary exhibits gallery, the O'Brien Gallery, and now, also, the Rubenstein Gallery where we have the exhibition record of rights, and the Magna Carta, of course." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Did changes in Presidential administrations or archivists of the United States administrations change the nature of your work?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "No, not really." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "I'm sorry, go back. Is it change of Presidents, change of administration?" }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Uh-huh." }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "No, that wasn't an issue." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "How would describe the intellectual and institutional value of the records with which you work? You don't have to answer that if you can't." }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "Well, that's a hard question. I mean, that's one of the wonderful things that we in exhibitions are able to do, is we're able to explore the great breadth of the National Archives. But at the same time, we're not—the individuals in the exhibitions office are not experts on any particular area, generally speaking. We're often dependent on the expertise of individual archivists, who work with a limited amount of records, that are limited, but they can still be very voluminous. Like modern military records, we're talking about tens of thousands of boxes and maybe more than that, so we're dependent on those archivists who've worked with those records over a long period of time, and developed an expertise, and we're very, very dependent on them. But, I mean, personally, I'm very interested in the American Revolution and the early Republic, and have, as I mentioned earlier, the early State Department Records piqued my interest even more, and so personally, that's the body of records that I'm most interested in. I would say they are the core of our government and American Democracy. The Journals of the Continental Congress, the Voting Record of the Constitutional Convention. You know, we debate a lot about what the founders intended, well, we can always go back to the record and see what they actually had to say. Sometimes they're contradictory, so history is sometimes messy. But what we have are the records, so we always have to go back to that." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Do you feel you've made a significant contribution to the National Archives? And if so, what do you think that was?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "I don't know. What I'm proud of is that I built the Registrar's position from a technician to a real professional position over the course of my career. I'm also just proud of the National Archives' loan program today, and being able to share records from the archives with museums around the country and around the world. I think that we, here in Washington, we're able to see great works of art, and we see these great records every day and we tend to be a little jaded. But it's when we get an opportunity to get these documents out of Washington and into museums around the country, and you can actually meet the individuals that the museums and also the people that are visiting those museums, and see their reaction, it's quite amazing and awarding." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "How do you view your time at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "How do I view my time?" }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Mm-hm." }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "All my time?" }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Mm-hm." }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "I mean, over the last..." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "I feel like I'm a very lucky person, and I've had one of the best jobs in Washington for all that time. That amazes me every day." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Is there anything you would like to add to the interview? Anecdotes, stories, words of wisdom, et cetera?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "I would say anyone who's—I'll go back to before coming to the archives and being a high school student, and trying to decide what I was going to do. You know, my dad taught European History and I was interested in history, and my mother was a librarian, so, you know, coming here would've seemed very natural. But I remember that my mother did not think pursuing a career in history would be very valuable. Or maybe that's not the right word, but so when I applied to Catholic University, I didn't apply for the History program, and I didn't apply for a Political Science program. I applied for Computer Science. But I had realized within that first year that that's not really what I wanted to be doing. I had relatively good math skills, but I wasn't passionate about it and I was much more interested in Politics than History. And so I put myself on that track, and then I was just lucky enough to get that phone call, my mother seeing that posting. So what I would say is, when someone tells you that your English Degree is not going to help you, or that you really need to go one way or another way, take that with a grain of salt and give yourself the opportunity to take another path." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Is there anything else?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ZEENDER", "text": "That's it." }, { "speaker": "MS. WATFORD", "text": "Okay." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. ERIK MOSHE", "text": "What branch of service did you serve in?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MICHAEL BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "The United States Air Force, active duty 1989 to 1993. I was part of Desert Shield, Desert Storm, the first one. I started an E-3, when I got out, E-4." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Where were you living at the time you enlisted?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "I was from Texas. I joined the Air Force to see the world. My basic training was in Texas, and my technical school was in Texas. I had orders for Elmendorf, Alaska, and the person I was going to be replacing decided to reenlist, I got Texas again. Back down in San Antonio, Wilford Hall. I loved Texas. I was born in Texas. I wanted to see the world." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Why did you decide to join?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "I had a bachelor’s in political science and international relations from Austin College in Sherman, Texas. I wanted to go to law school when I very first went to college, but then I got burned out educationally. I like languages, so I took the B-Lab, and I had a pretty good score on it. I wanted to be a linguist for the Air Force. I thought maybe somewhere at the end of the road being an international lawyer, maybe an interpreter for the United Nations. So I had my package put together, but then we had a Senator from the State of Texas named Phil Graham who passed the Gramm-Rudman Act, which said we’re going to do proficiency pay for enlisted people’s natural language abilities, only use them 75% of their normal duty time as opposed to recommissioning bonuses for officers. My mom had severed the invisible umbilical cord of financial protection, said you’re on your own, this is back when the rural economy tanked. I really wanted to be a linguist, so I went over and talked to the enlisted side and said, yeah, like an 18­ month window for delayed entry for a guaranteed job. I’m like, I can’t do that. They’re like, oh, well, go open general and volunteer, and you’ve got a pretty good chance. I did that. My choices were cook, cop, dog cop, box checker, medical box checker, airborne weather specialist, imagery interpreter specialist, medical services, technical/medical admin, and nothing to do with languages I had volunteered for. In my four years, they were looking at the START Treaty and putting together officer and NCO and some lower level enlisted people to be linguists for the dismantling of nuclear weapons over in the Soviet Union. And said, “hey, if you’d like to go, we’ll take you.” And I’m like at that time I’m ready to get out." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you recall your first days in the service? What was it like?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "Yes, it was a little bit different. You get off the bus, you stand in line, you grab some chow. For us, we got in super late, so we went in and they bunked us the first night, got up the next day, got your haircut, had to pay $1.15 or $1.25 for your haircut that came out of your first paycheck. Everybody’s dressed in their different clothes. They called us rainbows, and then we all get our BDUs, that’s Battle Dress Uniforms, and started to look alike. You just shut up and you listen and you observe and you absorb, whereas others learn the hard way. You never open your mouth. Somebody’s always got something for you to do with it. It was somewhat tough getting accustomed from being in college and getting up whenever the hell I wanted to—and now we’ve got to get up at 4:30 in the morning so I guess getting acclimated to the early morning stuff. Physical fitness in the Air Force was a joke. We did like 20, 25-set side-straddle hops. We did 20, 25 pushups. We had to run a mile and a half with our entire flight in like 18 minutes. The physical aspect was a joke. I don’t think I ever really had any tough parts other than just dealing with the fact that any kind of Federal holiday was not considered an active duty day even though you still may have to scrub the deck or scrub the toilets or something like that." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember your instructors at all?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "Yes, Staff Sergeant Scott and another Staff Sergeant. Sergeant Scott was cool. We had a guy in our unit that had a mental episode. I’m not going to give his name ‘cause he’s probably still around. And Sergeant Scott, we had to deal with that situation. I thought it was over and done. I went off to technical school and then I went on leave for a while before I went back to my permanent duty station, which happened to be Lackland as well. And I ran into Sergeant Scott; his wife was pregnant, and we talked about this other airman, and this other airman, this is like 6 months, 8 months later, was still in the mental health unit. But yeah, no, I remember my NCOs. They were cool. They were hard. The thing that got me is when I got in, the very first couple of days we saw a tech sergeant that was leading morning PT, like what the heck is a more senior NCO doing leading the morning PT. And he’d actually been a master sergeant and he got busted down in rank supposedly for hitting somebody. And in my mind it’s like, I’m in the military, you should be hitting me, if I can’t take a hit, what am I going to do, call time out with the enemy? And they’re like, well, he did something intentional to an airman. I’m like, still doesn’t matter, you know? He broke his arm. Maybe there is an issue if it wasn’t involved with training. I had an incident where my sergeant, you know the Smokey the Bear hats? He bopped me in the nose ‘cause he was trying to get my attention. And I have a tendency to bloody noses real bad and our flight training commander came out and saw me bleeding on my shirt and asked me what happened. I’m like I have bloody noses. And he thought he saw my sergeant being physical with me. I’m like, no, he wasn’t. He was just trying to get my attention. My nose just bleeds naturally. It was just one of those weird things." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Which wars did you serve in and where exactly did you go?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "Desert Shield, Desert Storm. We went to the Cotswolds, the Midlands in England, near Brize Norton. Did you ever watch _M.A.S.H._ back in the day, the TV show? So M.A.S.H. was the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals. And what they do is they would stabilize you, and then once they stabilized you, if you go back to the front, they give you a little convalescence and send you back. If it was more extensive medical needs, they would send you to Tokyo General—we essentially set up Tokyo General in England. So Wilford Hall was a 1,001-bed training facility for the Air Force. And when we mobilized, we built an 1,800-bed facility at Little Rissington and the airfield. So we were ready to go. We had the neurology, nephrology, OBGYN, and the Army setup, the burn unit and the psych wards. I went to England, I was nearby Norton for building, but the actual location where the hospital was Little Rissington Air Field or Air Base." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Was that the first time you were ever in a foreign country?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAINBRIDGE", "text": "Yeah. It wasn’t bad. I mean the crazy part is, I like beer, so we’d buy Guinness and we’d buy Bass and we’d buy all the local stuff but for like pennies on the dollar of what we were paying back in the States. But then you always had some crazy kid from like Kentucky or Tennessee and they charged him £6 and that’s like $12 bucks for a Budweiser, it’s like dude, you’re drinking the wrong stuff. I liked cheeseburgers, or I did like cheeseburgers back then. Cheeseburgers in England are way, way, way different. Like a nasty Salisbury steak on squishy bread with wilted lettuce and squishy tomatoes. It wasn’t the same thing. We got to go around a couple of the towns and villages. I mean, you know, it’s nice seeing a different culture and everything. But you’d see the vegetables out. You’d see somebody cutting meat and cutting meat on like a piece of ply board that they painted white and they cut it fresh right there and barely wiped it down so. Never bought the fresh meat. Bought the fresh beer. They had a real cool bingo game that they played, and they turned it into a beer drinking game. That was kind of fun. But when it comes to putting them back and holding them down, I’m going to say the Brits got us, on average, they got us covered. I mean we were some flyweights. They were just pounding pints left and right and left and right and left and right." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What was your job assignment?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "So the 906 Medical Admin, if you’ve ever gone to like sick call in the military and you went to outpatient records to pick up your records, I was the technician that either took your request or pulled your record. So I managed and maintained your medical record, both inpatient data, outpatient. I did Patient Squadron for about three months." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you see any combat while you were out there?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Were there a lot of casualties in your unit?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "No. None in my unit. We actually at the hospital for the whole time we were deployed received three patients, only one of them was a POW. That’s it. So that’s a good thing." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Can you tell me about a couple of your most memorable experiences?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "Memorable experiences from the military. Well, I met my wife. She’s now my ex-wife. In the military. It was a military marriage. Most people said, oh, those don’t last. We just recently divorced. Our military marriage went 26.5 years. We had two wonderful, beautiful daughters while we were in. I got my MBA while I was in. I have an MBA from Webster University. I guess the most memorable thing to me was that being in the military and being assigned to a hospital you’re not really in the military. But Air Force doctors and nurses get this thing that’s still called MMSO, Military Medical In-processing or something, they teach them how to wear their uniforms, use their name stamper plates and that’s it. The hospital people were very condescending for the most part, not that they actually did any combat. They had just come out of school and they’re paying back their tuition. And they’re just, it’s a different breed. But once you actually get into the stuff, people change. So I guess my education, my kids. Going overseas. I had to actually come back on emergency leave for my firstborn, who was born with a medical condition that required me to come back in case she passed away. And so I had to go from Little Rissington to Heathrow. I had to stop off at another Air Force base, pick up some travel orders, pick up some tickets, and all this I was trying to figure out as an E-4, by myself, from Texas, first time overseas, trying to get from Point A to Point B to Point C to get on a plane, couldn’t go through customs because I didn’t have a passport. All I had was my Red Cross ID and my military ID so you have to go in the heating/ventilation, underground pipe chambers of a major European airport to come up on the other side of customs. That was kind of weird to me. You hear about the Bobbies and they never carry weapons, but we ran into SALs, they had all kinds, AK’s and they were checking anybody and everybody that looked like they were from the Middle East. They were checking trash cans. They’d pat people down. They had dogs walking around. On any given week, Outpatient Records had 100,000, on average, outpatient records. So it’s broken up into the 10 color series. And that’s all based upon the last two of your Social. So if you told me the last two of your Social I could tell you what color your medical record was. You have like a foot of loose paperwork per week that you’d have to be responsible for putting into the appropriate file. So that’s very mind-numbing, and it can be boring, and so I just made it a game, competition. I competed with the civil servants who I hated at the time because they were making so much more money than me. On the 1st and the 15th of the month I’d get $375 as an E-3 to live on, and they got a GS-2 and a GS-3 that were just making fistfuls of money compared to me. So I’d play a game in my mind, you know, visual competition. I’ll be them and then I’d beat the other airmen so that’s like trying to set my own record. So I would sleep thinking about terminal digital orders, thinking about a color coding, thinking about sorting. I liked sorting. I’m good at the game. Actually I got three extra days of leave for my wedding. My civil servant GS-7 on this crew at the time, and I don’t think she liked me so much, but she loved my future wife. And she said if I could come in and do all this extra paperwork, she’d give me an extra three days. I didn’t realize the power of civil servants at that time. Well, the volume of paper was about six feet worth of paperwork. So I did six feet worth of paperwork sorting and filing it as well as my work within 2.5 weeks. So make it a game. The other part that was good about it was the educational opportunities. They don’t tell you about traditional systems in basic training because they’re pushing the GI Bill. But I got my master’s. I probably paid $24,000, Uncle Sam probably paid $76,000 for my master’s. So that was super beneficial. Being able to be deployed and put overseas, service to my country, that’s the good stuff. The bad stuff was people who were condescending and people who thought that they were better than everybody else." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Were you awarded any medals or citations?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "We got the National Defense Service Ribbon. We got an Outstanding Unit Ribbon. Other than that basic training, yes. Nothing that stands out. You don’t get medals for paper cuts and being an exceptional filer and technician. I got the three days of leave. I got to be an Airman of the Week, Airman of the Month, and Airman of the Quarter. I got to sit for Airman of the Year. Didn’t win it. I had those opportunities. I met some really cool people." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did you stay in touch with your family?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "So if we’re talking basic training, then it’s obviously a letter or a postcard. Technical school, you’d get a phone call in every now and then. I’d call my mom. This is way, like old school for all the millennials or people that are ever past the millennials listening to this. Way, way back in the day we had these things called landlines. And we didn’t have cellphones. And so call up your family every now and then. When I was deployed overseas, because my wife was also military, you may understand this, non-military may not, and you used the AUTOVON System. And make AUTOVON calls overseas back and forth. They come maybe once a month that you could do it because my wife was pregnant at the time, they let me do it like once every couple of days." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What was the food like?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAINBRIDGE", "text": "The food wasn’t bad. I heard we had it off better than Army and Marines and with the exception of senior NCOs; we were probably comparable to the Navy. I mean you couldn’t be a picky eater. In basic training you ate whatever you got. You didn’t waste anything. I remember putting a lot of hot sauce on the meals, like salsa, because we were in San Antonio, just to give it some flavor. That was the only thing. It was either too salty or no spice at all. At the end of, towards the end of basic training we had to do a confidence course, which was a joke in the Air Force. They give you an MRE. And an MRE, I’ve had MREs that were pre-Tabascos and then the ones that now come with like the mini-Snickers and the mini-Tabascos and all that kind of stuff. We had the pork patty—it was like a hockey puck. The best MRE was meatballs and barbecue sauce. I’m not a chicken fan so I’d always trade the Chicken ala King and that was the thing when we were deployed overseas. Our folks didn’t send us cold-weather gear, and they allowed the Ministry of Defense for England to take care of our transportation. The hospital that we set up was at Little Rissington, and they had about 800 beds in the facility, so they had most of the doctors and most of the officers there in their base housing. All the enlisted people they essentially pushed offsite into old World War II apartment complexes near Brize Norton. They had one bus to pick up about 1,000 people. And obviously not that many people could get on there, so in our complex it got to the point that we realized, hey, we’re not all getting there, so we would take our IDs and we would give our ID to somebody from our housing unit and let them show up at base that day so that they could get a hot meal and then they would collect boxes of MREs to bring back to everybody else. We just did a rotation until they figured out the transportation issue. And that took them about a week and a half before they started getting the rest of it. It cycled through. I still think it’s a full complement every day, I mean it would have had everything hit the fan. I’m sure they would have had us out there in tents or something like that. The other thing was, and I don’t know what other Air Force food really tasted like because I worked at a hospital, and they do not add any kind of spices in there because you never know when a patient’s going to come down and have an allergic reaction or something like that. So you had to doctor it—a great variety, but you had to doctor it up, whatever it was." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you feel pressure or stress?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "A little bit in basic until I figured out the mental aspect of it, the game of it all. And the only problem I had was I was quiet. Somebody told me before you go in, don’t open your mouth, don’t say anything because you never know what you’re inadvertently volunteering for. And so I took that to heart. We had a meeting in a day room, and Sergeant Scott was talking about how he’s going to go home and nail his wife tonight, and oh, by the way does anybody know how to bowl. And a bunch of people raised their hands. I know how to bowl but I’m not going to say anything. And so he goes through and we had a bunch of guys from Kentucky and Tennessee and Texas in our group, and we had a couple of guys over from Germany. And he’s like, okay, well, who’s a real good bowler? Who’s got like a handicap of like 150? Lots of hands are still up. And then he’s like how about 180? A couple of hands drop. So how about 200? Couple more hands drop. And then you’re stuck with these two guys. And they’re trying to say they carry like a 260, 265 average. Finally one of them looks at the other one and stares him down, and he’s like, ah, that’s great. You’re really good at bowling? The guy’s like, oh yeah, you know Sarge I’m really good, I’m really good at bowling. So he said, good, you get to be my latrine queen, you’re in charge of all the toilet bowls. I didn’t feel pressure about that, but after I got my sergeant out of bumping me in the nose and everything, he figured I’m not out to get him, I’m more of a mental person anyways, we had four squad leaders: two guys that were super athletic, body builder guys; and then we had two older guys and I was one of the older guys, I was 22 and then we had another guy that was like 24. And so if the sergeant had problems, the pressure that I got was like if he had problems with the people in the different flights and the different squads, he’d switch them out between squad leaders to get them fixed. And there was pressure that if you don’t fix whatever this screw-up is with this individual that you’re going to be held accountable as well. So there’s either somebody who’s exerting physical influence or somebody exerting mental influence over somebody. So there’s a little pressure there. Other than that the only other pressure was for me to better myself while I was in. And get to the point where I could start pursuing my master’s. And so just cranking out my job, being as competent as I could have been, not mess up anybody. That’s the only pressure I had." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did people entertain themselves?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "So for me, if it’s just like regular routine day it’s like work—like I said gamification, making it somewhat different for me mentally, challenging myself or not challenging myself trying to figure out how to pace myself. And make it like full bore, hardcore, 100% of the time doing actually just gliding. Lift weights, go play racquetball. Back in the dorms, booze and socializing." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Where did you travel while you were in the service?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "I went from basic in San Antonio to technical school in Wichita Falls. I had orders for Elmendorf, Alaska, the person I was going to be replacing decided to reenlist. And I was actually on Air Alaska Airlines. I had purchased the little earphones and was starting to chill, somebody came and knocked on my head and the only person that knocks on your head is your technical instructor. I’m like, I thought we got rid of one another. He’s like, yeah, well here’s the deal. Explained the situation. Like where am I going? He’s like you’re going to Happy Valley. I never knew that Lackland was called Happy Valley, so I went back down to San Antonio. Other than being deployed for Desert Shield, Desert Storm, I went from the permanent party side of the base to the training side of the base and back and forth, moving records around. That was it." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you take any photographs?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "I have some personal photographs of me in my military uniform and my wife in her military uniform, but when I was in the only thing I had, you know how you go through basic and you get your flight picture or whatever? I got the flight picture and the one that they give you, that’s like the 5 x 8 or 8 x 10 or whatever. The wife actually got a little hardbound book. She’s got lots of photos from friends that she hung out with." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember the day that your service ended?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "October 3, 1993, I was in San Antonio, out-processing. I already had my master’s by that time. I did my master’s in a one-year timeframe. So I was probably out of work maybe a total of six weeks until I found a job at the University of Texas Medical Branch down in Galveston." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Was your education supported by the GI Bill?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "At that point in time, no. I had my bachelor’s in political science and international relations that was paid for by my family prior to going in. I got in, figured out tuition assistance while I was in, where Uncle Sam pays 75% of your stuff as long as you get your skill levels passed. I had received an inheritance while I was in, and so I used part of that money to crank through my master’s and get that knocked out. So I didn’t use the GI Bill at all. I actually ended up losing it as did the wife for not using it all for 10 years." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you make any close friendships?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "I had close friends while I was in but didn’t maintain any relationships afterwards. The wife did. One of her good friends prior to going in and afterwards was an airman that became godfather to one of our daughters, but he dropped off the radar for me, but she kept in touch with him from now and then." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you join a veteran’s organization?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "No, not really. I took advantage of state benefits in the State of Texas. Through the Texas Veterans but no, no like VFW or anything like that." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What did you go on to do after the military?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "It was better. I was making about $1,100 every two weeks as a married individual. Well not every two weeks, on the 1st and the 15th and it wasn’t a ton of money. I got out and I started making $36,000 when I was working at the University of Texas Medical Branch and doing a whole lot more than just specialized niche areas like—I wasn’t doing the grunt work anymore as much as I was doing some of the management, some of the analytical type stuff. So did you ever hear of Steven Covey and _The 7 Habits of_ _Highly Effective People_ ? It’s management theory. I actually helped reengineer myself out of a job at the University of Texas. We had a staff of like 30 or 40 people, and by the time I left, we were down to 6. So I left the University of Texas Medical Branch, went and became the records manager for the Houston Airport System. I’d been looking for a job for one of my employees when I came across the job with the National Archives in 1999. John Carlin was the Archivist of the United States at that time. And he was looking to bring in new blood. He wanted people who could perform records management, essentially business consultation on behalf of the National Archives to other federal entities. You didn’t have a good records management back then, and it’s highly preferable if you have an electronic record management back then and put in a package for that and haven’t looked back since." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did your military experience influence your thinking about war or about the military in general?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "Yeah, if I ever had to do it over again I wouldn’t do anything in the medical field because in my mind, that’s really not the military. I do feel like I served and everything. I don’t know that I had any kind of great impact. It gave me great skills and opportunities to pursue education for myself on the outside but if I were to go back knowing what I know now ... I’m also a Freemason, I’ve got lots of brothers that are prior military in Masonry that didn’t do the hospital side. They were in combat operations or deployed as ground troops, frontline troops, things like that. I’d probably go back and I’d join the Navy and try and be a Navy corpsman. Either that or go and become a Marine. But sometimes they’re a little too physical. I think I have the mental aspect for it, but I don’t know. And maybe that’s why I joined the Air Force. So I have a military joke for you now that I’m thinking about it. So you’ve got the Army and you’ve got the Marines and you’ve got the Air Force all bivouacked at the same location. And the next day, they have to get from Point A to Point B. So the Army and Marines wake up early in the morning and they do this thing called PT? Yeah, yeah, PT. And then they eat chow. And then the Marines plot the most treacherous course possible. They ruck up and they head off. The Army forms up. They get their little road toads out, and they start marching down the road. And then about 9 o’clock rolls around, and the Air Force guys wake up and wondering where the hell their Blue Birds are. Do you remember Blue Birds? Blue Birds are the big blue buses. Meaning we don’t do any physical in the Air Force. We don’t march. We don’t hike. We wait to be bused." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did your experience at the hospital affect your life moving forward?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "Well, it gave me a foundation for records. Sorting and filing and maintenance, creation and maintenance, use and final disposition. I actually used to box stuff up annually, medical records, or the ones that weren’t being used and ship them off to the NARA. I thought they were a bunch of idiots because they said, yeah, they have a complete folder level inventory in Box Number 1. And Box Number 1 has to be in the bottom left hand corner of this pallet and then you build up this pallet and it has to be shrink wrapped. And then you’ve got to call somebody to—and you can’t fill in any of this or any of that with a permanent marker. Nobody ever explained the process. I was the E-Nothing. And so I wasn’t a huge fan of the NSR guys, I’d call them every now and then to get somebody’s medical record back but their processes seemed dumb. I mean how are you going to look in Box Number 1 when it’s on the bottom? And they didn’t think their process through. Then when I came to work for the National Archives I actually saw a pallet come in and I also saw a technician unload it so that Box Number 5 goes on the ground first and 4 goes on top of it, 3 goes on top of it. When they unload these from the pallets, Box Number 1 actually come out on top. Kind of makes sense. Structure, discipline, having parameters, using Air Force regs, we had file plans. All this stuff that I train folks on now, I didn’t think about it then, I was just stuck doing it. So foundationally it’s an education. I am kind of a linguist. While I didn’t get to go to the Presidio and study Mandarin or Farsi, through my MBA program I had an emphasis in computer resource and information management. And while the English language is pretty intuitive, a lot of our words have multiple meanings depending on who’s using them. So I translate records management, the IT terminology and vernacular and back. Now you say Archive to a records management person, I’d say that means it’s going to go historically some place. You say Archive to IT, that’s tape backup. Everything just kind of fit how I wanted to but it all kind of came together unintentionally. I just got lucky. Now I’ve got a daughter. She’s thinking about criminal justice, and she’d like to join the military either the Marines or maybe the Army, and I’m like you don’t do anything until you get a degree and you go officer. That way you can get out whenever you want to. Otherwise you’re stuck until the military says they want to get rid of you or until your enlistment comes up and even then they may hold you past your enlistment date. And I actually had that for my wife and I, medical admin was a retained career field. And it’s like, really? You have to retain people who push paper, yet you’re letting doctors and nurses opt out now. You’re letting them opt out, it’s just kind of a little weird. When they do their reduction in force and they want to retain certain elements, you give up your legal right, your piece of property to Uncle Sam." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Is there anything else that you wanted to add that we haven’t covered yet? Any last words you wanted to say to the public about Veterans Day or veterans in general?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BAIMBRIDGE", "text": "So veterans in general. When you look around, you don’t necessarily know who is and how isn’t a veteran. They come from all walks of life. Different age groups. Different colors. Different religions. But they actually took the time out of their lives to serve, either for you or for themselves. When they’re doing to for themselves, they’re also serving you. They gave up a portion of their lives. Some of them have given up more than just a portion of their life. They’ve given up some of their sanity. They’ve given some of their body. They’ve given some of their soul. So be thankful for those that have served. Try to not disgrace them or demean them for their actions. Some people do it because it’s a mechanism for living. Some people do it to serve. So I guess that’s about all I have to say. Other than I’m thankful for the United States military. One other thing, just kind of like a personal aside. I was an only child and joined the military, and my grandad was in the Navy. And it was kind of cool that when I joined NARA—I was actually working with the Fort Worth regional facility, and they had us work on the Record Center on their side of the house, the IRS Group and all of that. I got to pull my Selective Service Card, my biological father’s Selective Service Card, and my grandad’s Selective Service Card. And I just thought that was kind of cool. And then I remember— married into a family, my wife is like one of seven. Out of the seven, four of them were in the military, and one brother-in-law, he was an E-5 in the Air Force, he bootstrapped, went reserve, and he just retired as a colonel. Full Bird Colonel from the Reserve. I’ve got another brother-in-law that just retired as a senior chief from the Navy, the Navy Intel, and he was able to translate his job to civil servant job. The wife got out as an E-4. I got out as an E-4. Her old man, her dad, was a retired master chief from the Coast Guard so yeah. The military’s been good to us." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Thank you for your service and thank you for the interview." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Hi Mr. Beebe. Would you be able to please give me a quick introduction and announcement what service you were in and what your rank was at the time that you discharged?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "I served in the United States Navy from 1986 to 1992. I separated as electrician’s mate second class, qualified in submarines." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Where were you living at the time that you enlisted?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "I had just graduated from high school and had grown up in a small town called Mitchell, Nebraska." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Why did you decide to join?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Largely because it seemed easier than going to college at that time." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did it turn out to be as easy as expected?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Yes, I know that I just wasn’t motivated for college at the point that I got out of high school and seemed like something better to do than just sticking around in a small town. So it was worthwhile. It was a lot of work but it was worthwhile." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Why did you pick the service branch that you joined?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Largely to get out. I’d had a friend that had joined the Naval Interior Power Program, which is what I went into, a few years before and it seemed kind of interesting and submarines certainly seemed pretty interesting. So that’s primarily why I went that way." }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Did you know a lot about submarines prior to joining?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "A little, but nothing like I learned later." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What surprised you the most about submarine culture, the environment?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Probably the quality of the people there. You worked with a group. In my case it was about 125 to 130 officers and enlisted men, and across the board I’ve never worked with a higher level of ability than I did when I was on board the ship. Just from the guys that were cooking the meals to the captain. They all just were super sharp and knew what they needed to do, and we all depended on each other to come back every time." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you think being underwater had some role in that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Yeah, I mean, serving in the submarine service was unique. The one thing we learned when we got on board was a common mantra that said, anywhere you were inside the ship, you could reach out at arm’s length and you could touch something that had the potential to kill you. And that was very true, there was always at least high-voltage electricity within arm’s reach of where you were. When you were sleeping, you had high-voltage electricity running, sometimes right above your bunk. It was just everywhere. And so, with that knowledge, and then knowing that unlike a surface ship, if you had a problem you were already on the surface and you could abandon ship into lifeboats. And for us, first, we had to get to the surface for us to even contemplate something like that, and depending upon the casualty you might not make it to the surface. So everybody had to stay on that game and make sure that you recognized any potential problem that might arise no matter what you were doing." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember your first days in service?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Yeah, so I left western Nebraska. I went to basic training in Great Lakes Naval Station in North Chicago. And got there, it would have been late on January 3rd. Got a few moments of sleep and the next thing I knew I was being woke up by metal trashcan being thrown, kicked, and tossed through the room as they woke all of us up to start out our first full day of basic training." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What did it feel like to be in the service finally?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "It was interesting. Now the first week or so it all became kind of a blur as you got your haircut, got rid of all your civilian clothes, got your uniforms you were going to be wearing. And all the differences that you saw initially, when you first woke up that first morning, by the end of the first day they were pretty much all gone, as everybody then was baldheaded and wore the same clothes. And part of that, of course, is the whole idea that it starts to build that unit. Take away the individuality and start to build a unit-mindedness where you would work as a group instead of by yourself. It’s been worked on for hundreds of years now, and it works pretty well." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Was your boot camp/training experience different because you were in the Navy?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Well, I’m sure it was different than the others. Chicago has its own, being North Chicago, it’s rather cold so I know one of the things the Navy typically does is they would do a fire drill or fire where you’d go through a chamber and they would have smoke and whatnot. You’d have basically a respirator on and they would then pull that off just before you left. Because it was so cold they didn’t have us do that because our clothes would have reeked of the gas and whatnot that they had in the chamber. So I missed out on some of those things but North Chicago was an interesting place. I suppose to me it was going from being a kid in a town of about 1,800 people where everybody knew me. My dad was a grade school teacher so I mean everybody in town pretty much knew who I was. On the north side of Chicago, it was just such a different world for me. I hadn’t traveled a lot before I joined the service. I had been to Denver a couple of times and, like, to Lincoln, Nebraska, and that was about the extent of big cities to me. I had never been to anything like Chicago, so it was just such different world from what I was used to." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember your instructors?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "I remember the one that I disliked the most. Ironically his last name was Floyd. I forget what the other one’s name was. They were very good friends. The last day I remember they were rotating out of basic training after our company had graduated, and they had worked together numerous times over the years, were very good friends, and they were an interesting lot. The one was very sharp intellectually and had actually started out in a nuclear power program and then ended up not finishing it. The other one was a boson’s mate, and the boson’s mate and I did not get along. He was not my favorite, but they were there to get you through. And you might not have realized it at first, but in the end they had a lot of respect for you if you managed to make it through. And I think our respect grew for them as the weeks went by." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What were your strategies for getting through?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "I always figured I could do anything if I tried hard enough, and I managed through a variety of things. In fact, at one point I ended up with basically pneumonia and still managed to go through. I spent the better part of a week just completely miserable. I went to a sick hall at night one night, and they asked if I had thrown up and I said no. And they said well come back tomorrow morning then. The guy that had walked there with me, they asked him the same question. I knew he had, and he was like, “yeah, I threw up” and they called him back in to talk to him. But a few weeks later they did tuberculosis screening on my lungs and they said, “yeah, you need to go to sick call.” I’m like “okay.” So they sent me over and they’re like “yeah, you had pneumonia” or “you’ve got pneumonia.” And I’m like “I don’t feel bad.” I felt really horrible a couple of weeks ago. And they said, well, “yeah, you had pneumonia.” And that was some of that team-building kind of thing. I remember prior to lights out you weren’t allowed to lay down in bed. And we had a spare bunk for the backend of the barracks room. And I was so sick, and everybody knew it, even our chiefs knew it, basic training. They knew I was sick. And basically they said just put him on one of those spare bunks so his own bunk doesn’t get messed up. I wanted to sleep. Just keep somebody nearby so that if a roving person comes through, you can get him out of bed and have him stand up. It was one of those things where you just learned to cover for each other. And it was an interesting experience, having all the way up to the guys that were ostensibly getting us through, getting us through this, and you might’ve thought, oh, you’re too sick. You need to do something, and they’re like no, we’ll keep him with us. Let’s just cover for him and I did everything else I needed to do. It’s just I needed more sleep than everybody else. So they managed to get that for me. I graduated with my class that I came in with. And largely because they all pitched in to help me get through that point, because if, not I would’ve had to been rolled back, because I don’t know if they just sent me to the hospital for that, but I was quite sick at the one point." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Where exactly did you go when you finished training?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "After basic training, the nuclear power program at that point, you had three different schools that you did. First you’d get, in the Navy, you got your A school training which for me was electrician’s mate, and I stayed there in Great Lakes Naval Station for that. Then I went to Orlando, Florida, for Naval Nuclear Power School. Did about six months there, then I went to—from there you had a couple of choices—when I was in, you could go to upstate New York, where there were a couple of nuclear power plants, and then there was also some out in Idaho. I went out to Idaho Falls, where we worked on live nuclear reactors. Once you did that, then I was assigned to the USS _Omaha,_ which is a fast attack submarine stationed in Pearl Harbor. And I got there just a little under two years after I joined the service." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember arriving at all these locations and what it was like?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Some of them more than others. At Orlando, you flew into the airport there, of course which is huge vacation destination and you’re going there but you’re going off to the naval base. And that was very much a school. I mean we trained for hours in classrooms for probably six to eight hours a day plus another three to four, five hours of homework every night. Then you did that for six months, nothing overly remarkable there. Idaho was a different thing because you went out and there was no naval base there. There was a reactor out in the middle of the desert, and we all had to get apartments in one or two of the cities near the reactors. That was about a 45-minute bus ride out to the reactors. And so that was kind of different because you’d gather up with two or three guys when you were in Orlando and say “hey, let’s find a place to rent when we get out there,” and so you’d rent a house and live for about six months. Getting to the boat was a different thing, certainly the most memorable. I remember it was Thanksgiving Day of 1987 when I arrived in Hawaii and was met by a couple of crew members and taken down to the boat, shown around a little bit. So that was basically the start of all those places." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What did you like about your job or dislike about your job and assignments?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Well, the electrician on a submarine is an interesting guy. We had stuff everywhere. Like I said earlier, we had electricity that ran throughout the ship and we had the entire electrical distribution system on the ship, which was ours to maintain. We had equipment in every space on the ship that we had to go and maintain and we tended to work with everybody a little bit more. Some of the divisions would work very insular within themselves and didn’t have a lot of interaction with other ones. But even though we were primarily back in the engine room, we would go forward and work with all the other different rates up there to at least get electricity to their equipment. That was the interaction a lot of times, just getting electricity to their equipment and once it got into their equipment it was theirs. So it was nice to be able to get along with everybody. And I think probably the smallness of the submarine was kind of nice for me because getting back to a small group of people similar to my small hometown, which is somewhat common. A lot of guys in the submarines, of course, came from smaller towns." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How small exactly was the submarine environment? Was it a big submarine?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Well, that depends on what timeframe. The outside dimensions is just one of those things you remember as 360 feet, eight inches long, 33 feet in diameter. The inside of it was probably a little closer to 300 feet, jet ballast tanks forward and aft. So it was a fairly small tank that we all rode around in. And when you consider what we had, we’d go to sea and we’d have 120 or 140 guys onboard—that’s a lot of people in a pretty small space." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Tell me about a couple of your most memorable experiences." }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Sure, so one of them we were doing a set of drills, which is a pretty common thing in the Navy, practice various casualties. And we were getting nearly done with the set, and we thought we were done actually, and I was in what’s called maneuvering, which is the control room for the engine room. And we were trying to get all of our logs sorted out and taken and getting all the paperwork done for the set of drills that we had just done. And this is probably two and a half, three hours’ worth of one thing after another that they were throwing at us, reactor scram or steam line rupture, all these different things. And we were all kind of settling in and then suddenly the engineer showed up at the side of the room where I stood, which I now was standing the throttle man watch, I was in control of the speed of the ship. So the officer of the deck would order speed change, and I was the one that made the ship go faster or slower as they wanted. And we were going fairly fast, fairly shallow I want to say, 100, 150 feet. I don’t remember exactly how fast it was but it was fairly quick. And they initiated a jam rudder drill, which kind of startled us. It’s like, one, we didn’t really expect it. And then it was like jam rudder, we were used to jam dive where they would make the boat go into a dive and we’d have to stop and backup. You’d reverse the screw to slow this boat down so you wouldn’t go below test depth and then you’d come back to level surface. But the jam rudder kind of threw us. But it ends up being the same sort of drill because as fast as we were going, a submarine at high speed leans into the turn because of the sail, it sticks upright. And as it leans into that turn, the rudder, which they had stuck full to the left, all of a sudden is making the boat go down. And so we ended up through a variety of errors that are a little complex to explain, we ended up at somewhat of an uncontrolled downward event. We exceeded by a little bit I think, depending upon whose readings you had, what would be the normal maximum angle that you would do. We could do up to 30 degrees up or down and I think we went a little above that. I don’t remember for certain. And we ended up getting the boat stopped before we reached test steps, obviously. And backed up and it was one of those events that everybody onboard just kind of was like holy cow. Because the angles were so steep that we took and unexpected. There was just stuff everywhere. And the engineer, who is one of the mildest mannered people I ever knew, and he was standing next to me as I was trying to turn off all the alarms that were going off on my panel, because the angles had a number of level detectors for different water levels throughout the engine room. And they started going off, and one of the rules is you would turn them off and you would have to say what the alarm was. And I probably had half a dozen of these alarms and the engineer said, just forget the alarms, just answer this bell, which is to reverse the shaft and get us stopped. And at that point I was like, hmm, this is a little bit more than what they were expecting because the engineer wouldn’t normally interrupt and tell you not to do this particular step. So it was one of those moments. We got it stopped and went on, and it became the fairly famous story from the boat for a number of years. That was probably one of the better events. We all survived, no one hurt. Quite a bit of cleanup to do afterwards, but that happens. The land stories, we would go a number of different places. I did two west PACS, which is where you go over to the western Pacific for six months and run around, and we got to a number of different places. We stopped in Japan, Korea, South Korea, Philippines, Guam, and Okinawa. I always had a history interest. I would always try to find something when we were trying to divvy up who was going where. It was like I always gravitated towards the people going to someplace kind of historic. I’ve been to a beach where the Marines landed in Guam, and you could walk up into the hills and look down on the beach from where the Japanese had been. And just see the sheer ... what those guys would’ve been up against. We actually went snorkeling there, and you’re snorkel along and you’d be in six or eight feet of water, and then all of a sudden it would open up in kind of a dish-shaped area that would be another 10 feet deep, and you’d realize “oh, this is actually a bomb crater where something went off.” And that was one of those things that always stuck with me, was realizing that hey, we’re out here in this place where a lot of history took place. And a lot of guys weren’t so fortunate to come back from it." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How about Pearl Harbor?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Pearl Harbor, it was a fun, big place. I was obviously stationed at the submarine base, plenty of history there in its own right. To give you an idea, we did our small-arms training in an old air-raid shelter right there, probably 100 feet from the pier. We would fairly often—if any family came over, anybody new came to the boat. We’d end up taking them over to the _Arizona_ to see it. There’s this old World War II submarine there that we would take them through. It’s very interesting being in a place that’s as historic as Pearl Harbor and just being there to work. I don’t know that it dawned on me as much as it should’ve being that I left there, I was not quite 24, I guess I was a little over 24 when I left. And it’s like I don’t know that it dawned on me exactly where I was some of the days, but a lot of times I was just too tired to care. But it was a beautiful place. I mean I did enjoy my time there and tried to take advantage as much as possible. But the fours year that I was stationed on the ship we probably spent two and a half years at sea, or sometimes it would be on like, because a full year of it was on a west PAC, two six-month deployments there. And so, at best had a year and a half in Pearl Harbor out of the four years that I was stationed there. Most of that time I was still working quite a lot. I didn’t have as much time there to do what I wanted to as a tourist might think." }, { "speaker": "ERIC", "text": "Did you see any combat while you were deployed?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "No, I was in during Desert Storm. We used to kind of jokingly say how we fired I forget how many torpedoes during Desert Storm but they were all exercise torpedoes, so it didn’t really count. I know there was a Pacific Fleet submarine that ended up over in the Gulf area during that time, but basically we just weren’t in. I think we had just come back from a fairly long deployment so we weren’t in a rotation to go on anything like that, but it was interesting to watch Pearl Harbor and Oahu gear up for it because there were a number of Marine units on the island that were deployed there. And to see all of their vehicles going from the green paint to the desert brown as they got ready to ship them out and whatnot. And I had a friend from high school that was submarined, ended up going over to Desert Storm. I didn’t really know he was out there at the time because we had lost track of each other, but I learned later that he was there in one of the units that got shipped out over there." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Were there many casualties that you knew of?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "No. Now the closest I ever got to, and I’d have to think back which boat it was. When I was in Idaho, one of the guys I was in school with, his brother was on, I believe, it was the USS _Stark_ that was hit by a missile in the area between Iran and Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. And it was basically mistakenly hit by, and I don’t remember which side shot the missile, but it went in and it killed I think 27 guys, if I remember right, his brother was one of the sailors on there. And that was certainly the closest that I came, would be a guy that I knew fairly well. He was like another electrician in training, so I knew him fairly well. And that was one of those wake-up moments when you realize that it’s a little more real. His brother was the kid in the family that was sure he was going to go to college. He had joined just as a very basic thing to get a GI Bill, and now I think he had planned either a two or maybe four years and then was going to get out and go to college and ended up on, I don’t remember what the _Stark_ was, but ended up over there and ended up getting killed before he had the chance to go, which made it a little more real." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Were you awarded any medals or citations?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "A few, regular good conduct, expeditionary medal. We would do patrols to the northern Pacific once or twice a year. And occasionally, depending upon what we were doing, we’d get an expeditionary medal. There was a meritorious unit commendation, which I think that’s just a ribbon if I remember right. But I did not get anything particularly high but did my job." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did you stay in touch with your family?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Well, it was largely writing letters, occasional phone calls. When I was in Hawaii I would call somewhat often, certainly nowhere near as often as I would now. I do remember one of the times we were in the Philippines, and I wasn’t even certain if my parents knew where I was, they knew I was on the west PAC. And I happened to be there when an incident or two occurred where some servicemen were killed in the Philippines, and I ended up calling my parents. I had no idea what time it was. And just talked to them briefly and said, yeah, I was out there but nothing to worry about. And they were like, you know, we wouldn’t have known to worry anyway. Because yeah, the communication was nowhere as instant, anywhere as quick. And then when we were at sea, and I never got one, there was no communication really. You couldn’t send a message out. Some guys would get what we call family grams. Generally they were the guys that were married. Where they would leave the form with their family and they would fill out a short message, and then that message would be broadcast throughout the Navy. And I don’t remember the radio terminology well enough. But it would be sent in a regular broadcast. And then when the ship was out, when we were up and had a radio antenna up they would download all the important information and then they would start picking up the broadcast. Anything that was directed to us they would download it and then distribute that family gram out to the guys. But that was about the only communication, was maybe a once a week, married guys would get a message from a family member. And then we would download very brief news, like headlines, was all. Just maybe a sentence of two for any major story that was going on, and that was all you would get for news for the entire six to eight weeks that you were out. So you’d come back and have no idea of what had gone on really for the last six weeks. You might have the general gist of what had gone on but have no idea what was really going on in the world. So you’d have to kind of catch up and see where we were on things then." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What was the food like?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "If were in port or if we were doing weekly runs it really wasn’t too bad. I think generally we probably ate better than a lot of the guys in the service. They told us we did anyway. When we went out for a long under ways, the six to eight weeks, we had one walk-in freezer and one walk-in chill box, basically a refrigerator. But when we went on a long under way, we’d convert them both to freezers, so we didn’t take really any fresh food with us at all. And so everything was, you had powdered milk for milk, there was no real milk. Powdered eggs. So those runs, particularly breakfast, breakfast got pretty rough on those. Everything else was either frozen or canned, which wasn’t horrible, it got you by. But in port wasn’t too bad most of the time." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you feel pressure or stress?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "It’s funny, in some ways yes, I am a fairly low-stress person. I don’t get too worked up about most things. But there were times where events would start rolling around you and you could start seeing some. There was a lot of pressure some days. Like I said, I’m not a very high-stress person. I try not to let things get to me too much and never have. And so I never got too stressed out about anything going on there. A little anxious sometimes, but generally I think that was part of what they tried to get in people there was people that wouldn’t get too worked up about what was going on. Because they needed you to pay attention to what you were doing. You needed to ignore whatever it was that was going on right next to you, and you needed to do what you were assigned to do. And if you didn’t, and if everybody didn’t do that, then you stood the chance of having a small casualty become a much larger one. You kind of learned to compartmentalize and ignore whatever was going on with the next guy needed to do." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did people entertain themselves?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Under way we had a TV, actually it was a Betamax player. They did that because that way we would get new release movies fairly shortly after they were out. But they would release them to us on Betamax because they knew that there were so few of those around that the chances of theft were much less that that movie would get out because there just weren’t any Betamax machines around for the most part. And so we would have, and I forget, I think we had probably three or four hundred movies onboard. So they’d watch a movie usually in the 18 to 2400 hours, and then the 24 to 0600 hours there’d usually be a movie run during both of those times when we were at sea. I usually brought copious amounts of books and sat and read quite a lot. At that point I was reading a lot of Presidential histories and biographies, autobiographies, memoirs. Like I say, history was just one of my things. I did a lot of reading of different history books." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you recall any particular humorous or unusual event that happened?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Well, you know, submarine humor was always kind of an odd thing. Let me go at it this way. We had been at sea for a while, and I would, typically under way we would just wear tennis shoes because they were quieter and more comfortable, uniforms kind of went out the window as far as that. And typically in your bunk you’d just toss your shoes at the end of your bed and go to sleep. So I kept getting up and my shoes wouldn’t be there. I’m like what the heck? And I’d run into the bathroom, take care of things, come back and my shoes would be back. And this went on for like a week while we were under way. I’m like, I don’t know what’s going on. And finally one time when I come back and my shoes aren’t there. I’m like, wait a second. So then I have to dig out my regular Navy boon dockers that I would wear when we were in port. Wear those back on the watch and I get back there and in the maneuvering room, which there were four of us in that room, the guys set next to me, they were actor/operators just start to chuckle. They were like what’s up with the shoes? And I’m like, somebody’s messing with me and stealing my shoes. I don’t know why. And he’s like, well, that’ll teach you to mess with my shoes. And I’m like, what? And it turns out that some number of weeks before when he was doing, I think he was waxing some floors, which we did by hand with sponges and what not, but he had taken his shoes off and set them somewhere and somebody to mess with him had hidden his shoes and then they blamed it on me. And so for like a week and a half he was like torturing me hiding my shoes and what not. And then finally it comes out I’m like, I didn’t even do that. You learn to take a good joke because that was one of the worst things was to let people realize that something bothered you, because that was like carte blanche for people to keep doing it to you." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "When did you decide to leave the service?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Oh, probably not too long after I got to the boat. It was interesting, but the work was a lot more than I care to do in a lot of ways. I was working, if we were in port, we would work 70 to 80 hours a week minimum. At sea we stood watch, we did six hours on, 12 hours off so we were actually on a weird 18 hour cycle instead of 24 hour cycle. So it’s like I can’t do this another 14, from the time I got on it would’ve been like 18 years. I would’ve had some shore duty if I had stayed in. But it’s like nah, I don’t have desire to keep doing this that long. And I always had some idea of doing some. It was in that group timeframe where it’s like oh, you kind of need to go to college. So I opted to get out shortly, but I had six years to do. So it was shortly after I got to the ship. So about a couple of years after I was in and I decided that it wasn’t for me." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember the day that your service ended?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "So I left Hawaii actually on December 13. I didn’t separate until January 2 of 1992. I left in December of 1991. Yeah, it was kind of a fun day. I mean I had done all my paperwork to leave the island and basically go on what’s called terminal leave where you spent the last, my last 21 days of leave and then I just never had to check in again. And had done all that and sat around with the guys that were, the engineering department at that point was actually on shift work for a major evolution that was going on the ship. And so I was sitting around with the day crew or the crew that would have been on at night, and we were just sitting around shooting the breeze, having a good time for a few hours. I think my flight was probably like 4:00 or 5:00 out of the Honolulu International. And so one or two of the guys who had taken me down there to get me off. So it was just kind of nice chance to sit around and shoot the breeze with half the crew or so, or half the engineering crew anyway." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you go back to school when you got out?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Yes, I did, like a year and a half at a small state school in eastern Nebraska called Peru State College. And then I transferred to the University of Kansas probably as much to get married as for the education, and finished my bachelor’s and then also got a master’s in historical administration and museum studies from University of Kansas." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Was it difficult to make that transition from submarine electrician to historical museum?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "No, I mean it was a slow transition in some ways. I spent time at a couple of different historical places before I ended up at National Archives working in the Federal Records Center and stayed there for, well, I worked here at the FRC for like 11 years before I transferred to Research Services and still continue to work here with the archival records." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Was your education supported by the GI Bill or was that before that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Yeah, it was supported by it. Yep, they helped out." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you make any close friendships while you were in the service? And do you continue any of those friendships today or the relationships today?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Yeah, there’s two or three in particular. Actually, one of the officer that I served with is still a really good friend. He runs a business out in San Francisco Bay Area. Then an electrician that I spent pretty much the entire four years that I was onboard the ship, we arrived the same day, and he left a month before I did. And he’s down in the Tampa Bay area, and I still chat with those two in particular fairly often. And then there’s a group for the boat on Facebook that I chat with on occasion." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Have you ever tried accessing your military records?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "No, I haven’t. I’ve thought about it but I don’t really have any particular need to get to them. Yeah, I have helped a person or two here in Lenexa that was needing some help from the people in St. Louis, and I’ve helped them get some access to their records, but I haven’t needed to for myself." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you join a veteran’s organization?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "No, I never did." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What did you do after the service?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "After I got my degree, I worked at an association for golf course superintendents as their archivist and records manager. I did that for a couple of years. I worked at a science museum for a few years. Then I worked at a historical farm at a stagecoach stop, and I actually drove a stagecoach for like two and a half years. And then I got the job with the Federal Records Center and then into the archives side of it here, a couple of years ago now." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "So from a golf course to the science museum to the historical farm to a stagecoach, what was your favorite pre-NARA job?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Oh, I would have to say it was work with horses, driving a stagecoach. I mean it was a lot of fun. I have a thing with animals. I work well with animals. For the most part we got along pretty well." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you learn how to play golf too?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Not particularly, I know how to play but I’m not any good, and I usually drive the other people around me crazy if I’m golfing because I don’t take it serious enough. So never really did but it was an interesting place because it was basically for the groundskeepers for the golf course is what the association was. And so, we had some old grounds-keeping equipment that came from Saint Andrews in Scotland and whatnot, and I would get to play and tinker with those things. I did both their archives and their museum equipment, so that was kind of fun." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did your service and experiences affect your life overall?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Well, one, probably the biggest single way is it put things in a different perspective than I think a lot of people have. A lot of people view whatever they’re doing as a job is just this incredibly important thing and they focus on it like it’s the really big thing. And while it is very important and I love what I’m doing here, in the end it’s nothing like the responsibility of sitting down at like 20 years old and being the senior watch stander over about a billion-dollar nuclear reactor. There’s something important here, there’s two of you back there, and you’re the senior one at 20 years old. It’s hard to put that kind of responsibility into play. You just don’t run into that level of responsibility in most places. And so it’s kind of tempered that while what I do is important, it’s not going to cause a major catastrophe if something doesn’t get done today. The world won’t end. Things will come back tomorrow just fine, and we can pick it up then. I don’t know. Some people may not appreciate that as being a good thing, but to me it’s like nah, tomorrow things can happen if they need to. It can wait another day if it needs to." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What’s a nuclear reactor look like?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Well, I mean, ours was a fairly compact thing. The room itself that it was set in, I probably in the four years I was there, I probably went into the reactor room 15, 20 times total. When it was operating you couldn’t go in it, or you wouldn’t probably come back out shortly thereafter. It was very high radiation level. You don’t really see that much. If you’re familiar with hot steam piping, it’s all covered in insulation, and that’s what this was. Everything was covered in insulation for the most part, painted different colors, depending upon what it was. It’s not an easy thing to describe unless you’ve been in a power plant of some sort, and then it would be sort of the same thing except for its all compact and smushed into a 33-foot diameter tube. So you end up with some strange positions for things and how you get to it. But yeah, it’s not a super easy thing to describe. When you think about a civilian power plant it’s essentially got all the space that they want. They can spread this thing out. And so, everything’s going to be laid out in a logical area. For us, everything had to be, all of that had to be massaged around and put into a 33-foot diameter tube, and you had to have director system in one room, bring steam out of that into the engine room. You had four turbines that ran off of it: two for main engines and two that turned generators to make the electricity for the ship. You would create your own water from the sea water by boiling it. It’s a marvelous piece of machinery, a submarine is. I mean it’s amazing that it can do as much. Because then from that pure water we could shift forward to another machine that would separate the hydrogen oxygen bond, and we keep the oxygen for our use to breathe. Then we would pump the hydrogen back overboard so you wouldn’t have that explosive gas onboard. So I mean the only thing that limited us was food primarily. I mean we could make our own water. We could do all this stuff but basically we were the limiting factor on it. If we weren’t there, the thing could’ve just kept going." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "That is very cool that you can make your own water." }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "Yep. Yeah, and we could make a lot of it. It wasn’t like the old World War II boats, where the guys they would take salt water showers because they couldn’t make enough pure water. We could make thousands of gallons of water a day, which was more than enough for the ship to use and for us to use too." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Thank you for your service and thank you for the interview." }, { "speaker": "MR. BEEBE", "text": "No problem." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. ERIK MOSHE", "text": "Where were you living when you enlisted?" }, { "speaker": "MS. DEANNA BELAMY", "text": "I was living in New Orleans, Louisiana." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Why did you decide to join?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "There was a horrible hurricane in the Honduras and I saw what the Louisiana National Guard was doing for not only their community but for other countries, so I wanted to be a part of that." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Why did you pick the service branch that you joined?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "So my dad told me I wouldn’t make in the Army ‘cause I’m too girly. So I joined the Army National Guard [Laughing]." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "[Laughing]. Do you remember your first days of service?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What did it feel like?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "Actually, I was a little disappointed because I expected it to be like how it is on TV where people are doing push-ups in the mud and all that kind of stuff, and it really isn’t that. I mean, they were mean to us, but it wasn’t like on television. I met a lot of people. I saw people that I knew from college and different areas. And immediately they picked up on my New Orleans accent, and they made me a little target. [Laughing]. And I smile a lot, so smiling a lot and being from New Orleans kind of made me a little easy target. [chuckling]" }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember your instructors?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "Yes. My drill sergeant’s name was Drill Sergeant Assad." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What was he like? If you remember." }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "He was hardcore. He did not play. He had very large eyes and he used them. And one day we were doing a weapons check, and I was not good at weapons checks because I was actually afraid of weapons prior to joining the military. And when he would sit in front of me to do my weapons check, of course, I didn’t do it right. And he looked at me in the eyes, and he poked me with his hat in my forehead, and he told me I’m going to step to the side and I’m going to let this person do weapons check. And he goes—and then I’m going to step back in front of you and you’d better have it right or I’m going to break you in half. So when he came back I had it right [Laughing]. And I had it right perfectly, you know, like I was born to do this." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did you get through boot camp?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "How I got through it was my parents threw this huge party when I was leaving to go to basic training, and the whole family, the neighborhood, everybody came out. So there was absolutely no way I could let them down [Laughing]. There were days I wanted to quit, but I was like, how am I going to—my mom, she has the whole neighborhood knowing that her daughter joined—as she’d say, Uncle Sam. Yeah, I’m Uncle Sam’s daughter now. So I couldn’t disappoint her." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What wars did you serve in?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "I served in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. I was a Supervisory Casualty Liaison at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember arriving and what it was like there?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "Yes. [Laughing]. When I arrived I was so happy to be there, kind of like Eddie Murphy in _Coming to America,_ I was so happy to be there, right? And when I got off the plane, we had on our flak jackets and our weapons and our Kevlars and it was extremely hot, and it was the brightest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s very, very bright. Like the sun shines off the cement and the sand, and so it’s very bright. And I looked up, and I saw snipers on the rooftop. And that’s when I realized this is real. [Laughing]. And then I kind of calmed down." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What was your job/assignment?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "My job in the military was a human resources specialist. I was like a personnel sergeant. But in my deployment, I was a supervisory casualty liaison. Basically, they gave me a regulation. I came up with an SOP, training materials, and I trained my team on how to do casualty reporting. Whenever someone wrote a report, anybody got hurt, it was my job to review the reports, before going on. And I also gave reports that needed to go out." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Were there many casualties in your unit?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "No, not in my unit, but unfortunately I did see a lot of casualties working in the hospital." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Was that hard to deal with?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "It was because I’m a feeler, you know? I always think about whoa, these people’s family member, they have no idea what’s coming, you know? I would take special care in writing the report. I would speak to the doctors, speak to the military police and even some of the coalition soldiers to make sure I got as much information as possible to not just explain the medical details of what had happened and the actual incident but also to highlight any heroic or positive things that that individual did." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Can you tell me about a couple of your most memorable experiences out there?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "So what happened was we had some insurgents who came on the base. First they blew up our communications, and then some insurgents came on the base. And when that happened, we lost communications for over three weeks. Depending on the buildings people went in, they were able to get internet access or phone access, but I didn’t have access for three weeks. One day I went to work and my phone rang. And I said, oh my God, the phone’s ringing. And they were like, “oh yeah, Belamy, the phones came back on this morning.’ And I was like, “oh my God, great.’ So I’m going to call my husband. My husband’s a Marine. And so I called him, now my ex-husband, but at the time my husband. I called him and I was like “hey,” and he’s like, “hey are you okay? I saw everything that happened on the news. And it looks pretty bad.” And I said, “no, I’m fine.“ He’s like, “but they had insurgents.’ “Oh, I don’t know anything about any insurgents, I’m good, right?“ ‘Cause I didn’t want him to worry. So he’s talking, and there was a whole bunch of commotion coming down the hallway, and when I looked to the left it was Rob Schneider, an actor and a comedian. And when I looked, I said “oh my God.’ And I hung up the phone on my husband. And I’m 5’8”, okay, and Rob’s 5’5”. And so I jump up, and I start running down the hallway to catch up with him. And the MPs turn around and they’re like, “hey, hey, hey, hey,” and they’re like, “no, no, she works here.’ And I’m saying, “hey, you are my favorite actor” and he goes, “ah, no I’m not.’ And I said, “no, you are. I love you.” He goes — “yeah, right, what movie you seen?“ I said, “all of them.“ He goes, “what’s your favorite?“ I said my favorite is _Deuce Bigalow,_ and he goes, “really?“ And I said yeah. He goes, “well, what’s your favorite scene?“ And I said “well, it’s not in _Deuce Bigalow_ , it’s in another movie. I can’t think of the name of it, but it’s when you’re with this girl and the girl woke up one day and she was you.“ And he’s like “okay.” I said “you’re talking to your friend, and you tell your friend, ‘you know I’m not pretty anymore, look at me,’ and she’s ‘oh, no, you’re fine.’ And she was, ‘are you sure?’ And she goes, ‘am I still pretty?’ And she goes, ‘yeah.’ And she goes, ‘on the inside.’” [Laughing]. So everybody, even patients bust out laughing. He’s like in tears. And so he goes, “oh my God, I’ve got to take a picture with her. He goes, “but only if you make that face.” I said “I’ll make the face if you quote it ‘on the inside with me.’” So I have a picture with him with him and I going, “on the inside,” you know? So that’s one of the most memorable times." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you get any medals or citations?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "Yes. I got what they call ARCOMs, Army Commendation Medals. I received four of them. I got an Army Achievement Medal. I got the National Defense Service Medal." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did you stay in touch with your family?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "I was very fortunate because I worked at the hospital. I had a phone at my desk because of the nature of my job. So I would try to call my family at least once a week to let them know I was okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you feel pressure or stress?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "Oh, most definitely. First, I was in a combat zone. Second, seeing the people come in the hospital made me realize how serious the situation was. Third, I’m a huge family-oriented person, so although I volunteered to go to Iraq, I still missed my family, and I worried about them because my dad was fighting cancer." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Was there something special that you did for good luck?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "So I believe in God, and I had called my mom and I told her this is pretty heavy. She sent me three crosses, and one was just a wooden cross, one was a cross made out of palm leaves, and the other one she got it from a Catholic church, a rosary. I hung the rosary in my tent and prayed over my tent, and I carried the wooden one in my front pocket, and the palm was over my bed. And I just believed we’d be okay. And thank God we were. We had no casualties." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did people entertain themselves out there?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "We played cards and we played dominos. I didn’t know how to play dominos until I got deployed [Laughing]. But I am an awesome Spades player based off of my deployment. [Laughing]." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Where did you travel while in the service?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "Most of it was stateside. I was a Fort Jackson in South Carolina. I went to Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. I was at Fort Polk in Louisiana. I was at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. I wasn’t stationed but I always traveled to Aberdeen Proving Ground, which is why I live here now because that’s how I was introduced to Maryland, and I just thought it was beautiful. I’ve been some other places, like Rock Island in Illinois. Mostly stateside." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you recall any other humorous or unusual event that happened?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "Yes. [Laughing]. I’ll tell you this one. So my first military duty day, they had me stuffing envelopes in a general’s office, and they said the general was out that day, he wasn’t there. “But Deanna, if you can go over and help them stuff envelopes because he just became a general, and we’re going to have this huge party or whatever and we need to stuff envelopes.” And I’m like okay. So I go and stuff envelopes, and this guy walks in with golf clubs. And so I’m like, “hey Sir, how you doing?” And he’s like “hey, I’ve never seen you before.” And I said, “I’ve never seen you before either.” And everybody starts laughing [Laughing]. And it’s like he goes, “well, I’m Ben.’ And I said, “nice to meet you, Mr. Ben,” you know because I don’t know this man to call him Ben. And I said “I’m Deanna.” He goes, “oh, nice to meet you, Deanna.“ So we talked and we talked and we talked. And I mean he made me laugh, I made him laugh. So he goes, “well, Deanna if you ever need a job, you let me know. Here’s my card, let me know and we’ll try to get you—we’ll try to see the type of training you need to get,” you know, as a soldier or whatever and this, that, and the other. “And I’ll do everything I can to help you.” And I said, “well thank you very much, I really appreciate that.” I said “but I’m in college right now, but I appreciate that.” So I looked at his card and he was the three-star general over the Louisiana Army National Guard. [Laughing] On my first day at work. I was like, oh my God, so I like busted my knee trying to jump up and stand at attention but I had on civvies, I had civilian clothes on because they didn’t have my uniform yet. And he goes, “no, no, no, I’m not in uniform, you’re not in uniform.” And I was like “still you’re like over everything, you know?“ [Laughing] It’s like—he laughed. And so I said, “well, thank you, you know thank you so much for talking to me.” And ever since then he was always nice to me, even when he came to visit us when I was deployed in Kuwait, he saw me and he goes Deanna, and I said, “hey sir.” He goes,” I want to hug you but, you know all these people are around.” [Laughing]. The New Orleans culture and being in the National Guard, we’re more laid back. It’s really like a family unit." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What are some pranks that you or others would pull?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "I had this E-8 who took vitamins all the time. And he was kind of, I don’t know, he has to be taking Red Bull before we knew what Red Bull was ‘cause he was really hyper. So we, well not me, but some people [Laughing] because I was too scared, they switched out his vitamins for something else. It was a different kind of vitamins and whatever. And so the whole weekend, 3 days, he was taking a different kind of vitamin which really was just like Vitamin C or something, it was something weird. It wasn’t what he thought he was supposed to be taking. And so he kept saying, “I feel different. I feel like my vitamins ain’t working right,” [Laughing]. So the whole weekend we never told him. Because he would have killed us. But we all laughed the whole weekend, the whole PAC was in tears because he really felt the effect of us switching up those vitamins [Laughing]. He was too hyped, he used to run 10 miles and the sing cadence whole time way loud by himself. [Laughing]." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember the day when your service ended?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "Yes, I do. I had left a doctor’s appointment because unfortunately I had some injuries from being deployed. When I left I said, “well, let me go to this ID place and see if they can give me a new ID because this other one’s about to expire.’ So when I went to go get my ID, the lady told me she couldn’t give me a new ID. And I was like, “well, I don’t understand. Why not?” And this is Randolph Air Force Base. I’m about to retire, but they’re still doing the paperwork. She goes, “actually your retirement was effective last, I think it was like Thursday” or something, and I was like what? And I say it like the Minion, “What?” You know? [Laughing]. And people started looking. I was like, “oh my bad, hold on, hold on.” I really was retired already? And she goes like “you are retired.” And I said “oh my God.” She said “do you want to get your ID?” I said “the blue one?” She goes, “the blue one.” They took my picture, and if you ever saw my retirement ID you’d fall out laughing ‘cause it’s real cheesy, like you could see all 32 of my teeth. You know because I was so excited. [Laughing]." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you work or go back to school after?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "Oh, most definitely. I became an intern, human resource civilian intern for the Department of Defense." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Was your education supported by the GI Bill?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "Yes. And actually I didn’t use my GI Bill a lot, so I have some years left of it. So I’m going to go ahead and apply to go to Howard University now that I live here." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you make any close friendships while you were in?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "Yes, most of my friends, I went to a class about networking, and I’m working on meeting people who are not military or government affiliated because all of my friends are military and government affiliated." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Have you ever tried to access your military records at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "No, because I already have all my records. I was a personnel sergeant, so I already had my records. My records were on the wall in the office I worked in. So I always had a copy of my records." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you join a veteran’s organization?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "I did not but I have had a few people reach out to me to join, and I have the application recently for the VFW, the DAVs, and the American Legion. I’m going to put in for all of those because now I actually like where I’m at, so I don’t plan on relocating." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What did you go on to do as a career after the war? I know you stayed in HR, you said." }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "Yes, I stayed in HR; really, it was more personal. I was able to nurture my personal relationships with my friends, my family, my nieces, and my nephews. I met an awesome guy. I’m engaged. We’re getting married next year. So things I didn’t have time to do when I was in the military. I also do a lot of community service with my church." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did your military experience influence your thinking about war or about the military in general?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "Most definitely." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did your service and your experiences affect your life?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "I think I’m very happy-go-lucky now because I realize how short life is. I think my parents did a good job of raising me to be respectful and loyal and to be a hard worker, but the military just magnified that. I believe in cohesion, looking out for one another; when I see somebody’s a backstabber, I don’t like that, because it doesn’t make anybody look good including the snitch, you know what I mean? Pull together and make one another stronger." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Is there anything else you would like to add that we haven’t covered?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BELAMY", "text": "I love my country. I love being able to serve it in a civilian capacity. And I think NARA is pretty awesome. I met a lot of great people." } ]

[ { "speaker": "Segment 1", "text": "Jogging Memory** :" }, { "speaker": "MR. ERIK MOSHE", "text": "Where were you living at the time you enlisted?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KIM CORYAT", "text": "Oneonta, New York, 1974." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Why did you decide to join?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Small town, dropped out in my senior year of HS so I wasn’t going to college, needed a way out of there. I took the ASVAB and scored high enough that I had my pick of jobs and didn’t even need a high school diploma. This was the first time I did well on any test, and I felt like I might actually be smart." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Why did you pick the service branch you joined?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "My mother served in the USAF when it was first opened for women during the Korean War. Seemed like a logical choice." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you recall your first days in service? Absolutely, basic training was insane. So much confusion, people yelling at me, trying to understand what was going on, etc." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What did it feel like? The first couple of weeks (it was 6 weeks long) were surreal. I was really scared most of the time." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Tell me about your boot camp/training experience(s)." }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "I remember this was the first time I ever was made to eat breakfast in my life. Also, the regimented meal procedure, everyone stays standing at the table until all four seats are taken and then they sit down at the same time. You had to eat what you took. I had a cough throughout the time I was in Basic, and sleeping in an open-bay barracks with like 50 other women meant that people would yell at me every night when I would start coughing. We were given periodic smoke breaks and allowed to fall out of formation if we smoked. Some people actually started smoking so they could fall out when we did. I found out I could fall asleep standing up." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember your instructors?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Yes. I don’t remember their names (I think I blocked them out) but there was one tall blond woman and a short black one. The blond found out she was expecting in the middle of our training, and she was nice after that. I was most afraid of the black lady. They weren’t allowed to swear at us but she invented words that took the place of conventional swearing. She would get right in my face and yell." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did you get through it?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "I think most of us had it figured out by week 4. We found ways around some of the strictest rules, made good friends who helped. I even joined the church choir so I could get some free time on Saturdays." }, { "speaker": "Segment 2", "text": "Experiences:**" }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Which war did you serve in?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "I entered service in 74, so I was a Vietnam-era vet but never had to go there. I went to the Persian Gulf, Desert Shield in December 1990, which became Desert Storm in January 1991." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Where exactly did you go?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "My first posting was with the 1st Desert Airlift Wing (1st DAWG) at Al Ain Airbase in the United Arab Emirates. I spent four months there and then two months in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at USAF headquarters." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember arriving and what it was like?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "It took us three and a half days to get there from Kirtland AFB in New Mexico. Commercial plane, then C-5 military airlift from Dover, Delaware, to Frankfurt, Germany, then another C-5 to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The final leg was by C-130 to the UAE. We had anywhere from 6 hours to a full day at each stop. Only one of those nights (the first one in Dover) did we get an actual bed; the rest of the time we were sleeping on floors or in chairs. By the time we got to Al Ain, I was so exhausted I was hallucinating. We were in processed and shown to our tents, where we collapsed." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What was your job/assignment?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "At the 1st DAWG I was in charge of the wing commander’s office. I worked for him and the squadron commanders in the Headquarters tent. Basically their secretary. When I moved to Riyadh I was NCOIC (noncommissioned officer in charge) of the Air Post Office." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you see combat?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Nope." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Were there many casualties in your unit?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "My unit flew the C-130s that transported personnel and material all over the AOR (Area of Responsibility), which meant they went as far north as Kuwait and as far south as Yemen. Some of our crews were shot at, but we didn’t lose any aircraft or personnel. My old unit, the 16th SOS, which was a special ops AC130H squadron out of Hurlburt Field, Florida, suffered a terrible loss in the waning moments of the air war when call sign Spirit 03 was shot down. I knew every person on that plane. I lost 14 friends on January 31." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Tell me about a couple of your most memorable experiences." }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Waking up before dawn on January 17 to the sound of my commander reading President Bush’s war declaration over the base intercom and knowing that we could never go back to the way we were before." }, { "speaker": "MR. ERIK MOSHE", "text": "Were you awarded any medals or citations?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Sure, all of them that everyone got. National Defense Medal, SW Asia Service Medal, Kuwait Liberation Medal. Because I was the admin person, I also prepared decoration packages for our personnel, about a thousand of them. Mostly Air Medals and Air Force Commendation Medals, and for the higher ranking folks, Meritorious Service Medals. Prepared and submitted the Outstanding Unit Award that everyone at Al Ain received. I was told that my gaining unit after I left theater would take care of my wartime service medal. Never happened. Still kind of annoyed at that." }, { "speaker": "Segment 3", "text": "Life**" }, { "speaker": "Wartime", "text": "*" }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did you stay in touch with your family?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "I wrote letters and received them." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What was the food like?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Our chow hall wasn’t bad, the food service was contracted out to a local company. I was leery of the meat they served, you really didn’t know what it was. I don’t remember much about eating there. One thing that does stand out in my mind is everything we ate with and off of was plastic and Styrofoam, which went into the local landfill. I’m still haunted by the thought of all that forever garbage in the middle of the desert." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you have plenty of supplies?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Al Ain AB was run by the active duty military but was mostly staffed by the Air National Guard. Thanks to them we had it better off than most. My tentmates were all from the TX ANG out of Dallas, and they were able to get coolers, actual beds, and plenty of lumber to build a screen porch on the front of our tent. At work I was expecting an IBM Selectric but had a real computer, thanks to the Japanese. I used a mouse for the very first time in that Headquarters tent." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you feel pressure or stress?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Of course. The job wasn’t that bad, I spent most of my career dealing with demanding officers so they didn’t bother me much. Sexual harassment was incredibly rampant and borderline frightening. There were 5000 people on Al Ain and only 50 of us were women. While that may sound like fun and great odds you pretty much needed a bodyguard everywhere you went. Put men under stress of possibly dying and only a few women to talk to and things can get scary really fast." }, { "speaker": "MR. ERIK MOSHE", "text": "Was there something special you did for \"good luck\"?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Nope." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did people entertain themselves?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "We were allowed to RON (remain overnight) in the local city, which had some very nice hotels catering to Westerners. Right before the war started, they opened up an R&R (rest and relaxation) site in Bahrain on a cruise ship anchored in the harbor. You had to travel with your chem gear though, as Bahrain was within SCUD range while we are outside of range at Al Ain. We didn’t really start sending people until after the war was done. Mostly we hoarded our two rationed beers a day until we could get enough to get drunk (6 pack)." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Were there entertainers?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Not where we were." }, { "speaker": "Non wartime", "text": "*" }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Where did you travel while in the service?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "I was stationed (in order) at Hurlburt Field, Florida; 3-year break in service; Hurlburt Field, Florida; Spangdahlem AB, Germany; Kirtland AFB, New Mexico; 6 months at the Persian Gulf War; Kirtland AFB; NAS Keflavik, Iceland; and Ramstein AB, Germany. I retired in 1994 as an E-7 with 16 years in service." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you recall any particularly humorous or unusual event?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "When I was in the NCO Academy (a 6-week in-residence course an NCO has to complete to be able to be promoted to E-7), I was a squad leader by virtue of my line-number for promotion to E-7. My squad had a “friendly” rivalry with F squad, and we were always pranking each other, trying to get an edge. The squads had reveille and retreat duty, raising the flag in the morning and lowering it at night, on a revolving schedule so you always knew who was responsible on what day. The rival squad was on the reveille schedule for a Tuesday morning and I came up with a plan to really embarrass them once and for all, and my squad was all in. We purchased a large women’s support undergarment at the BX, wrote “F Squad Sucks” on it in big letters, and in the middle of the night on Monday we ran it up the main flagpole. At dawn we were up watching and waiting for the reveille ceremony to get our laugh. Imagine the horror when we saw approaching the flagpole not F Squad but a formation of Junior Civil Air Patrol kids (10 years old) who were in an encampment nearby and had requested the honor of posting the flag that morning. And it was even worse when I saw the base commander was in attendance to support the CAP. I can still see the puzzled looks on the kids’ faces when they lowered the lanyard to find our surprise package and the thundercloud on the colonel’s when he realized that the Academy students were responsible. I carefully dressed, making sure everything was perfect on my uniform, and went straight to the Superintendent’s office to confess to the prank so no one else would get in trouble for it. One of the main lessons of the Academy was that good leaders take responsibility for their actions. It’s the only reason I wasn’t expelled from the school. While stationed in Germany in 1993 I took a 10-day solo dream vacation to the Greek island of Iraklion. I was lucky enough to know someone who had a brother living in the little coastal town I had chosen for a destination, and he agreed to let me sleep on his couch. For several days it was the best vacation I’d ever been on, perfect weather, beaches and ancient ruins, bars and restaurants that were open virtually all night. On the evening of the fourth day, my host had the night off from his job so he took me to a little restaurant for dinner. I vividly remember having veal piccata and a salad, everything was delicious. We partied very late and I woke up sick a few hours after getting back to his place. At first I thought it was all the booze but no. I will spare you the gory details but suffice it to say that if there had been a hospital in that town I should have been admitted. This violent illness continued for the rest of the time I was in Iraklion, my poor host came home from work every day worried that the American would be dead on his couch when he opened the door. I don’t remember much from the start of my illness to when my host called a cab to take me to the airport, it’s pretty much a pain-laden and sleep-deprived blur. By that time I was finally able to stand and walk and get out of sight of a bathroom for 20 minutes. Long story short (I know, too late), the hospital back in Germany said I had one of the worst cases of E. coli they had ever seen. It took me several months to completely recover from it. The worst part? Six weeks after I got back I had to go TDY with a base closure team to—you guessed it—Iraklion AB. I did not touch a morsel of solid food for the three days we were there. The likely culprit, the doctor told me, was the salad which was probably washed in local water but I can tell you to this day I have never eaten veal again or any kind of piccata sauce. But I can brag that I went to the Greek isles and only spent $49 in 10 days." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What were some of the pranks that you or others would pull?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "I was a squad leader in my NCO Academy class—we were feuding with another squad and conspired to embarrass them by running a piece of female underwear up the flagpole for them to find when they did reveille (our squads took turns raising and lowering the flag). We wrote the squad name and some other stuff on the underwear and ran it up the flagpole, then got up early the next morning to watch what happened. Unfortunately, the Junior ROTC was tasked with doing reveille that morning, not the rival squad. We were helpless to watch in horror as these 10 year olds and their captain realized the halyard was at the top of the pole, lowered it to find the underwear. I went to the commander’s office later that morning and took responsibility for the prank so no one else would be punished. Needless to say I didn’t earn honors from the school, even though my grades were among the highest in the class." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you have photographs?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Yes. And video." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Who are the people in the photographs?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "We won’t go into that." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What did you think of officers or fellow soldiers?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Some were stand-up folks. Many tormented me. I entered the Air Force as a carpenter just as many new career fields were opening to women. I did well in tech school and was subsequently assigned to Red Horse at Hurlburt Field in Florida. This unit is a mobile heavy construction squadron, think SeaBees but Air Force. They build bare base runways and put up hangars. It had NO WOMEN assigned and had NEVER had any women. They didn’t even have a women’s bathroom in their compound. They did NOT welcome me. I was 19 years old, and all I wanted to do at that point was to get along and do my job, I wasn’t a feminist or a crusader. I spent 18 harrowing months suffering the worst sexual harassment on the job that you can imagine from everyone, from the highest to the lowest. I finally snapped one day and tried to kill one of my worst tormentors with a hammer (I have no memory of this). I was quietly transferred from the career field and moved to the orderly room. I pretty much spent the rest of my career in administration. The 70s were the “bad old days” when it came to women’s rights. The Air Force turned me into a feminist." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you keep a personal diary?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "I did while I was in the Persian Gulf. No, you can’t see it." }, { "speaker": "Segment 4", "text": "After Service:**" }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you recall the day your service ended? Where were you?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "I do. I left Germany on terminal leave and went to Albuquerque to make the decision where I would retire. I stayed with a military friend who was pregnant at the time (the “baby” graduated college this past spring), went to bartender’s school, and decided to move back to Vermont (we’d lived there when I was a teenager and one of my brothers was currently living in the state). My last day was just an out-processing appointment on Kirtland, and then I was free to go." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you work or go back to school?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Both. I bartended for several years after getting to Vermont. I settled in Bennington. I had an associate in personnel/administration from the Community College of the Air Force, so in 1995 I applied for admission to Southern Vermont College. Completed my bachelors in Liberal Arts in 1997, graduating summa cum laude and third in my class. Went on to graduate school for U.S. history at the University of Vermont in Burlington. I didn’t graduate, I was ABT (all but thesis) and had a dispute about my thesis with my adviser and left school in 2000. Really hate that the degree was never finished." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Was your education supported by the G.I. Bill?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Yes. I used up everything but the last two months, I believe. Still had to take out loans so I ended up $45K in debt." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you make any close friendships while in the service?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Absolutely. Some of my closest friends still." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you continue any of those relationships?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "The friend from Albuquerque is in Dallas now, and I just saw her last month. There are numerous people I’m still in contact with daily, thanks to social media." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you join a veterans organization?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "I was a member of the VFW and the American Legion for a while but dropped them both because of their right-leaning politics. Same goes for the Spectre Association." }, { "speaker": "Segment 5", "text": "Later Years and Closing:**" }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What did you go on to do as a career after the war?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "I felt my future was with government service, so starting in 2002 I applied for everything and anything I was remotely qualified for, trying to get my foot in the door. In 2003 I got a GS-5 position as a secretary to the USAF military recruiter for the state of Vermont. I kept applying and 18 months later I was hired by the Clinton Library in the volunteer and visitor office and moved to Arkansas. My two years of history grad work was good enough to eventually qualify me for a job as an archivist, which is probably what I should have been my whole life. I’m glad I found my true calling while I was young enough to make a career of it." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did your military experience influence your thinking about war or about the military in general?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Yes, I think I look more at the bigger picture than most people when it comes to aggressive action against another country. I am also against cuts to military spending because they usually impact the military member and family rather than a weapon system. I personally hate the automatic “thank you for your service” that you hear everywhere now. I don’t believe most people really mean it, and most don’t understand what they are thanking a military person for when they say that. It’s politically correct crap, but I am gracious because at least they aren’t calling me a baby-killer." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you attend reunions?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "I used to, with the Spectre Association (this is the unit that lost Spirit 03). I was even on the board of directors for three years. But when President Obama was running for the first time, some key members of this group said totally unforgivable racist things about him and black people in general. I had to cut all ties." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did your service and experiences affect your life?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "If I hadn’t gone into the military I wouldn’t have turned out to be the person I am now. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Maybe if I followed a different path I might have been a better, more accomplished person, maybe I might have died as a junkie, no one knows. I have a healthy respect for all life, believe that everyone deserves equal treatment, and want to save the planet from the excesses of its human occupants. I’m happy and reasonably successful, so I think I probably made the right choices for myself." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Is there anything you would like to add that we have not covered in this interview?" }, { "speaker": "MS. CORYAT", "text": "Nope. This has actually been pretty cathartic. If you have any questions please let me know." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. ERIK MOSHE", "text": "Hi, Mr. Daverede. Good morning." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Hey, Eric. Good morning to you." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How are you today?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Any better I couldn’t stand it." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Can you just please make an introductory announcement for what service you were in and for what rank that you were before you got discharged?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "My name is Alex Daverede and I was a lieutenant in the Fly Corps, United States Navy." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Where were you living at the time that you enlisted?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "When I joined the Navy, I was in New Orleans. I was born and raised in New Orleans, so I enlisted there to attend the Naval Academy Preparatory School in August of 1979, and then I graduated from the Naval Academy in 1984." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Why did you decide to join the Navy?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "A variety of reasons. The Navy story has always inspired me. I have always had this thing about seeing the ships, so I wanted to be a part of that. Naval history was a real inspiration for me, and I developed some heroes in naval history, and I wanted to go down that path." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Could I ask who those heroes were? For example, what kind of books did you read?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "They were general Navy histories. I recall reading a Random House book called _All About the_ _U.S. Navy,_ and I was a wee child at the time and I saw things there that you know, spoke in generality but for the most part, you are looking at World War II histories. People like Admiral Chester Nimitz, Admiral Raymond A. Spruance were inspirational characters to me because they seemed like ideal leaders, and what they had in common was their origins at the Naval Academy and that kind of inspired me to work to gain entrance there." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember your first days in service?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Vividly. My parents drove me to the preparatory school; we drove from New Orleans to Newport, Rhode Island, and they, as usual—I am kind of a time person—I want to be places on time or in advance of time, and my order is to go to the prep school. It said, “report no earlier than 08:00 3 August 1979,” and so my parents drove up at 08:00 and on 3 August 1979. I recall my mom saying, “I am just going to drop your stuff off and come back out and we will go get some breakfast.” And oh my lord, that was the furthest thing that ever happened! When I went in, they said “you have 10 minutes to get your stuff and get down here,” along with some other kinds of words I wouldn’t use. My mom was just in complete shock when she heard that. My brother and my father were scrambling to get my gear out of the car so I could hustle back down because once you entered those doors you weren’t going back out for breakfast; that is for sure. So that day was quite remarkable, in my mind." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Letting someone get their breakfast. They were being a little stingy that day for sure." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "No, no. The Navy food once you got going was fine. It is just that it wasn’t going to be a family breakfast." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What did it feel like to finally be in?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "I couldn’t believe it, there were such mixed feelings because there were moments where you kind of feel like you are on top of the world, and then there are times when you are saying, “oh my lord, what did I just do?” Because I am a New Orleans kid, and I first faced snow up there in Newport, Rhode Island, over there by Narragansett because they made us shovel the sidewalks. I never cleared sidewalks in my life, so you get introduced to some things. You get introduced to the Marine sergeant who ran you through the obstacle course they had up there at Newport, which wasn’t necessarily the most fun experience I ever had. But then there were the other things like some of the courses of study, which were fabulous. Others were just downright hard. The new environment, having to work with people you never worked before. I had always been in all male schools down in New Orleans. Never went to school with girls, and so that was the very first opportunity I ever had to serve with women. Never had that chance before so you know, there was always something new around the corner, always a new obstacle, like keeping your room clean, making sure your room was in tip-top shape every single day. But then you could always wait for the weekend, and they gave you liberty. You get normal liberty like sailors normally had. So from Friday afternoon until Sunday evening, you had liberty and could explore Newport to the best of the funds that E-3 in 1979 could afford. So that was all pretty neat to me." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember your training instructors?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "It was primarily an academic environment so it was more of the civilian teachers that you had. I had military staff in terms of a company officer and an assistant company officer, and the company officer was a Marine captain, and all we knew at that point was to keep our distance. We interacted more with the assistant company officer, who was a chief. And you know, again, it was more keeping on the good side because you are trying to adjust to this new military environment, and although I had been in junior ROTC in high school, that is an in-and-out kind of thing. You have military evolutions in high school during the day that would last for a certain period of time and then you were done, you went home and everything was normal. Being immersed in the environment was a lot different, and you learn quickly, especially from observing the troubles of others; what to do and what not to do. I kind of kept clear of the military staff as much as I could. I could not avoid the Gunny who was running the obstacle course though. He was there every day. The civilian instructors were challenging. I had to take two calculus courses, and one of them was just plain intimidating because he just insisted that you weren’t going to make it, and of course, not making it at the prep school meant that you weren’t going to Annapolis in the end. It was a challenge for me just to make it through the kinds of courses that they had at the prep school, but I eventually prevailed so I could make it down to Annapolis." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Where exactly did you go when you finished all that calculus and all that training?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Went down to the Naval Academy so I could go through four more years of the same. You go through the Annapolis schooling and because you are kind of older, you are treated a little bit differently because you had gone through the prep school and are looked at a bit differently. The first year, which is often a shock to kids coming into the civilian world, wasn’t as difficult to transition because you can sort of say I cheated in going through the prep school first. Knowing how to rig a uniform, knowing how to deal with superiors, keeping your room clean. All that other stuff had been second nature, and I didn’t have to learn it, so it was a great advantage, but the academics were still a challenge, and there were times over the four years that it would be very difficult—especially the third year. Second-class year at the Naval Academy is traditionally a heartbreaker for many of the guys, and when you are taking some of the courses like electrical engineering (I am just not built that way). I turned out to be an English major, and so electrical engineering or any kind of engineering was a big challenge for me. It was a bit of a struggle but I was able to make it through that. I graduated about the middle of the class but again a rewarding experience, probably based on learning how not to do things, but it was just the beginning of the education because things don’t really turn around until you get to the fleet. Then you start unlearning some of the bad habits that you picked up over the four years." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "So it was more on the job than it was on the books?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Absolutely. It was quite a different environment between what the instructors tell you in a classroom or what you practice in the yard at a Naval Academy then when you go out to an actual ship and you are actually dealing with sailors and chiefs on a regular basis. You are leader at that point, you are an authority. You have to know what you are doing, and in addition to that, sound like you know what you are doing, which is more challenging than most people think. Your education really begins when you get commissioned and you start that service in the fleet and you start returning back to the Navy what it has given you so far. For me that was five and a half years of school. I had to go through six more months of school for the Navy Supply Corps because that is the logistics part of the Navy, and you had to learn how to be a supply officer." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Was that what your assignment was, supply office?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Yes. You serve in a variety of different roles wherever the Navy put you, so I did five different areas. I started out as a dispersing officer, the guy in charge of the money in a lovely little place in the Aleutians called Adak. It was about the middle of the Aleutians chain in Alaska. We were closer to the Soviet Union than to the mainland USA. It was a very interesting place, a very challenging place. My wife and I spent two years there. It was quite a bit of a challenge. As a dispersing officer, duties were pretty regular, you just “got to make sure you got the money.” People got paid. People got their travel claims done on time. It wasn’t a terribly challenging tour but it was a necessary tour, and so you just have to be precise and when you do your balances at the end of the day, you have to balance out. You are accountable to every penny. There are a lot harder jobs in the Navy, and being a dispersing officer on an isolated island in the Aleutians wasn’t that to me. You have to really go on board the ship to face those challenges." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you go anywhere while you were in Alaska?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "No. My wife was an officer as well, so we couldn’t afford really to go far. We only went back to Anchorage, Alaska, that is as far as we could go. We spent a few days off the island and then we went back. And then in two years that is all we did. We did that once. In your first years you just don’t get a lot of time to yourself. It was just difficult to get off the island because there was only one way on and off; you had to pick your time. You had to pick your weather because the weather was never very good. The time that you are off the island, you want to make sure that where you are going to have at least decent weather so you can have a good time. Alaska is just a fascinating place besides the weather; just the sites, the mountains, the water, the glaciers, the whole thing. It is just a fascinating place to be." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Can you tell me some more about your some memorable experiences in Alaska?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "There wasn’t that much to Alaska simply because Adak was the end of a fairly long chain, and my duties—my wife probably had a more exciting experience than I did. She was the assistant Navy Exchange Officer at one point and then she was the Food and Service Officer, so between us, I ran the money and she ran the food, and pretty much controlled a good portion of the happiness that was in Adak at the time that we were there in the 1980s. The real times that you had is when you go on board ship because obviously the tempo picks up on things that you do. I served on board a helicopter carrier, USS _Guadalcanal LPH-7_ . She was an old ship at the time, and I reported on board her in the middle of 1987. You just go out and you start doing things. I hadn’t been on board the ship long before we were headed to the Caribbean and doing some exercises and had the opportunity to sail with the battleship USS _Iowa._ With the _Iowa,_ we went down to the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, which at the time part of the island was being used as a target range. It was there were able to see the _Iowa_ fire with 60-inch guns, which was something else, and a number of other junior officers were able to observe Vieques. Any time you can see a battleship open fire is something worthwhile and we were able to do that. Once you are done with these exercises, then it is time to deploy. So by the middle of 1987, within a couple of months of reporting on board, I was off on my first deployment headed to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Deployments always bring exotic things, and you see exotic places, so we stopped at Rota, Spain. Almost all Navy ships go into the Mediterranean to do what they call “change in operation” or “control choppies.” You in chop at Rota and you become part of the sixth fleet at that location, and your job as part of an Amphibious Ready Group is carrying a battalion of Marines and having them ready to do whatever needs to be done, so there’s training exercises that are done with the Marines. The ship is an aviation ship, so you are constantly bringing Marines on and off with your helicopters and you go from place to place. There is a presence, there are port visits, although we didn’t get into those terribly much during this cruise. We ended up sailing through the Suez Canal—one of the more exotic places that I went was Mombasa, Kenya. We had to dip down to Mombasa in the Indian Ocean, and that is where we did the line crossing because when you cross the equator there usually is a line crossing ceremony. That is where all the Pollywogs who have never been across the Equator get turned into Trusty Shellbacks. Not necessarily a family-friendly ceremony, and the whole ship goes through this, and it had been a long time since the ship had crossed the equator, and so there were a lot more Pollywogs than there were Trusty Shellbacks. The ceremony was a bit drawn out as a result, but everybody survived the experience. And we go down to Mombasa for a port visit. There we get redirected by the Joint Chiefs of Staff because a situation had developed in the Persian Gulf because of Iranian mining activity at the time. This is July of 1987, and so the ship is going in there carrying mine-sweeping helicopters. We had to go in from Mombasa, Kenya, to a little spot in the Chagos Archipelago called Diego Garcia, and from Diego Garcia we had to switch out the Marines we had with Navy mine-sweeping helicopters. From that point, we had to practice with those mine- sweeping helicopters, and we had to transit through the Persian Gulf through the Strait, being on the lookout for mines along the way. For that, we ended up going to general quarters for extended periods of time because of various threats in the area, and life became much more exciting when you are actually doing the business of a war ship at sea. My duties at the time, I was a ship store officer so I am contributing to crew morale by making sure we have the right stuff on board, making sure the laundry gets taken care of, making sure the barbershop’s running properly, but not going to general quarters with everybody else. That was kind of the downside of what I did because you know, you are not really participating in some of the things that most of the crew are participating in. That is the struggle with working with logistics at sea. It is not quite like the duties of other men that are performing on the ship but we are all in it together. For a few months, we ran the Guadalcanal up and down, escorting Kuwaiti tankers to make sure that the Iranians didn’t do anything to those tankers, and it was all covered by something called Operation Earnest Will, and that ran long into 1990, long after my ship departed. But it is something that I have a lot of memories about because a lot of things happened during that cruise and those memories do stick with you." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you see any casualties in your unit?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "No. We could come close, but we are actually part of an operation that captured an Iranian mine layer that was putting mines not far from where my ship was anchoring. And so there was a special operation that took down a landing craft that the Iranians were using to drop mines in the Persian Gulf, and in the course of that special operation the Iranians took casualties and the survivors of the crew were taken prisoner. They eventually showed up on my ship. They were treated by the medical crew on board the _Guadalcanal_ , and they were transported off the ship. But the other thing we run into, and that is whenever you are dealing with aviation is dealing with crashes, and we did have a helo crash during that cruise: one of the UH­ 1 helicopters that was part of the Marine contingent on the ship that remained on board attempted a landing on another vessel and crashed into the Persian Gulf, and a couple of members of that crew were lost. So the Marine division did have a few casualties in the course of the deployment." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Thank you for all these stories." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "You ask most sailors and there is a sea story or something out there. It doesn’t take much poking to come up with them." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "So what were helicopter pilots like?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Naval aviators of any type are very confident and sure of themselves. Some of them, you know, carry it a bit too far. A squadron commander was known to be traveling with a foot-long cigar dangling from his lips constantly. Large man, but these guys they were the tip of the spear and I understand why they carry themselves the way they do. They are interesting to be with, but ships that have aircrews like that, there is not a lot of co-mingling. Everybody, the officers dine in a place called the Ward Room, and what happens in the ship’s company stays with the ship’s company. The air group stays with the air group. You don’t mingle much. I had to bother them because I needed to collect money for their food so they didn’t care much for my presence, because anytime you loosen them of their money they are not very happy. And there is always the discussion of the quality of the food that they are paying for, so you always end up with interesting conversations when dealing with a pilot’s money. The circumstances bring you all together. You find a way to make it work, especially on board a ship, because honestly, there is no place else to go. If you can’t get along with each other, where are you going to go? And so each of us kind of learns that teamwork is vital, not only in getting the mission done, but being able to live day to day on a ship." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Were you awarded any medals or citations?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "In that deployment, no. I got some stuff later on, but as a fairly junior officer doing a service job, there is not much recognition in that. And yes, I didn’t expect it. It is just the way that it turns out when you are in the supply corps and you are working services—there is not a lot that gets recognition, but like I said, it came later on in other tours that I had, so that was okay." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Going to Spain, the Suez, Kenya, the Persian Gulf, Diego Garcia, what was it like to be in those places? How surprised were you about their culture and did you know anything before you got there?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "As a student of military history, I was fascinated by some of this stuff. What is really neat when you are transiting by the Suez Canal—this is 1987, so 14 years before, you had the October War between the Israelis, the Egyptians, the Syrians, and a lot of fighting took place on the edge of the Suez Canal. You can still see remnants of that as the ship was transiting the Suez Canal. You can look at the Sinai side of the Suez Canal and you can see remnants of Egyptian fortifications, remnants of the Israeli fortifications. Occasionally you would see wreckage of armored vehicles or you would see armored vehicles set up as memorials, because this was all ’87 in Egyptian territories. Naturally, the memorials that you saw were Egyptian memorials, and that was a constant reminder when you transited the length of the Suez. You saw lots of military installations, antiaircraft gun batteries, missile gun batteries, and whatnot. The Suez was a really intriguing; if you are on the flight deck of aircraft carrier, you see from side to side and you get this great view of everything as you go by, and then when you emerge from the southern end of the Suez Canal, there is always a flock of ships that are waiting for the next convoy that goes North through the canal. We ended up passing the USS _Stark (FFG31),_ and the _Stark_ was struck by two Exocet missiles launched by an Iraqi aircraft in May of 1987. The _Stark_ had lost 37 crew and her superstructure was pretty well torn up by the impact of those missiles, and so she had been repaired in Bahrain. When we saw her at the mouth of the Suez awaiting transit north, she had been superficially repaired, and as we passed her, we rendered honors. Everybody lined the flight deck and saluted as we went past the _Stark_ in memory of her losses and the trauma that she went through, and so that was quite a remarkable sight for us as well. All kinds of things that you could see." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Yes. Must have been pretty emotional for everybody." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Well, it was. I mean, we knew that there had been deadly business now at the time. We had no idea that we would be going there ourselves. We thought that once we had finished our little Indian Ocean deployment that we would transit back through the Suez Canal north and resume our deployment in the Mediterranean. Little did we know that a couple of weeks later, we would be headed to Diego Garcia and then headed to the zone where the _Stark_ had gotten her causalities. That is how quickly life in the Navy could change sometimes." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Throughout your military journey, how did you stay in touch with your family?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Well, back in the day it was letters. You wrote letters and it had to go through the fleet post office, which for the bulk of my Navy career was in New York. So if you are on a ship in the Mediterranean when you put your mail in the slot on board the ship, it is taken off the ship and it has got to go all the way back to New York where they process it and then have it sent back out. Now during one of the second of my cruises, my wife’s ship was deployed at roughly the same time as mine, and so sending a letter at that point was really difficult because you had to send it back to the FPO who has got to send it back to the Mediterranean to catch up with my wife’s ship. That was rather difficult. We didn’t hear from each other for a while. The Navy does have a means you can send a message from ship to ship for a personal message. If you were a family member on another ship, I could write what was called a ‘class easy message’ to get to my wife, which would be quicker. The only problem is everybody and their grandmother reads the message. And so your division officer, your department has to read it, the communications officer has to read it, the executive officer has to read it, the captain has to read it and then the radio men who actually have to send it have to read it. And then the reverse happens when you send it to its destination, so you have to be very careful what you write in class easy messages. You don’t want anything in there that you don’t want basically a crowd of people to see. So that is basically another way of doing it and then the final way was when you hit a port, a lot of places that you went to, you just had banks of phones. Everybody figured out how to do international dialing from these phones and that was the expensive part of it because international dialing was so expensive, especially the way we were doing it. You have lines waiting outside of phone booths; people waiting to be able to call home and then mentally trying to figure out the math, figuring out what time it is when you are back home because you didn’t want people to necessarily to dump out of bed, but you had to take advantage of whatever time it was, especially in some of the further locations. If you were at say, Israel, that is quite a leap from the East Coast with the U.S. and there is quite a time separation. You have to be cognizant of that." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What was the food like in your experience?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Navy food is Navy food. It is a tough food service environment because you are kind of stuck with the ingredients that you can get. I know a little bit more about this so you know, there is a catalog of food store that you are limited to. When you are close to port or if you are in homeport, you get regular supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables and dairy and all that kind of stuff. All that changes when you get underway. At the time, the ship had a salad bar and so you can kind of tell the status of what happened by watching the salad bar, like what ingredients started to disappear. And it was a constant challenge if you are in the food service organization. It was a constant challenge to come up with making sure you had the quantities available, the quality available. Was the stuff even good anymore? And then with dairy, the same thing. At a certain point, the fresh milk will run out and then you are stuck with a rather unpalatable alternative, but they are there nonetheless. And you are dependent when you are underway on hitting what we call the unrep ships, the underway replenishment ships and in the Navy it was called a food storage ship or an AFS and they had a shopping list. When they were tagged up, you are not quite sure how old that pack out was, and so the quality of the food on the ship that is giving it to you that is sending it over that was questionable. Even after you do a replenishment, you may not necessarily get back what you are hoping for. And you can hear that when people sit down for their meals, you just hear a bellyful from some of them, why they can’t have this, why they can’t have that. People could be picky on their brands. So you are dealing with okay, what kind of cereal do I have and if the ship doesn’t have certain kinds, you go without because it is just too difficult or too expensive to do it overseas. You are kind of stuck within the Navy system, and that is not necessarily what your customers are looking for, so you end up with some things that people just hated to see, like a lot of sliders. People detested having sliders but sliders were pretty reliable. They were always there and as long as you had freezers on board you had a ready supply of frozen burgers available. You work a cycle menu and you do the best with the standard Navy recipes that they give you, and the rest will depend on the cooks in your outfit to make sure that they put a palatable meal that is hot and nourishing and most of the guys at the end of a hard day’s work are hungry and they are going to eat it anyway. It is just a matter of how much grouching they are going to have about it." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Yes. It makes sense. You guys have a very limited environment to get those good food items for them." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "There are a lot of worst places to be. The ground pounders that you talk to have probably talked about things as ancient as sea rats or the more modern guys will talk about MREs and any of them would trade in a heartbeat a chance to eat in a Navy galley. So it is all about perspective. Sailors will grouch about it because they live with it so long and since they are not exposed to say, MREs, they are none the wiser for it. But I know Marines or soldiers will probably come back as “oh my lord, you guys get away with murder,” and they have a point. They do have a point." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Throughout your deployments, did you feel pressure or stress?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Yes. But in the line of work that I did, it was in working with logistics which is a different kind of stress. It is more in the lines of the leadership kinds of things where you are trying to foster an environment where people can work together to get the mission done. It is more difficult on the ship because the environment is difficult, what you end up with are some things that you couldn’t change very much. And understand at the time, I am a junior officer so I am still learning this game. The lessons come naturally to some and but for me it wasn’t as natural an experience; I learned some tough lessons there, like how do you get guys to work in a laundry. It is hot outside and so it is hot inside the skin of the ship, and we are putting them in places where we have work with presses, washers and dryers, or as the Navy calls them, extractors, because they have to make sure they get all the water out of the stuff and nobody says a thing nice about anybody in the supply department. They are just expected to do this work, so you are doing it without expecting a lot in the way of compliments. Nobody goes around to the guys working the presses and says thanks so much for crushing my buttons, and things of that nature. Leadership in such an organization is difficult, and I struggled, to be honest, I struggled with that, because you are always looking for answers. And it was in some occasions—it wasn’t easy to do and in some cases you have mixed success and sometimes you didn’t pull it off very well. That is a concerted effort between your chief, your senior petty officers, and yourself to try to make that environment, and the physical environmental conditions just add to the mental environmental conditions. And then there is just the kinds of things that sailors get into, be it with family, be it with girls back at home, be it with their personal situation with money. They went and got a loan and did this, that, and the other thing and it is going south on them. You have to be careful that you don’t personalize all this stuff and don’t make those troubles your own, and you have to walk a fine line between standing above the fray so you can be effective and being personable enough that you can communicate with people and be credible as a leader." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Is there something you did for good luck?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Maybe, I didn’t have much. There wasn’t anything specific. Once you get into a routine wherever you are at—I got into routines, you know, living overseas. I spent over a year in Bahrain living in a fuel region in the Middle East. My job was to check on fuel that the government bought, so I had to work on civilian tankers to check on if are they clean enough to take petroleum products on board. I had to be sure the right amounts were discharged. I had to be sure that the fuel quality met specifications and so you kind of get into a routine on how you do those things and a variety of locations. I lived in Bahrain for a year but I had to go to Saudi Arabia once. I spent a lot of time in the Emirates and this was in the Emirates around 1991, so at the time, the Emirates weren’t the big vacation destination they were making themselves out to be these days. They had some build-up but it was nowhere near as fancy, and it was really a kind of odd place to operate, but when you went to each of these places, you sort of developed routines because I was on my own. The only time I interacted with my office was by phone. The rest of the time, I had my work cut out for me, and I was visiting labs, ships, or fuel tanks. I pretty much got the smell of JP5 jet fuel and diesel-5 marine in my nostrils for a great deal of the time. You develop a new routine for each of those things to suit your comfort zone, and when new things come up, the old service saying is like Gumby: Just be flexible." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did people entertain themselves?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Variety of things. Onboard ship is a challenge because your workday is so undefined. Your workday can stretch almost until the time you hit the rack. There would be some television in various places, so the cruise usually in the berthing spaces would have a lounge. The ship had what was termed a site TV so there would be a daily broadcast of things that they got from the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service that gets packaged in the form of videotapes. They set up a videocast day, but that broadcast day really didn’t begin until the afternoon where you might have people stopping ship’s work at that time. Reading was big; you had card games; you had just telling more sea stories to take the time away. And the ship had a library. The usual chaplain activities were available on a regular basis. The big changes occurred when you got into port and you could see different things. During the Persian Gulf experience, that didn’t happen as much simply because the situation we were in. We got ashore a couple of times, but you got folks who are, they are giving you a briefing before the ship ties up and the ship will point out where things are, and one case during a port visit to the French port of Tulane, there was a map and they were telling people, ”these are the places you shouldn’t go.“ Most of the officers, or at least most of the officers and the chiefs, were thinking, ”why the hell are you telling them where not to go and pointing out where that is?“ Because usually the first thing that sailors do ... that is where they are going to go. It would have been far better had they not briefed the places where they shouldn’t be going, and the sailors just would have remained ignorant of that stuff and they wouldn’t have gone there. You constantly scratch your head sometimes on how the Navy does things, but that was one port visit that really stood out. You got used to seeing places on foot, you walked around a lot. There was no internet so any research you did, you tried to hit places that might have guidebooks or whatnot to kind of help you out. What time you had on liberty generally was quite limited, and it depended on the duty sections that you had on board. If the port visit only lasted three or four days, the chances are you are only going to get off the ship once because liberty would be granted after the ship’s work ended or on the weekend and if your duty section was up. There were a couple of times where I never made if off the ships at all. I made it, I had the duty and my time didn’t come around while the ship was still at port. And that was just the breaks. It works out that way. But it was also kind of exciting, sometimes disappointing, because you would see the Americans in foreign ports and you would think they would get into seeing what things are like in a foreign city, but a lot of guys weren’t comfortable with that and they would end up going to some regular establishments that serve American stuff. I remember one Italian port near the fleet landing, and I think just about everybody who came in on liberty went through. Here you are in Italy, which has got such a vast expanse of drinking and dining experiences, and here we’ve got Americans buying American-style pizza and washing it down with Budweiser. And that was just criminal to me. I mean, just not being able to step out and enjoy what some of these ports could offer, but I also could understand where young folks aren’t necessarily comfortable with new experiences. It takes a little courage to go see an Italian hole-in-the wall in the city of Naples, and taking a chance on it even though it may have some of the finest cuisine and the best table wine you will run into. That is not just a chance that some of the folks will take. So you shake your head. You take advantage of them yourself if you are comfortable with that, then just wish the best for everybody else." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you recall any particular humorous or unusual event that happened to you?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Let’s see, there was the time when we were driving around in the supply officer’s car, and he decided that he was going to show us how to do police turns, and he did that a few times on the street in Israel, I think, and at one point they got overenthusiastic, slammed the right rear tire into a curb and blew it out, then returned the car to an agent to say that he had a defective vehicle. So that was a bit funny. The rest of it was just exhausting. It is when you get off the ship, there is so much you want to see that you just run yourself ragged in the hours that you have. I did find myself one time in Golan Heights in Israel. I don’t think that I was supposed to be there. I was with another officer and we were following some vehicles, some paths, passing some signs in Hebrew that probably said something along the lines of “Do Not Enter” but since we didn’t read Hebrew, we ended up being stopped by some guards at the Israeli border patrol. After a few minutes of trying to figure out who the hell we are and me and the other guy kind of sweating bullets thinking “oh my lord, we have a diplomatic incident going on.” We eventually get pointed in the right direction and out of the area, so sometimes fun times are not always as fun as we hope them to be, but it was definitely a different experience and one I carry with me always." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What were some of the jokes or pranks you or others would pull?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Those are harder to come up with. One does stick out though and it picks on Marines, and I love Marines, you know, we sail together on so much stuff, but when you are on a ship with Marines, the things that you could do sometimes can be a little cruel. And one of them was down by the ship’s mast, which is kind of the larger open areas on the ship below decks. There was an area where we had vending machines and whatnot, and I recall a couple of times where some sailors would just get into a line on the mess decks and pretty soon after that happens some Marines will start joining the line, and because the Marines have lots of time on their hands on board ship, at least back in the day, more and more Marines would join in the line and at some point the sailors would disengage themselves from the line and just disappear. You would just end up with a bunch of Marines standing there in a line and nobody had a clue what they were doing there. So somebody finally figures out that there is nothing here, so break it up! That was pretty good." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember the day that your service ended?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Yes. I was here in DC, I belonged to an organization called Naval District in Washington, and one of the unfortunate facts of officer life is something called “Up and Out.” If you fail to select for the next rank, you have to leave. You go up with something called the Selection Board and you have two options to use before you go to the Selection Board, and if you fail to select for the next pay grade on the second board, you are out. You are automatically out. And so that is all clock-driven; within 90 days of being notified, you have to be out. I knew this was going to happen when I got to my last duty station because I had not made some good choices as a junior officer either in the places that I went to or some of the things that I did. And the competition at the time for getting selected is always rough and so I just I knew I was not going to make it. That was in March of 1996. On March 1, I signed all that stuff up and that was pretty much it. I had made up in my mind that going for reserves was probably not for me, because in the supply officer community, reserve duty is not very good. There is not much point to it, and so rather than make that commitment for the Naval Reserve, I said I will do a clean break and just get out. That kind of ended it for me and started a six-month period of unemployment that took a few job applications to do, but ultimately six months later I found myself here at College Park and the National Archives. That was a miraculous transition for me." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "You went straight from the military to the National Archives? Have you been there ever since?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Yes, I have been here since September 30, 1996." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you also go back to school at all?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "I did, actually. I went through an outfit called American Military University, and now this was all pre-9/11 so it doesn’t have the 9/11 GI bill. I ended up being able to go through that school with some assistance through there, and I was able to pull out a Master of Arts in Military Studies from AMU, and I completed that program in 2002. It has been a great tour being able to work here in the National Declassification Center using my military background and military history education to be able to work the records and work on making records available to the public. It has been a godsend for me. It has been great. The transition was not that long compared to others’ experience, and so I figure myself lucky in that respect, although when I was in the middle of it I didn’t feel particularly lucky. I put out dozens of job applications and just was not coming up with any luck. I applied to be an archives technician in the Declass Branch as it was called back then, and I didn’t have any idea what that was, but my supervisor at the time, the Division Director, a lady by the name of Jean, took a chance. She took a chance. She didn’t have to, but she took a chance with me, and this has been a great stop for me all this time." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you make any close friendships and did you continue any of those relationships when you got out?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Not as much. Part of it is just the moving. It is just so difficult to keep that together. Moving from coast to coast and place to place, it was difficult to keep those relationships up. The shore installations for ships, the social organization is a little bit tighter because your wives get together on things, and the ward room is just much tighter with the camaraderie, but when you get to shore installations which is where I spent four out of the five tours in the Navy, things aren’t quite as tight. It is more of a day thing, and you kind of treat it like an office job, and the Middle East tour was great. I actually maintained contact with my boss from that tour for a number of years. My boss in Bahrain was an Army colonel, and lord forgive me for even saying that, but he was one of the finest officers I ever worked for. We kept things up, but just over the years they turned out to be too tough to sustain, but fond memories nonetheless but I have lots of pictures and from the ship, I have the cruise books, so lots of memories and faces from those." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Have you ever tried to access your military records at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Actually no, I really haven’t felt the need because I have a decent copy of stuff at home so I never had to go and look at my official record out of St. Louis. I probably should at some point, maybe as I get closer to retirement I should do that, but I haven’t done it yet." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you join a veteran’s organization when you were done?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Not really. No. It just never appealed to me because, while I enjoy a good sea story and spinning a tale, when you compare it to like folks who have really gone into combat and whatnot ... during the early part of my post-Navy career, the organizations were pretty well dominated by Korea and Vietnam veterans, and now we have more and more of the veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan showing up from more modern conflicts and being a Cold War veteran it is kind of a tough place. Yes, I served in one pseudo-combat operation in Earnest Will, but it is nothing compared to what the younger ones have dealt with or the older folks, say in Vietnam. So it is difficult to go into a hall and kind rub shoulders with guys and gals like that who have actually done the thing. I am proud in my service and the time that I was able to serve, but in terms of kind of perpetuating that stuff I have a feeling I just don’t hold a candle to true combat veterans because they have dealt with things that I had never had to feel or face, and they have been tested in ways I never would be. It is just an uneasy thought of being in there presence and kind of being looked at on the same plane, and I don’t feel that way." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did your service and experiences affect your life overall?" }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "Well, I met my wife at the Naval Academy so I would say that is a great effect. I matured a great deal during my service. When I first got commissioned, I was not a very mature young man. The reason I was commissioned in the Navy Supply Corps was I ended up with a medical condition that would not allow me to become an unrestricted line officer—the guys who wear the stars on their sleeves. All I wanted to do since I was a kid was drive a ship, and I found out fairly close to the end of my time at the Naval Academy that I wasn’t going to be able to do that, but I still had to serve and I still wanted to be in the Navy. Being a supply officer was not part of the plan, and my transition, shall we say, was not graceful, and in retrospect it could have been done a lot better. I should have grown up a lot sooner, and part of the reason for that is I couldn’t get promoted later on because I made some errors early on that I really couldn’t recover from. Although, at the time, I didn’t really understand that, but what ended up happening during the time that I was in the Navy was that I grew up a great deal. And I learned how not to be a leader. Ultimately, when I came to NARA, I was fortunate enough to be selected to be a supervisor or a manager, and I kind of got a second time around, because when I came to NARA as an archives technician I was in GS-5, and that was kind of a rough transition because I was going from being an officer to a GS-5 technician. I kind of had to go to school again, to learn things over again, but learn them right this time. When I became a supervisor again and when I became a manager again, I was able to at least apply some of those lessons learned when I was in uniform and hopefully be a better manager and supervisor for it, and I think that is what benefited me so much. Plus the fact that just the variety of experiences broadens your horizons to see how other people live. It is all things that most Americans will never see, and you get an appreciation for that kind of stuff that I think to this day and age is most definitely needed because we have to understand our place in the world, and I think only trips overseas and seeing how the rest of the world lives is how to do that." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Thank you for your service, Mr. Daverede, and thank you for your interview." }, { "speaker": "MR. DAVEREDE", "text": "You are quite welcome." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. ERIK MOSHE", "text": "Where were you living at the time that you enlisted?" }, { "speaker": "MR. JASON GLOVER", "text": "I was living in Forest Park, Georgia, just south of Atlanta." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Why did you decide to join?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "My father had been a sergeant major in the Army, and was a Vietnam veteran, so from an early age, I knew that I would also go into the military. My dad was actually an Army veteran, and I was looking at what service that I was going to join myself, and you might think that I would have tended to join the Army, since he had been in the Army, but a story he told me actually sent me towards the Marines. He told me that when he enlisted, he had wanted to join the Marines, and he had a buddy program, he was signing up for the Marines with a friend of his, and that friend backed out, and when his friend backed out, my dad backed out also. He was too nervous to go into the Marines without his friend, and so he decided to go into the Army instead, and so for me, part of choosing the Marines was probably to honor his original desire to be a Marine." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember your first days in the service?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "Oh, yes. My three months at Paris Island are certainly burned into my brain, I think pretty much every minute of those three months is right there, I can recall from memory very quickly, because it was all so very intense, and it was probably the most defining period of my life, though, in terms of the things that it taught me, and the characteristics that it gave me." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What did it feel like when you were going through that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "It was hard. It was very difficult. I had been kind of the nerdy or geeky high school kid. I was a little bit chubby. I wasn’t your stereotypical jock that was joining the Marines to be the macho Marine guy. For me, it was a challenge. It was something outside of my comfort zone, and so boot camp was very hard. Physically, it was difficult, and mentally, it was taxing, but I persevered, and it was very rewarding at the end of those three months." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember your instructors?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "Oh, yes. Our senior drill instructor was Staff Sergeant James, and we had some other drill instructors, Staff Sergeant Green, Sergeant Williams, Sergeant Osborne, and Sergeant Kerry, and it’s very much, I’ve learned in retrospect, that you don’t—Marine boot camp is, for all of the chaos that it appears to be if you’re a recruit, it’s actually a very organized dance of sorts, and every drill instructor has a different role that they play on the team, and the things that they’re doing that seem insane are actually very deliberate, and they’re designed to evoke certain actions and emotions from the recruits, and so in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense. But when you’re there and you’re doing it, those guys seem like they hate you and they’re your worst enemy, but they’re not, they’re trying to break you down and then build you back up and make you a Marine. About two-thirds of the way through boot camp, I had a final inspection for the platoon, and with the final inspection, the commanding officer was coming around, and was going to inspect us personally, and when he got in front of me, I brought my M16 up and did my inspection arms, and he looked at the weapon, and then I put it down, and then he asked me some questions. And I remember him asking me something along the lines of, how did I view myself as a recruit? And it was a really interesting question, because it was such an odd, sort of self-reflective question, and most of the questions are about Marine Corps history, or the weapon, or some tactical knowledge. But this was a very self-reflective question about what I thought of myself as a recruit, and I had always considered myself, up until that point, that was about two months or so into boot camp, I had considered myself to be at best an average recruit, maybe even a bit below average. Again, I wasn’t super physically fit or super gung-ho or macho, and so I said to the battalion commander, I said, hey, “this recruit feels like he’s a pretty ordinary recruit, average on his rifle marksmanship or his PT,” and I kind of gave the answer to indicate that I just looked at myself as average. And my senior drill instructor was standing there next to the commanding officer during this inspection, and he spoke up at that time. He didn’t have to speak up, but he spoke up at that time, and he said something to the effect of, Recruit Glover is actually an above-average recruit, and he gave some reasons for me being an above- average recruit, in that I was someone who followed orders, who didn’t question authority, who helped my fellow recruits when they had difficulty with tasks. And I don’t remember everything he said, but I do remember him speaking up when he didn’t have to, and saying that I was above average, and that was a real confidence boost, because of course, you look at your drill instructor as a father figure of sorts, and you’re looking for his approval, and to receive his approval in that circumstance really boosted my confidence, and I don’t know that it made me feel like a Marine, but it made me feel like, for the first time in boot camp that I could really handle my time in the Marine Corps, that I wasn’t just an average guy, that I could do more, and I think that helped me going forward. There was a possibility of actually excelling, and I had not considered that before. I had assumed that I was just going to skate through, and I was concerned about if the Marine Corps was going to be like boot camp in any way, you know, was I going to be able to do anything besides just skate through, do the mediocre level of work, and make it. And then I realized, when he said that, something in my realized that there was potential there for more, there was potential for leadership or excellence, and that was very helpful. I’m very thankful that he spoke up that day, when he didn’t have to." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Where did you go once you graduated from boot camp?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "I went to my military occupational specialty training, which was the School of Infantry at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and that was because I was slated to become an infantry machine gunner, and that was about a month and a half, two months, I can’t completely recall, but I remember it was cold, and we were out in the woods a lot. We were shooting a lot of machine guns, we were patrolling, we were hanging out and eating in the rain, and I remember it was a lot of fun, it was a completely new world to me, but yes, I had to spend a couple of months there in that sort of military occupational specialty, like your job training. When I signed up for the Marines, I picked the infantry broadly as a job specialty. I did very well in the ASVAB [Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test], and could have done just about anything in the Marines, but I kind of knew that if I was going to do it, I wanted to go all the way, so I went for the infantry, and then when I got to the School of Infantry, they ask you what your particular specialty within the infantry that you would like to do is, and there are a lot of different ones. Working with mortars, or with TOW missiles on top of Humvees and demolitions, but I decided machine gunner, because I think as a little kid— the movies that are out there that you watch, _Rambo_ or whatnot, and the guys get the machine gun and the belt of ammunition, it’s blasting away, and it just seemed cool, really, that’s really all that went into it, so I went machine gunner. The thing that surprised me, or was—I had maybe not expected about being a machine gunner was that when we would go on forced marches or humps, that’s basically a very long, very fast-paced walk with all of your gear, the machine gunners, who are on a 50-caliber machine gun, or a Mark 19 machine gun, you’re toting these machine guns. They break down into several pieces, but ultimately, you and your team are toting these things around, and the receivers for these weapons can weigh between 60 and 75 pounds, and that’s on top of all the other gear that you’re wearing, and so it was heavy, it was heavy, and miserable at times, but it was also a lot of fun." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Can you tell me about a couple of your most memorable experiences?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "One of the reasons I wanted to do this interview is because when I left the School of Infantry and got assigned to my first unit, I actually was not assigned to a Fleet Marine Force Infantry unit. I actually volunteered for and was chosen to go to the Marine Honor Guard in the Presidential Honor Guard up in Washington, DC, which is at Marine Barracks 8th & I [Streets]. It’s in the southeast quadrant of the city, and it’s famous for the Silent Drill Team. Some people have seen the Marine Silent Drill Team, but there are actually six different platoons of Honor Guard Marines there, and only one of those platoons is the Silent Drill Team. The rest of the platoons do less fancy stuff. They do very important things. They do a lot of funerals at Arlington National Cemetery. We did a lot of Presidential and diplomatic receptions at the White House, at the Pentagon, State Department, things like that, and we do parades for the public during the summer also. So I was stationed there at Marine Barracks, Washington, DC., after the School of Infantry, and one of the first things that I got to do, which was pretty interesting, was the second inauguration of Bill Clinton, and that’s a really massive undertaking, if anyone has ever been to an inauguration parade. It’s a lot of people, and we actually marched in a formation that was nine by nine, so it was nine people in the front and nine people deep behind him. It was a huge formation of Marines that were marching in that parade. That was really interesting. Probably the most interesting thing about my time at the Presidential Honor Guard, and this directly relates to the National Archives, actually, is that in July of 1997, on July 4, 1997, the Archives, A1, downtown, or just off the National Mall, was opening their doors, like I believe they do every July 4th, for the public to come in, and they have presentations. And they have—most importantly, I think for the public’s sake, is the ability for folks to come in and go through the Rotunda and see the original Declaration and Constitution and whatnot, and on July 4th, they do a special—they do, like, a special viewing with members of the Armed Services Honor Guards there. So what it was, was a volunteer situation, and I volunteered on that July 4th to go and be a part of this joint Honor Guard there in the Rotunda, and it was a 14-hour day. I did 30 minutes on, one hour off, 30 minutes on, one hour off, and what our job was, was one member from each Service branch, we would march into the Rotunda and take up various posts around the Rotunda. Two of those posts were sort of by the entrance to the Rotunda, the fence gates, you might call them, for people who have been there, and then there was the commander of that particular detail in the center of the rotunda, and then there were two more posts on either side of the—I believe it’s the Constitution in the middle, and there’s like, a little—if anyone who has ever been to the Rotunda, seen the Constitution, just to either side of the Constitution, there’s a little recess in the wall next to a pillar, and so there are two positions on either side of the Constitution in these recess areas where a couple of members of the Honor Guard would line up, and I was chosen to be at the first of those two positions. In terms of as the public approached the Constitution, I would be on their left, and then directly past me would be the Constitution on the left, so I was standing right next to the Constitution, and it was a really interesting experience, because it was the most I’ve ever been tested at the Honor Guard, and I spent four years at Honor Guard, almost my entire time in the Marine Corps was at Honor Guard. It was the most I had ever been tested, because much like a Buckingham Palace guard that you see on TV, the public were literally filing within 1’ 18\" of me, and they were coming to see the Constitution, and I had to maintain military bearing at the position of attention for 30 minutes. Eyes straight ahead, not moving, etc., and there was a lot of people coming by who wanted to try to get me to break that military bearing, and were doing all sorts of crazy things to get me to do that, and I don’t think at the time, I understood the importance of what I was standing next to, and certainly at the time, I had no idea what the National Archives really was. It was just another ceremonial job that we were doing, much like we would go to Arlington or the White House, but then, that was in ‘97. But then less than a decade later, in 2005, I started a career with NARA as a student, and when I started my career with NARA as a student, I remember it being one of the first things that I realized, as I learned that one of the primary public missions of the Archives is there at AI, and it’s to have the original documents on display for the public to come see, and it brought back that memory of me standing there that day, and it was just really interesting to think how I had spent that time in the Marines right there in the Rotunda, with no expectation that I would ever work for the National Archives. Then a decade later or a little less, there I was, working for the agency, and I’ve since been in the Rotunda as an Archives employee, and I’ve stood there and looked at that spot where I was standing that day with some nostalgia and déjà vu, and it was just a really sort of interesting story I thought that tied together my time in the Marines and my time here with NARA." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Which one was the most emotional place for you to go?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "Definitely Arlington National Cemetery. I mean, nothing can really compare with Arlington, and I do remember the first funeral that I did, we would often be dropped off at the Fort Myer chapel, which is right next to Arlington, and has been featured in many movies that feature Arlington. During the funeral, our platoon would stand out front of the chapel and provide sort of a backdrop to the body-bearer or casket-bearer, pallbearers, who are also Marines, but are a distinct group within the Honor Guard of very strong guys. We would provide sort of the backdrop as the platoon, but we would stand during the funeral, we would stand out front of the chapel, and of course, you have to stand motionless, maintain military bearing, and then the casket would be brought out and placed onto the wagon. It would be carried into Arlington, and we would march behind the casket, much like people have seen on the JFK funeral footage or the Ronald Reagan funeral footage, and it’s a pretty long march. It’s about two miles from that chapel to the newer section of Arlington where people are being buried now. Arlington is very big, of course, and I remember my first funeral, marching through the gate from the chapel area out to the cemetery, and about a two-mile march, and that takes a little while when you’re doing a horse-drawn carriage. The platoon is marching and whatnot, and I remember just being completely, like you said, overcome with emotion, to the point that I was—had tears welling up in my eyes as I marched, and just the enormity of the place, and all of the white headstones that just—row after row, line after line, dot that landscape, and it was very powerful. Sometimes, when we got to the grave side, we would be in a position to see family members as the body- bearers folded the flag and presented the flag to the family members. We had to be careful not to let your emotions take over during that time, because we had to maintain the military bearing, but it was certainly sometimes a challenge to keep it together, and that really didn’t diminish over my four years there. I mean, I certainly experienced it my first time out. You might think that you would grow used to it, or it would be something that eventually, you would not be affected by as much, but truthfully, it was much like a rollercoaster. Some days, you might go into Arlington to do a funeral, and you might be fine, and then the next day, you might go into Arlington to do a funeral, and something triggers you, you can’t—it was a very emotional experience, and it certainly was a very emotional experience to be in Arlington. Whenever we were doing our drill movements, like present arms, with our rifles, we wanted to do it in the most excellent way possible, to all be together on cadence, to present the best that we could for the family, because we knew that ultimately, there was the family of this fallen Service member, sitting there and watching us, and we were representing his wife and his career, and the thing that he had devoted, he or she had devoted their life to, so it was a definite motivator." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you see combat at all?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "I did not, I was in the Marines from ‘96 to 2000, actually, and so I spent my entire time at the Honor Guard, which is a little bit unusual. Usually, people do two years in Honor Guard and then move out to the Fleet Marine Force, but they do retain a small number of people who have picked up NCO, non­ commissioned officer, and they retain those people to teach the new crop of guys coming into the barracks. I was part of a handful of corporals that were retained to teach the new group, and so I ended up spending my entire four years there at 8 th , and because I got out in 2000, because 9/11, there were really very few conflicts going on in the world. I had friends who went to Kosovo, Eastern Europe, but for the most part, it was a peaceful time. It’s a good thing, and it’s also sort of disappointing in a weird way. You know, you don’t want to train your whole life to play football and then sit on the bench, but on the other hand, I did have friends who stayed in the Marines, and who did go to Afghanistan shortly after 9/11, and one of my friends had his leg blown off by an IED, so there’s certainly the aspect of, you want to play in the game, but nobody wants to be mangled or killed in combat, either, so it’s a strange dichotomy of emotions about that." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "You stayed in the Honor Guard for a long time, so you must have had an excellent posture." }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "Yes, and my back pays for it today. Yeah, it was a lot of standing, and it did a lot of damage to—I imagine it must have done a lot of damage to my lower back, because it’s something I struggle with still, and I think it’s probably attributed to four years of standing at attention like a backdrop of toy soldiers, so I appreciate that time, it was a great time in my life, but it had a cost associated with it physically." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you have an exercise regiment you did?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "You know, you would that think we might have had—and I guess nowadays, you would think that we might have some specific exercise tailored to strengthening the lower back, for example. Back then, it was still an old school mindset. I think some of that specific sort of tailored exercise is more of a contemporary mindset for us today in America, and more of a contemporary mindset in the Marine Corps today, which I found has recently put together some sort of collateral duty positions called force fitness trainers, I think. They’ve maybe moved more that way, but back then, it was just an old school mindset of, we run, and we do pushups, and we do crunches, we do pull ups. It was calisthenics and running, calisthenics and running, and so there wasn’t really anything specific to help build up our backs at that point. Now, we did spend a lot of hours practicing the drill, and so if practicing the drill is in some way helping prepare your back, I guess that was good, but not enough stretching, for sure." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Were you awarded any medals or citations?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "Yes, I have a handful of different things that I received, but I think the things that I’m most proud of are—I received two Navy and Marine Corps achievement medals, and I received one of those as an E3, as a lance corporal. It’s pretty unusual to receive an achievement medal as an E3. I received both of them for essentially the same thing. The Marine barracks up in Washington, DC, during the summer does a parade in-house, in our barracks, and we do it every Friday night, and we invite the public to come, and there’s typically about 5,000 people that show up. We have bleachers set up on the parade field so that folks can come see that, and before the parade starts, there’s a handful of Marines that have been chosen to go out and play the role of crowd educator or crowd warmer, and each of us are assigned a section of about 500 people, section of the bleachers. It’s our job to spend about 20 or 30 minutes warming the crowd up, introducing ourselves, explaining what the parade is all about, explaining some of the etiquette that’s expected during the parade, maybe tell them some jokes, or just interacting with the public. There’s about 15 crowd warmers each parade season who are chosen to go out and do that, and every year, the best crowd warmer for the year is awarded a Navy and Marine Corps achievement medal, and for two consecutive years out of the three years that I did that job, I was selected and awarded the achievement medal for best crowd warmer. It was definitely something I enjoyed doing. It was difficult in its own way, and it gave me appreciation for people, like stand-up comics or improv artists who have to be put on the spot and entertain folks, keep their attention, and make them happy, and so I enjoyed doing it, and getting that one achievement medal as an E3 was something I was very proud of. It definitely helps that I can be very loud when I need to be, because there’s a lot of people to talk to, and it also helped me, like you said, really develop sort of under fire, in a way, really develop my public speaking skills, and to be able to respond quickly to interesting questions or to unusual circumstances." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Throughout your military journey, how did you stay in touch with your family?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "Well, that was from ‘96 to 2000, so it was prior to the age of social media, and it was really just at the forefront of the age of cell phones, so from that perspective, I used a lot of calling cards and payphones, to be honest. Some folks will remember those days, will go to gas stations and buy prepaid phone cards, and then I’d use a payphone, and dial whatever number was on my prepaid card, and stayed in touch with my family, generally through that method. I would usually, once a year, around the holidays, either Thanksgiving or Christmas, I would try to take a little bit of leave and fly out or drive out to see my family, but I didn’t see them a lot during my enlistment, to be honest with you." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What was the food like?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "In boot camp, you don’t pay much attention to it. There are so many other things competing for your attention that eating is just a chore. It’s just about getting calories at that point, so I don’t think I even have any recollection of what the food tasted like in boot camp. Once I got to the School of Infantry, I remember that I probably put on five pounds, because they had a really massive chow hall with pretty good food, and I would pig out pretty considerably, because when we were training out in the woods, of course, we were eating the old meal ready to eat, which is not terribly appetizing. When we got back into the garrison situation there, in the base area, we go to the chow hall, and I would pig out, because I had been eating those meals ready to eat for days or weeks, and so the opportunity to have some real food that tasted great. They also had endless ice cream, I remember, like a soft serve machine that was probably frequented too much by me, but then once I got to the Honor Guard Barracks at 8th they had a small chow hall that was not very good, and then actually was just really dimly lit. I remember just not liking the ambiance of it being so dimly lit, to sit down and eat in there, and so the good news was that you only spent on year in the barracks, living in the barracks and eating in the barracks, and then they don’t have enough room to keep you there. After your first year, they send you out to live in town, and so I spent three years living in an apartment in Washington, DC, and primarily eating out on the town, or making my own meals in my apartment, but it wasn’t bad. It was what it was. I didn’t join the Marines for gourmet food, but it was survivable. I think that one thing I did love about the Marine Corps was the massive amount of diversity that I found amongst my fellow marines. Once I got out of boot camp and was actually interacting with these guys on a social basis, we had every range of person from every geographical part of the country, and every ethnicity and every religion you can imagine. We were all put together with a single sort of common mission and a common bond, and that was a really great experience. That was even furthered by being stationed in Washington, DC, and the vast amount of diversity you have up there, and the diversity with cuisine. The food the Marine Corps itself provided, not that memorable maybe, but when I was living out on my own, and able to go to different restaurants, I was able to experience a lot of foods that I never would have experienced if I had just stayed here in the South Metro Atlantic area." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you feel a lot of pressure or stress?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "No, I didn’t, really, after the first probably six months or so. The first six months of Honor Guard, you have to learn the Honor Guard style of drill, which is a little bit different. You get a few of those ceremonial commitments under your belt. You do a few Arlington funerals, you do a White House, or you do a State Department, but once you get the hang of it, it’s kind of repetitive, to be honest, at that point, and so it’s not really taxing or difficult. The only thing is, once you do pick up corporal, then you are placed in more of a formal leadership role, and so at that point, the difficulty arises in finding ways to lead and motivate the Marines under your charge. But that wasn’t really even super hard, primarily because the caliber of Marine that is generally selected to come to Honor Guard is a pretty high caliber of Marine, so the guys are already self-motivated and pretty much go-getters, and so just a little bit of direction, they can run with it. It was, in some sense, probably a much easier job in the Marine Corps than many guys, you know, who would be in a fleet infantry unit, or would have to go to combat, for example, than they would be having. I had it a little cushy, maybe." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Was there something that you did for good luck?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "I don’t know if there was anything we did for good luck. My ritual was—actually used masking tape to hold my pants up, so your dress blue pants, you can use a belt, you can use suspenders, things like that, typically. But what I found is that in Honor Guard, we’re very particular about the way we look. You want the back of your trouser, the very bottom of the cuff of your trouser, you want that to rest when you’re standing up, you want it to rest right where your heel, the back of your heel meets the top part of your shoe. You don’t want it higher, you don’t want it lower, you want it to rest right there, where the heel meets the shoe. In order for me to achieve that without it sagging or without it coming up, I found that actually using masking tape, so grabbing my pants, getting them to the right position, having a guy behind me spotting it to make sure it’s where it’s supposed to be, and then just masking taping—girdle onto myself with the tape, would hold the pants, and the other thing it would do was sort of provide a little bit of a back brace. We would go through masking tape pretty quickly because we’d use a lot of it to make sure it would hold, and also to provide that bit of a brace, but that was sort of me and a lot of other guys, that was our tradition, if we had one. We looked pretty funny when, at the end of the commitment, when we got back to the barracks, we were just tripping—looked like a mummy just taking off strand after strand of masking tape, creating these huge balls of masking tape at the end of the day." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did people entertain themselves?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "We were all infantry and Marines in Honor Guard, which meant prior to the recent lifting of the combat arms, that we were all males, so there was a lot of immature male frat boy type behavior. There was a lot of physical exercise, people would exercise for fun. There was, during our liberty time, a lot of carousing out on the town, drinking, so it was sometimes unsavory on the entertaining ourselves side, but I think that’s to be expected often with young enlisted servicemen." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Are there any pranks that you or others would pull?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "Sometimes, we would do this. When we lived in the barracks our first year, all the guys from my platoon lived on the same deck, on the same floor of the barracks, it was a multi-floor building. We had sort of a central hallway, and our barracks rooms were off either side of this hallway, and during the day, we would typically all leave our doors unlocked, because if we weren’t out at a ceremonial commitment, we were there in the barracks, and we were resting or training or preparing our uniforms. We would all kind of leave our doors unlocked, and ultimately, leave our doors just wide open, because people would kind of wander from one room to another. You might have to borrow an iron or borrow some starch or whatever, and so sometimes, what we would do is, we would go in, and we would jack somebody’s thermostat up, and maybe it was the middle of summer, and we would go over to some guy’s room, and just kind of pop his door open, and if he wasn’t in there, for example, pop his door open and jack his thermostat up to like, 90 degrees on heat, and then we’d shut the door and walk out. 30 minutes or an hour later, the kid would go back to his room, and it would be like a sauna in there, so we would do little stuff like that for sure." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "When did you decide to leave the service?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "It was at the end of my four years. It would have been late spring, early summer of 2000, and at that point, I had come to realize that I was on the verge of picking up sergeant and going to the Fleet Marine Force, to an Infantry battalion, and I just realized at that point that I had come to learn something, that people who reenlist, people who stay in the Marine Corps, they have to be willing to make the Marine Corps their number-one priority in life. The Marine Corps doesn’t settle for less. It’s not a military branch that prides itself on a work/life balance. It is a military branch that asks for total dedication and commitment, and honestly, to be a very successful career Marine, generally speaking, means that you’re going to have a very hard time balancing a family life. I had seen that firsthand with the leaders that we had in the Marines, and experiences that I’ve had, and I don’t say that in any kind of a negative way. I believe that the Marine Corps is special, and it’s special because it requires such a high level of commitment from its Marines, and particularly from its Marine leaders. With that said, I didn’t want to sacrifice my future and what I was hoping to do in terms of building a family. I didn’t want to sacrifice my family’s priority to the Marine Corps, and so I decided at that point, it would be better for me to move on and do something else." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember the day that your service ended?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "Yes, I do. I had a buddy that I had been at Honor Guard with, and he had gone to the Fleet Marine Force instead of staying at Honor Guard, and he had been to combat in Kosovo, and my last day that I was getting out, he was actually back in town on some leave, so we got together, and that night, or that day. I remember walking around and saying goodbyes to different people, and I remember, I guess, before I go into that night, that day, I remember in particular, going and finding my former company commander. He was a gentleman who is now a colonel in the Marine Corps, who now runs the Senate Liaison Office for the Marine Corps, that he was the epitome of Marine to me, and to pretty much everybody else who had ever worked with him or for him. He was a really amazing guy, and I remember specifically on my last day, going, seeking him out. He had moved to a support role for a tour, and just having a little conversation with him, thanking him for his leadership and his example, and that was really powerful for me. Then I was leaving, going home to my apartment, and I was packing, I was preparing to leave the DC area. My friend, this guy from Boston, who had been a roommate of mine at the barracks years before had come back to DC on some liberty, we went out that night, and we went to a bar. My friend got jumped, and together we fought like six guys that night, and we successfully won that, and were injury-free, and made it home, and the next morning, I was loading up a truck and driving to Georgia. So maybe that was a fitting end in some way, to my time in the Marine Corps." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you go back to school?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "Yes, I went and got a degree in political science, actually. I assumed I was going to work in the realm of politics, and began to follow politics a little bit, living up in the DC area. Politics was something that was interesting to me more and more, as I had lived up there for those four years, and so when I went to school, I decided to get a degree in political science, and thought I’d work in politics, maybe on a campaign, eventually running a campaign. I spent some time working at the Georgia State Capitol, and that very much jaded me. I became very cynical towards politics. I think my problem was that I was more of a political idealist, or someone who was into political philosophy, more than I was a political pragmatist, and the actual process of making a sausage, so to speak, was not very appealing to me. I realized that that was not going to be my career, which led me to getting a job with the Archives, and led me to working my way up here at the Archives and making this my career for the last 13 or so years." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Was your education supported by the GI Bill?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "Yes, the GI Bill was probably one of the best things that came out of my military service, besides the character development that I received. The GI Bill was amazing, and it was amazing in part because Georgia had a scholarship program, funded by the Georgia lottery, that allowed me to actually go to school for free. I was able to capitalize on my GI Bill and utilize it to help with additional school-related expenses, like a place to live, a vehicle, you know, extra in dues, and things like that, that the Georgia lottery scholarship didn’t cover. If it had it not been for the GI Bill, this would definitely have been much harder, those years at college." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you continue any of those close relationships and friendships that you had outside the military?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "I kept in touch with some guys while I was finishing up school, MySpace and then Facebook were starting up, and so I was able to reach out and find some guys, but really, there was only one person that I kept in real contact with. That was my friend from Boston who had been in the six-man brawl with me. Him and I remained close for several years, was in his wedding, took some trips to Boston with him, and we kept a pretty close friendship. Eventually, we drifted apart a little bit, I think because of him continuing to live in the DC area and me having moved down to Atlanta, and him pursuing an occupation as a police officer, and me moving into civil service, I think eventually, we drifted apart a little bit. I still maintained some contact with him and some other guys via social media these days, but not much beyond that." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you join a veterans’ organization?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "No, I’ve thought about it before, about the Marine Corps League in particular, but I’m married with three small boys of my own now, and I have enough going on with those guys these days that I haven’t really had much time to think about joining something for myself." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did your services and experiences affect your life overall?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "That really is probably the most important aspect of my story. Growing up, as I alluded to earlier, I was sort of a geeky, nerdy kid. I didn’t have much confidence in myself. I wasn’t very assertive, I wasn’t very physically fit, I didn’t see a lot of direction for my life, but then when I went into the Marine Corps. They really do a phenomenal job of building your character, if you’re willing to tough it out and adhere to their program, and they taught me some really invaluable things about confidence and leadership and punctuality and organization, and never quitting. It was that character development that I received, especially in boot camp, and then also throughout my time in Honor Guard. That character development really changed who I was, and provided me with a foundation to succeed then in college, and also to succeed here with the National Archives. My current position is a little bit different. After I joined the Archives, I moved up from student to management intern role, and then to a supervisor, and then to the Assistant Director of a Federal Records Center here in Atlanta, and all of those roles were sort of matching with my personality and skillset. They were operational, they were leadership-oriented, but about 18 months ago, I took a position as a management analyst. It has been nice in terms of a better work life balance, teleworking, and sort of less supervisory responsibility. To be honest with you, it really doesn’t suit my personality and my skillset long­ term, and I’m itching to get back into the operational leadership deals. To that end, I have recently applied for and interviewed for a Director of FRC role for the Atlanta FRC, or the Riverside California FRC, and I’m just waiting to hear back to see if I’m going to be potentially selected for one of those two director positions. I’m really, really hoping I get one of them, too. I think it’ll be a perfect fit for my life experiences." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Is there anything else you would like to add, Jason, that we haven’t covered yet in the interview?" }, { "speaker": "MR. GLOVER", "text": "No, I just appreciate the opportunity to share some of this, especially the story about my July 4th spent guarding the Constitution. I thought that was a very serendipitous occasion for me, and just appreciate the opportunity." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Thank you for your service and thank you for the interview." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "When did you first enlist in the service?" }, { "speaker": "MR. WARREN HALSEY", "text": "Well, I enlisted in high school. My initial intent was going to the Air Force because my family’s Air Force. My father and his older brother were Air Force officers, and so they kind of assumed I was going the same route. My father started off as a pilot, but he transitioned out of that early in his career. So I was going into the Air Force until the Air Force recruiter convinced me that the Army would probably be a better option because it had a larger number of minorities. This was 1975–76, and it was a large branch of service, the largest opportunity for minorities, and I wanted to go into law enforcement anyway. Even though I was qualified for the Air Force, he suggested that I talk with the Army recruiter, which I did, and one conversation I said, okay, I’ll join. So I was a military policeman. My whole career I just stayed military policeman, so I had a couple of assignments stateside and did five overseas tours and maybe about 10 or 12 stateside tours. I stayed a total of 22 years. They had a height and weight requirement, and I was slightly underneath the height requirement, so I was a military policeman but I worked in the military corrections facility. Luckily my first duty assignment with the Infantry Division and the military police battalion was experiencing a major drawdown of people getting out, and so they were looking for people who wanted to lead the corrections facility and work regular patrol, which I did initially. So I came there as a military policeman, but I was too short, so I missed my opportunity. I ended up leaving the correction facility after about five or six months after I had finished boot camp and went state patrol for the rest of my time. I was a canine handler and did the regular law enforcement duties associated with being an Army MP." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Where were you living at the time that you enlisted?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "Right here in Prince George’s County. Growing up in the military, it was in my blood so to speak, and it appealed to me at an early age. I wanted to be a helicopter pilot, but then I realized—this is during the Vietnam War—that the Air Force didn’t have a whole lot of helicopters, and so I kind of put that on the back burner and looked into law enforcement. I wanted to be a dog handler. Whenever we were stationed on base they always had the K-9 on the gates, and every year they would do an open base, joint base, open house and I would always see the K-9s. So it was just something that naturally—I was drawn to it. And I said okay. It’s an opportunity to do it, to travel and see the world and just like recruiters say and it fit perfect for me." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you have any favorite K-9s?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "Actually I had two of them. One going through school, he was about a 9-year-old German Shepherd, pretty good-sized dog. And then after I completed school I went to Korea, and they gave me my assigned dog, and he was pretty rugged. He was about a 150-pound German Shepherd and pretty vicious. I was not a patrol, we had patrol. We had patrol narcotic, patrol explosives. And then they had sentry. The Army no longer uses sentry dogs because they’re considered uncontrolled aggression, but I was a sentry dog handler initially, and the dog I was assigned to, his name was Caesar. And he was pretty aggressive. He bit me a couple of times and intimated me right out of school. I had to learn the hard way how to break him down, but after I got him under control, it was probably one of the best assignments I had. Yankee 104 was his serial number. And I was in Korea with him on a missile base." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember your first days in service?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "Yes. Fort Dix, New Jersey, for infantry training. Back then everybody, all males went through infantry training. A couple of years later, they broke it down where, depending on what your MOS was, you may go through a combined basic combat training, and your individual training, like military police, was combined, infantry, artillery, air defense artillery, combat engineer, and tankers. You would take your boot camp and your AIT or your advanced school together. You wouldn’t leave, you would just transition from boot camp to your advanced course. But when I went through, everybody trained together. So you went through the infantry phase and then you were transferred to wherever your base for your school was going to be. So I was at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and then I flew to Fort Benning, Georgia, and drove to the Army Military Police School or rode on buses to the Military Police School for about nine, ten weeks." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What did it feel like when you were doing that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "It was my first time being in the Deep South, and I grew up during the Civil Rights era and everything, so it left a kind of a different mindset with me, if I can say that. I had never seen cotton fields or anything like that until I got down to Georgia. And I’m thinking about all the Civil Rights protests and the demonstrations I would see on the news and in the newspapers, and being 18 years old, being down in the Deep South, I had seen Klan rallies and things like that, so I was a little bit intimated. I wouldn’t leave the base. We didn’t really have that much opportunity, but a couple of years later I got reassigned down there as a drill sergeant, and I had a little bit more freedom. I had a lot more freedom so I could see things, and it wasn’t as bad as I had made it out to be. It was also years later, probably had time to calm down the whole situation there—we called in the ‘76–’77, and then I went back in ‘82 and was stationed there for three years. And it was still different from being up here in Washington, DC, area and then being down in the South like that. It’s, I won’t say it’s culture shock, but it is a different type of culture and mindset, you have to get used to it." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did you first get into that and what was it like to be a drill sergeant?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "I was inspired by my drill sergeants in boot camp. This was a little over a year after Vietnam ended, and so we had 12 of them. I still could remember every one of their names. They just had that kind of impact on me, and it was something that I feel like, okay, I want to do that. So about six years later, I was back down at the Military Police School. Back then, all of the Army bases that conducted boot camp had their own Drill Sergeant School. So like Fort Jackson had one; Fort McClellan had one; Fort Benning, Georgia; all the places where the Army had boot camp had their own Drill Sergeant School just so—because there was that many drill sergeants always going through. So I was back down at the Military Police School, and I went through Drill Sergeant School, and I was a Basic training drill sergeant because they had drill sergeants. You all go through the same school, but some of you would end up as an MP AIT Basic, a AIT drill sergeant, so you’re with the same soldiers for 16 weeks. And then on the other side of the base where I was, it was just basic training, so you would get any soldier that did not have an assignment where they would have combined basic and AIT. So any trainee that had boot camp and then their advanced school at a different base, they may come to Fort McClellan or Fort Jackson or wherever. I only had the soldiers for eight weeks from reception station to graduation, and then you get a whole group of new soldiers. But the drill sergeants that I had influenced me and I really tried to, I guess, if I can use a good word—imitate them. I bumped into a couple of them years later, but that was a very rewarding assignment. I kind of remember how my drill sergeants were. My mindset was everything that you’re going to have them do, you need to be a subject matter expert in that. So I was single at the time so I was able to handle those long hours. We’d be there from 16- to 18-, 20-hour days sometimes. I had the time to really devote into it, and we used to use the term if you’re married, a two-hump family. In other words when you get up in the morning there’s someone else in the bed, that’s your spouse. And then when you come back home there’s another hump in the bed and that’s your spouse who was there that morning and because your day is that full, you’re always on the go, always on the go. But I just remember how they trained us and the fact that the Drill Sergeant School was 13 weeks long and it was pretty intense. The commandant made it clear to us this is what they call a controlled entry/free exit program. In other words, they determine who’s qualified to attend the school but just because you get into the school doesn’t mean you’re going to graduate. You can go all the way up until the last week and fail out of the school. And so then once you complete the school, now you have an obligated two-year duty assignment as a drill sergeant, and your tour of duty is not over successfully until you complete your two years, so at any time after you graduate, because of the demands of being a drill sergeant, you can be relieved of duty at any time before your tour of duty is up. The letter they gave us when we graduated really did emphasize that. So that was what I kept in the back of my mind because you did, unfortunately, you saw some people that graduated but two years later they weren’t there, they didn’t make it through the entire tour of duty because of maybe conduct, misconduct, or anything that could cause you to, as we say, lose your hat. That was one of the things I kept in my mind. Almost like being a police officer. You know you’re going to be watched by the public so you have to be above and beyond, you have to really set the examples. So more so than anything, set the example, be the example, be able to explain all of your actions, and just remember that you’re living in a glass bubble, just like a police officer. You have a lot of authority, a lot of power, a lot of influential power, more so than anybody else because you’re wearing that brown Smokey the Bear hat. And so just by the sight that can create…I guess in a sense, intimidation or people expect certain things from you so you have to be able to handle that because if you don’t, it can upset your career. They always have their perception of this guy wearing the Smokey the Bear hat or the campaign hat if you want it that, just like someone wearing a badge. And not to be disrespectful to the profession of arms or law enforcement, sometimes an officer or a drill sergeant may not be the best candidate, they may even make it through the course but they may not be the best candidate to be in that type of environment. And when I say environment as a drill sergeant, you’ve got people from all walks of life, all education levels, all different types of life experiences, and you have a very, very restricted time schedule where you’ve got to move everybody from Location A to Location B, you’re very much restricted on your time but you have a very heavy demand. And this pressure and stress that can create can really be tough, but you volunteered for it, so you have to be able to be as flexible as the situation is, but you also have to be very rigid and be able to communicate to a large group of people in the most effective manner to get the job done. So it’s something that you learn. You learn about yourself very quickly. You learn with whomever you’re working with if you’re lucky enough to have a drill sergeant partner, and then because every group that comes through—and it would be anywhere from 400 to 600 people every training cycle—so every group is going to bring a whole different set of problems. But after like for three cycles you kind of create your own mold on how you’re going to operate. You might have a good guy and a bad guy drill sergeant. And there’s just so many different variables that you have to plug into the situation. You’re training soldiers. You have eight weeks and five days from pickup to graduate. You know what your training cycle is going to be. The one thing you don’t know is how much individual difficulty. If you have 45 soldiers, you have 45 different personalities that you have to be able to deal with and make them fit the situation. And that’s where your biggest challenge comes in. It’s kind of like looking into the unknown. You know what the end result is going to be. You’re going to graduate some soldiers. Some of them may not make it the first time but you know what the end result is going to be, you just don’t know the specific pathway or the obstacles that you may have to overcome to get there. But that’s part of the positive effect or the positive stress of being a drill sergeant. You learn little tactics and techniques. We call them drill sergeant tactics or drill sergeant techniques of how to get a troubled soldier or a trainee through. For example, if a soldier can’t close his non-sighting eye, you may give him a pair of glasses that don’t have a lens in them and you take a balled-up piece of paper towel and you stick it in between or you leave the lens in the non-sighting and you might ball up a paper towel and stick it in between the lens and his eyelid so his eyes are still open but he can only use his firing eye. Little things like that you learn how to circumvent the problem so he can learn how to zero in on his target, because some soldiers, when they close one eye, the other eye closes. It’s stuff they don’t teach you, but you’ll pick it up from another drill sergeant or you may just in your own infinite wisdom design a tactic that if it works, it’s not going to detract from the training, it’s not going to hurt the soldiers, it’s not going to damage the equipment. Because the ultimate goal is to graduate the highest number of soldiers that you can the first time through. They develop a bond between each other as well as a rapport with the drill sergeants, and so as frustrating as it can be, you still want everybody to be successful. And so you want to try to make sure that the one soldier who fails out or who may fail out, him failing out may bring the morale of the rest of the group down. So you want to try to keep that in check. And sometimes you’ve got to do things that you would not normally think about or wouldn’t consider doing to get the soldier through. But on the same hand you may have to hold that soldier back or have him recycled so that he can graduate, maybe not with his peer group, but he can still graduate and be a soldier in the United States Army." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What wars did you serve in?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "I was in the invasion of Panama with the 82nd. I was in the 3rd Battalion, the Military Police Specialist Division, but the way we’re set up back then we called it the Slice Element so the military police, military intelligence, combat engineers, communications, and I believe it was mortar platoon, we were force multipliers for the airborne infantry, so wherever they went, we went with them. And we did our role as military policy, military intelligence, or the communications, or the engineers and so we deployed with them, in Jungle Survival School." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Where exactly in Panama did you go?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "We went to a couple different places. We flew into Howard Air Base, and we convoyed across Panama. Our base of operations was in the town of Gamboa, but we were Gamboa, Coco Solo. Our main objective at that time was we assaulted El Renacer Prison, where Noriega had political prisoners, a couple of American in there. So Madden Dam and a place called Sierra Tigre." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What was it like when you first arrived?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "Hot. When we left Fort Bragg, it was about 12 degrees. They had a major ice storm. So we had our snow gear on and then on the aircraft, it was civilian aircraft, but when we got to Panama the next morning after we got to Fort Sherman, which is where the Jungle Operations Training Center is, Fort Sherman, the next morning first PT run at 6 o’clock, it was about 103 degrees. It was about 12 degrees and the next morning, the humidity, this was in December so that’s their rainy season. You’ve got to adjust, hydrate, but the jungle is beautiful and it’s very dangerous. You’re so wet most of the time ... you got used to it. It gets kind of hot at Bragg in the summertime, but it’s a different type of humidity. You’re just drenched. You could be in the jungle. Sometimes in the jungle it would seem like the leaves are blowing where it’s actually rain coming down, but it doesn’t hit you because the vegetation is so thick and dense that it kind of sounds like a little bit of highway traffic and wind blowing through the leaves. Or you could be out in an open area and maybe like 100 meters in front of you, you could actually see the rain coming down and it hadn’t hit you yet, and then 30 minutes later, after you literally drenched in a torrential downpour, your uniform is bone dry because it’s that hot." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did you go about finding drinkable water in the jungle?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "Well, we always had our canteens. They didn’t have the camel bags, so we just had the sling canteens and then your hip canteen, you always carry two or three. And of course when you got in the jungle, we had to train for about four or five days, and then they just terminated the training because things started to amp up. But whenever we were out like on a training site, we were either inside the jungle environment or on the outskirts of the jungle. Special Forces ran the Jungle Operations Training Center so there was blister bags; it looked like a training area, but areas would be cut out and there would be blister bags. You always had access to water unless you were back at the actual barracks." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you see combat?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "Yes, we were in combat. We were the 82nd Airborne at that time had three airborne brigades, and each brigade has three battalions, which you know we had about 350 to 500 soldiers. So our battalion, 3rd Battalion, 504 Parachute Entry Regiment, we deployed to go to Jungle Survival School. While we were there, like I said earlier, things started amping up and I guess about 4, 5, 6 days into the Jungle Training School, things stopped because things got escalated. So we went into our primary role as paratroopers, and since we were already here on ground, we started practicing our patrols for any type of possible operation that may follow. And then the invasion did occur, and then the other two battalions, 1st Battalion and 2nd Battalion, 504 Parachute Entry Regiment, were back at Fort Bragg with 2nd Brigade and 3rd Brigade. They flew and they all did jump in with the Rangers, and actually there was maybe a small contingent of Special Forces and SEALS but they came—they all got their combat jump-in, we were already on ground in country so we did a combination boat assaults and helicopter assaults to the different locations during the invasion on Madden Dam and the prison. El Renacer Prison, we did the boat assault on the El Renacer Prison. With the survival school, we made it through about maybe a third, two-thirds of the school, I can’t remember. But they were just showing us all kinds of things. You know booby traps, how do I identify edible plants or plants that can cause harm. As they knew things were going to start to escalate, they started running us through. We did repelling, waterborne operations. And I think they just abbreviated the entire course for us because they knew we were going to be there for the duration. And we did some patrols in the jungle. It’s a different type of, if you will, wilderness environment. But it’s really the jungle. It’s beautiful. And it’s very dangerous. I do remember they did have like a small zoo, if you want to call it that, where they had plant specimens and amphibious reptile specimens of everything in the jungle that can kill you or that can keep you alive. They had a pretty good sized anaconda in a pit. They had bats, all kind of birds, it looked like a small jungle zoo. They had anything you could come across in the jungle, not anything but most things that you could come across if you went deep into the jungle—they had examples. They had a jaguar, caged up, good sized. They did tell us later during one of the waterborne training exercises that there was a Special Forces guy sitting up with a radio, binoculars, some type of carbine rifle with a scope and we had finished, and was just cleaning up waiting to roll out. I was talking with him, and he said he was the shark guard. And I said you mean, there’s sharks in this water. He goes, yeah, there’s sharks in the water. We were in the lagoon area, not in the canal or in Gatun Lake, which runs into the canal. But we were in water that was known to have sharks. So he was our guard and he had a mask. He has swim fins, a rifle, binoculars, radio, and I think one or two tanks up on the shoreline. And so that made me think a little bit different, I’m like, okay, I know they’ve got anacondas and caiman, and they may have had some barracudas, but now I’ve got to contend with sharks. It was an entirely different country. I just kept sharp, trying to keep my eyes open. I’m from the suburb city type environment, so I don’t really like snakes that much, but I know they have the bushmaster, we never ran into any. The anaconda is a big snake. And we saw a couple of those in the water. I did when we were transporting prisoners one time, but I just kept my head on the 360-swivel just to make sure that I didn’t run up on anything or anything didn’t sneak up on me. They have some tremendous ant hills. I did ask one of the instructors, “why these big piles of dirt?” He kind of laughed and goes, that’s not dirt, those are ant hills. They were four or five feet tall. I said, okay, this is not a place you want to get lost in. But it’s beautiful, it’s not like Yosemite National Park or any state park, that you might see here in the United States, it’s all nature." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Were there many casualties in your unit?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "Yes, I had a team leader that was one of my MP team leaders that was wounded, and he was medevac’d out during the initial assault. I didn’t know it until the next morning because it was a six-man squad, but they broke us down into an Alpha and a Bravo team, three-person team. And he was with me and my machine gunner and then the other team, they did the helicopter assault into Madden Dam, but we got separated. He was medevac’d after he got hit by some shrapnel so I didn’t see him again until I think April of the following year, when he got back to the unit. He was good to go. Then I do know there was one infantry guy that got hit. I don’t think he was shot, but I think he had the medics working on him. Really couldn’t see a whole lot because our assault was at night time. There were some casualties. I’ll just say that. Yes, there were casualties. Not a whole lot. There was some people that were medevac’d and some people with just light injuries. But I do know the Military Police Unit that jumped in, my company, there were broken legs, broken ankles, that’s pretty common on a jump because they jump with a lot of gear, so we had a couple of soldiers get Purple Hearts. My team leader was awarded a Purple Heart." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Were you awarded any medals or citations?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "Yes, everybody that was involved got a combat patch, we were awarded the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal with the Arrowhead Device for waterborne or airborne assault. Then, the rest of the divisions, everybody that jumped in got what we call the Mustard Stain, they got the gold star on their jump wing which indicates a combat jump." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did you stay in touch with your family throughout your whole journey?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "They were back at Bragg when I was in Panama. And then when I first joined the Army, I was single. I didn’t get married until I was a drill sergeant. And my wife came down to Alabama, and we were there for a couple of years and went to Germany for three more years. Came back to Fort Bragg. So they moved around with me; once I had family, they moved with me. I did two tours in Korea when I was single. And then most Army assignments in Korea are what they call non- command sponsored, so your family doesn’t go with you. So my second tour in Korea was my last overseas assignment in ‘96–’97, and you’re assigned to an infantry division, so your family is not going to be with you anyway because you’re all the way up north. I was about 10 miles from the Demilitarized Zone. And so of course my family wouldn’t be there. They were in North Carolina still." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How was Germany?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "I loved Germany. I had always been told that there’s two Armies. There’s the Army overseas, and there’s the Army in the Continental United States. Germany, my first assignment, was right after drill sergeant duty. I was an instructor at the NCO Academy, which I really didn’t want to do initially because it was just like being a drill sergeant. So for three years I was a drill sergeant, and then they sent me right to an NCO Academy as an instructor, so I was doing the same thing but for more advanced soldiers and not basic trainees. But I tried to get out of the assignment twice, and they said, no, you’re still going or you’re going to get out. So I went and it turned out to be pretty good because I actually ran across a couple of my trainees who were now going to the NCO Academy. And so it turned out to be a pretty good assignment, very good assignment actually. So I was there for three years, the first time in the Mechanized Infantry Tank Division. That was my first time being exposed to the “big bad boy” tanks, the Abrams, main battle tank. I believe it’s a 37-ton tank. There was East and West Germany, so I was in Baumholder in West Germany, and in that location, Baumholder, you can pretty much go anywhere in Europe in about three, three and a half hours, so we were in a pretty good location as far as travel. But as far as if it’s local because of the Mechanized Infantry Division, you’re kind of forced in like a training environment. It was a small little town. But it was around tankers and stuff. There were two compounds or two bases in the city of Baumholder, which if you were an NCO Academy instructor, however they arranged it, most of us lived in base housing, which was walking distance to our job, so it was pretty unique. The professionalism of the instructors was really very comfortable. I’ll say that because the commandant of the NCO Academy had just come there from being the commandant of the Sergeant Majors Academy in Fort Worth, Texas, so he was a no-nonsense guy, he was a tanker. He was pretty intense if you weren’t doing your job, because he really did believe and he was kind of like George Patton, General Patton, the way he’s portrayed in the movie. He wouldn’t admit to it, but I think that’s who his mentor was. I think that’s who he probably tried to model himself after. As long as you were doing what you were supposed to be doing—that was training NCOs and doing it correctly—you didn’t have to worry, but if you were weak in one area or if you weren’t doing your job, you know he would definitely do a job to you. And wouldn’t pull and punches neither, so he made it really clear. His motto was “you don’t have to believe what I believe but you’d better blank, blank believe that I believe that.” And the scary thing about it was that he had a doctorate’s degree in psychology. He didn’t have a lot of friends but on a professional level he was respected. On a personal level, he probably didn’t have that many friends there at the academy, but you had to respect his knowledge base. He would take care of you if you were doing your job, and he made that very clear the 30 months I was there. If you were teaching, coaching, counseling, which is one of the NCO ethics back then, teach coaching, counsel soldiers—if you were doing that and doing it very proficiently, you didn’t have anything to worry about. He will take care of you. But if you were not doing your job, he would make an example out of you in the worst way." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Can you tell me about some memorable experiences?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "In Korea, I was up on the DMZ both times. I was on my first tour of duty as a dog handler when the South Korean president was assassinated. And they thought, everybody was thinking the North Koreas had a hand in it, but it turned out to not be the case. I was on a missile base, and it got pretty tense. And I won’t go into a whole to of detail obviously, but I was 19 going on or 20 going on 21, and I said, okay, this is real. Things got tense for a while and then they kind of died down. We had an incident in our unit where a young soldier, I guess it was his first duty assignment and his first overseas assignment, got hold of some alcohol and some drugs and started hallucinating, and I don’t know how he did it, but he was able to take like five or six soldiers hostage, and he had them tied up with wire and was beating them. And the commander, the first sergeant and security NCIs, we were all on leave, some in country and some back in the States. So it was a small unit. It was probably about 140 people in the entire unit, from private to the commander, so we basically we got him under control and he was medevac’d. They had to medevac him out, and they took him to Seoul, and they took him to Hawaii. But this was 1979; they still had a curfew in the country. So it was just a lot of things that people back in the States may not be aware of because it was a different era, a different time in Korea then—kind of like how it is now. I had some good friends over there. It was just different. Then when I went back the second time in ‘96–’97, I was all the way up north, and it was a little bit different. You had a lot of riots. And there was still stuff going on with North Korea. I’ll say, a lot of it never really got back to the States because it may not have been that much of a threat worldwide but maybe just in country. I saw some things which really surprised, just because of where I was stationed at Camp Casey and all the way up north, past Casey." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What was the food like?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "If you stay in Germany for a while, you’ll gain weight if you don’t watch yourself. And then in Korea, it’s a different type of cuisine, but it’s good food, either country it’s good food. Either continent, it’s good food. You have to develop a taste for it. A lot of people don’t like kimchee, which is the fermented spiced cabbage in Korea, but I have had a couple of types of kimchee, some of it is pretty strong, some of it’s pretty mild. You have to acquire a taste for it. There’s a dish called yakimondu. It’s kind of like dumplings, but it’s pretty good. We had a Republic of Korea (ROK) sergeant major assigned to our unit, and he invited all the NCOs and senior NCOs to his house, and we had a full-course traditional Korean meal. It’s very lean, it can be very spicy at times, and I just enjoyed it. I’d been over there twice, and I spoke a little bit of Korean, so I got around. I had a couple of what they call Katusa. The ROK soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, and then you have what they call Katusa, which is Korean Augmented to the U.S. Army. They’re ROK, they’re Korean soldiers that go to Korean boot camp, but because of their ability to speak English, they have a better understanding of the English language and they have a little bit more of an education. They’re assigned on U.S. Army bases throughout Korea, and they work side by side with the Army soldiers. When I was over there the first time, there was a dog handler with us, and he had a very peculiar personality and attitude. Come to find out he was a Korean soap opera movie star. After I learned about that, we became pretty good friends. But in the beginning, we would always go at each other. And then in my second tour, one of our supply sergeants sang in the Korean Opera. And I remember him telling me he was going to be the Korean version of Pavarotti one day. I didn’t believe him at first, but then he took me on a baseball field and he said, stand here at home plate, and he stood on home plate and he said go out to center field. And I could hear his voice and he started hitting those notes and I was thoroughly impressed. I was like wow. And he would take me around to the parts of Korea where there weren’t any U.S. soldiers and just give me—he called it the Korean experience: riding their subways and going through their shopping malls. I said, when I come back I’m going to look for you, I’m going to try to find you. And we had a pretty good friendship." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you feel any pressure or stress?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "Yes, because about seven months after my second youngest son was born, I got sent to Korea. There were a lot of things going on. I knew I was going to come home and retire within a year. My father-in- law was ill, and I had just gotten married like a year before, a little over a year. And then seven months into that marriage, my second marriage, actually, I was in Korea. I was up all the way up north so it was a little bit different. The first time I was there I was 20 years old, and then 20 years later, I’m back over there. The country was completely different. It looked like a combination of New York City, DC, Los Angeles, and San Francisco all rolled up into one my second tour. But my first tour they still had dirt roads where we were— they still had the curfew because when you’re on a missile base, you’re not in a city environment. You’re in a remote environment, so it was kind of like a little bit of the old and a little bit of the new the second time I went over there. But I was more familiar with the country, as I said, I spoke a little bit of Korean, so I felt more at home the second time than I did the first time, and the same way in Germany." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did people entertain themselves?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "[Laughing]. We’re soldiers. That’s a good one. Soldiers’ minds or imagination knows no limit. I’ll just put it like that. Some guys go to the club, some guys do sports. Myself, it was the martial arts. Everybody in the barracks had a stereo system or a big boom box, played an instrument. There was always, every place I was stationed either in the barracks, if you didn’t hear stereos you heard someone with their guitar or just everything and anything you could imagine. You’d definitely play sports. I played football I’d say at almost every duty assignment, football and softball from boot camp all the way up to my last duty assignment. There’s always something. No excuse to be bored and being able to say, well I don’t have anything to do, there’s nothing to do. Travel. You name it. There were just so many things you could that sometimes there wasn’t enough time to do it all. At least that was my experience. Been there at Camp Roberts. Fort Hunter Liggett. Been out in the field training exercises in the snow and the rain, in the mud. On the rifle ranges in Alabama in the summertime you’re asking yourself, “what am I doing out here?” Ninety- nine degrees, 100-percent humidity. People don’t think it gets cold in Alabama; well, it does get cold down there. And like on the rifle range with privates, making them know, zero in that weapon and at times you’re wondering, what, I volunteered for this? But in the end, you know, I wouldn’t change anything. Take the good with the bad. I did a little bit of time as a recruiter with the intent of switching over to be a recruiter for the rest of my Army career, but I can honestly say now that that part of my career was ... you’re working in a different manner. My schedule" }, { "speaker": "was Monday through Saturday from about 7", "text": "30 to about 9:30, 10 o’clock at night. And I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all, but you know I did it, and my attitude was different as a recruiter because normally you could be a drill sergeant or a recruiter but I was able to do both. If I had to compare one to the other, I’d do drill sergeant duty hands down for the rest of my career if I could, as opposed to being a recruiter. Because you’re dealing with civilians and government funds and you have so many restrictions on you, you have so much pressure on you to produce and put someone in. It’s just different. I was in military police, and so the long hours have always been part of my job, but it’s just that basically you’re recruiting, you’re selling a service and the service is the Army. And so if you imagine like a car, a used car salesman or a telemarketer. As I say, I don’t really like it that much because you’re a recruiter. There are high school juniors and seniors and some of them. If they don’t want to talk to you, you’ve got to learn how to deal with that and how to handle that. I didn’t really hate recruiting; it was just the leadership structure and the way they applied leadership went against everything that I had been taught. It created certain issues within me, because some of the things I was used to coming up with, now I’m on recruiting duty and it’s kind of like, well, forget all that. I’m like, you can’t, you know? You can’t teach me how to refire a weapon in a new way. There’s only one way you fire a rifle, and you can’t reteach that and say forget everything that you learned, I’m going to teach you a new way how to fire, and that’s kind of how I compare recruiting duty. But after I finished it I understood, because of the mission that a recruiter has, you’re not dealing with young soldiers, you’re dealing with civilians, but they don’t teach you that in school, you find that out when you get out there. As crazy as it was, there were some fun times there as well, but it was just very short-lived fun times." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Can you tell me some of the pranks that you or other people would pull on each other?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "In boot camp or Military Police School, whenever you get a chance to go to sleep, you go to sleep. I think all branches do this. You find a guy that’s a heavy sleeper, and you put his hand in a bowl of water or something and they say that it makes them got to the bathroom. Or you can like get their can of shaving cream, put it in his hand and someone else like take a straw from a broom or something and mess with his nose or his ear, and he’ll slap himself in the face and it’s putting shaving cream all over his face. I’m trying to think of one of the other things that we would do. My roommate was terrified of snakes, and we were out in the desert at Fort Hunter Liggett in California. This is back when we had to put the tents up and everything for shelter to have. He was outside the tent putting logs and dirt up against the edge of the tent where it comes in contact with the ground, because they get those snakes out there. And I guess that he forgot that I was inside the tent. I could see him packing dirt. I could see his arms and hands so I jabbed at the side of the tent as if it was a snake and I could hear him yell and it scared him. I scared him pretty bad. They had a lot of tarantulas out there, and one of the guys, he was leaning up against a tree and he just went to sleep. And he didn’t realize I was up in the tree, and I had caught a tarantula and had tied a string to it. I don’t know why I did it. I mean, these tarantulas are about the size of my hand. They’re big. Big hairy tarantulas. And I hung it down in front of him and called his name and he kind of opened up his eyes and there’s this big tarantula right in front of him and he literally just started crying. He didn’t move, he just started crying. And I guess he was afraid of spiders. It’s crazy because I don’t like snakes but I don’t mind messing with other people with snakes and spiders and stuff." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did they get payback on you after that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "One time they did. I got my wisdom teeth pulled back in Garrison, and I had never had a tooth pulled or anything like that so I didn’t really understand the whole process. But my roommate, he was always at the dentist for one thing or another, and I was always messing with him, like slapping him in his head when he’d come back, because his face would all be swollen up. He warned me they were going to get me when they found out I was getting all four of my wisdoms pulled at the same time. And they made it very clear. He said “don’t go to sleep.” So I started thinking about all the things that I had done to them and the MPs that we know—we do crazy stuff anyway. I’m laying up there in the bunk bed on the top bunk, and I can hear them sneaking into the room. And I had a baseball bat, I was on the softball team, so I had a baseball bat in the bed with me. And they were about to really put it on me, and I sat up and I had this big aluminum baseball bat, and I’m like not today fellas. And they said, “okay, well we’re going to get you one way or another.” And so I pretty much was in a lot of pain but I stayed awake for about a day and a half with that bat because that’s the crazy stuff we used to do. When you go to MPS school, a lot of times when you transfer out of the school, your first duty assignment, a lot of the guys are going to go together, so you’ve been with each other for a while. It’s like one big family and there’s going to be pranks pulled, and you’re going to get caught one time. One way or another, they’re going to get you." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember the day that your service ended?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "Oh, yeah. I anticipated waiting and waiting and waiting. I was overseas in Korea, ‘97, and I decided when I was in Korea, I said, when I go back to the States, I’m punching in. I’m punching out. I’m done, I’m going to retire and do some other things. So I was stationed at Fort Belvoir, and I was the operations sergeant at the MP Company, and I decided, okay, it’s time to go. So when I came back I knew I was going to retire. I was told I came out on a promotion list, but I don’t know if that was true or that was just a ploy to get me to reenlist again. I’m like, nah, I did 22, I’m going home. I’m ready to go home. You kind of know when it’s your time to leave. Some people stick around because they’re trying to get the next or the last stripe. And I had a couple of jobs lined up. It’s not really that hard if you come out of law enforcement in the military and go into law enforcement. I took a year break and taught JROTC at a high school in Baltimore because I was an instructor and a drill sergeant and I wanted to do some teaching anyway. But I still wanted to go into law enforcement, get back in law enforcement, so I just taught for a year and then went right back into law enforcement and that’s where I’ve been ever since. Security and law enforcement, security management, and law enforcement." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Have you ever tried to access your military records at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "Absolutely. One of the ladies who works upstairs, right here in A1, she came down to the security office. She had an issue with her badge, and we started talking and chit-chatting. We found out we went to the same high school, and her older sister had classes with me as a sophomore, and while we were talking she called her sister up, and “do you remember…” and then I made a comment. I said, “yeah, I need to start doing some research on my family.” Unbeknownst to me she worked in the Records Section. She asked what my parents’ last name was, what my father’s last name was, and about an hour later, she called me up and had pulled records of family members. My father, his two older brothers, my late grandfather, she pulled his draft registration card. My grandpa was born in 1897, but she showed me a copy of his draft registration card when he was 42 years old. I need to really, really get into the records portion of my family since I’m like the unofficial military historian. My father’s two older brothers are now deceased. And so it’s just him and then me and then I’ve got a son in and one getting ready to go in. I’ve got to keep that military history thing going. But she showed me some things, and I was like, “wow, you really can learn about your family history at the archives.” You really can. My sister, she does a lot of the genealogy stuff. She’s much, much more into it than I am. But just from a military standpoint, and this is the National Archives, I’m going to take the time and dig deeper and just get specific, like I did find a _Time_ Magazine photo album and I’m not 100-percent sure, but it looks like my uncle, my father’s older brother, looks like him on the beachfront during the D-Day invasion on the beach in Normandy. I had him look at it, and he goes, yeah, that kind of looks like him. But we can’t be 100-percent sure because he was a quartermaster, and it was during the time when African Americans were rumored to not have active combat roles, but it looks like my uncle. I’m not 100-percent sure, but I know he was a quartermaster, and these guys were offloading ships, and so that kind of sparked my interest and my motivation to dig deeper. While I’m here, that’s what I plan on doing is to try and find out the specific units that were there in a certain timeframe because I’ve got his discharge certificate, and if that was actually him ..." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you join a veteran’s organization when you got out?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "Veterans of Foreign Wars and then in the 80s, they made it like if you’re a squad leader or sergeant, you’ve got to set the example so you can’t try to encourage your soldiers to join and get a membership if you’re not a member yourself. I became a lifetime member. I’m still a lifetime member of the 82nd Airborne Division. I’m a member of the VFW and the American Legion." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What are your thoughts on some veterans’ benefits?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "A couple of years ago, the Archives had a guest speaker who was a Purple Heart recipient, a former Army Special Forces who had been blown up three different times and spent 39 months in Walter Reed, and he came and gave this speaking engagement. He brought out some very, very interesting facts about the military services and the VA. And gave some very good information. But veterans just in general, the VA has a lot of work to do to take care of the guys from Korea, from Vietnam, and all of the conflicts we’ve been involved in as well as the wars. There was a bombing of a Marine Corps Embassy in Beirut, Grenada, Panama, the list goes on and on. First Gulf War, second Gulf War, and Afghanistan. There’s a lot that they need to be doing to take care of these guys. And you know right now they’re operating at about 10 percent, they’re not doing what they need to do to take care of the soldiers, the veterans." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did your services and your experiences overall affect your life?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "The Army is older than the United States itself. We had what was called the Continental Army, then it became the United States Army after we became the United States. But the military as a whole— Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Reserves, National Guard—are a vital part of the history of the United States. Because if it hadn’t been for all of the conflicts and the wars, there’s no telling how different the United States would be right now. I have very personal feelings regarding service to the country because I believe the percentage is like a little over 1 percent, maybe less than 1 percent, of eligible Americans ever serve. Well, maybe it’s just less than 1 percent of Americans ever served period. In other countries, I do know in Korea, it’s mandatory unless you have a mental or physical challenge that will not allow you, you’re going to serve. I don’t have anything against anybody who doesn’t join, but I do know that in my era, when I was in high school, they used to think that people, I had a family member say it, “the only reason you went into the military is because you can’t do anything else,” and I kind of just laughed it off and I said okay. Years later, I brought it up to his attention. I said, “well, how many people do you know between the age of 17 and 19 can be on the ground somewhere in the Unites States and talk to a jet fighter pilot on a radio and tell him to place some munitions at this location and be accurate within 100 yards?” I said, what colleges are going to teach you how to do that? That’s hands-on learning. That’s what the military does. That’s why we’re so uniquely different, and I’m not knocking college or any type of other education, but whatever branch you’re in, whatever your skill is, the majority of how you learn that skill is hands-on. Learn while doing. And that’s going to affect you for the rest of your life in anything and everything that you do. I think that being in the military has definitely changed my life because I don’t know what I would be doing if I hadn’t joined the military. I would say I have no regrets. You take the good with the bad, but it’s just unique being a service member whether you’re Army, Navy, Air Force or Marine Corps, we’re just uniquely different. It’s not a bragging rights thing, it’s like I used to tell the high school kids ... they say, “well, I don’t want to go into the military.” I said, “well, everyone’s not made for the military, but the military has something to offer everybody. That’s why they use the word opportunity.” Just the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, the Coast Guard, they’re not joining you, they’re going to join that select branch of the service. You have to give, and if you give, you’ll receive." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Is there anything you would like to add that we haven’t covered yet in the interview?" }, { "speaker": "MR. HALSEY", "text": "I would say it was just a compliment that you called me and wanted to interview me. I mean, I was like, wow, I did one interview when I was recruited because it was during the first Gulf War, but we were targeted, so to speak. The matter of the fact that I’m working with the Archives, so the entire Security Management Division, the guys I work with here in College Park, I’d say about almost 100 percent, maybe 99 percent, 98 percent of the people are former military. Some are retired, some are just getting retired and got out. It’s a compliment, it’s an honor for me that someone would want to listen to my little stint in the service, because I’m just one of millions." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Thank you for your service and thank you for this interview." } ]

[ { "speaker": "MR. ERIK MOSHE", "text": "Hi Bryan, thanks for taking the time to do this interview. Where were you at the time you enlisted?" }, { "speaker": "MR. BRYAN MCGRAW", "text": "No problem. Well, actually, I decided when I was high school I wanted to be a military officer, so I went to the Air Force/ROTC route. I made a decision too late to even be considered for the military academy, so I graduated from high school in 1980, and shortly before then is when I decided I wanted to be a military officer, and I wanted to fly originally. So I went the Air Force/ROTC route, and got my commission in 1984 from Southeast Missouri State University, and I was a distinguished graduate of the program and ultimately received my regular commission in the Air Force, which is something that most folks don’t do when they come out of ROTC or officer training school. Typically, only the academy graduates are given that status, which means you are a permanent fixture, you cannot be risked. Things like that, as a regular officer. It was a quite an accomplishment. I went on active duty in 1985, early that year of January. And I’m from the St. Louis area originally." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What were some of the reasons why you decided to join?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "I’ve always had a deep commitment to serve a higher calling. I think part of that was just the way I was raised to look at the collective, societal view versus your own individual goals or desires. Obviously, we all want to be able to live a good life and provide for ourselves and our families, but I found that working in public service was very rewarding, because there’s a lot of things that we do that are not necessarily quantifiable from a standpoint of the financial aspects, but they are very important because of the service that’s provided or the protections that we take on for the nation. A deep commitment to public service was what led to that." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Why did you pick the Air Force?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "I wanted to fly, and I figured that was the best branch. All of my family up to that point on both sides had been Army folks. I had a few relatives that had been in the Navy, and I think a couple of Marines in the past, distant relatives. But nobody that I was aware of had gone in the Air Force, and I just thought that was the neatest thing. Unfortunately, when I got into college and going into my junior year is when we started the preparations for your final selection, what you were slotted to go into, when you started going through various physicals and things like that. I found out that I was not going to be able to fly. I had a medical issue that would not allow me to go to flight school so I ended up being in a support role on the ground, in engineering services, which is similar to a quartermaster-type function. So I took that. I was a little disappointed at first, but once I got past that, I made the most of my time. It was challenging, and I was in college during the Reagan years at massive buildup after the military had been decimated after Vietnam. There were a lot of opportunities, but they were hard and fast, as I’m sure you know, with various medical qualifications, and I thought I could’ve still flown the heavy so to speak, the transports or tankers, but I had a problem with high G-forces so they said, “Nope, can’t go.” Of course, if you get in the service and then you develop something, they’ll find a way to work with you, because they’ve made that investment, but they figure, “we spend millions of hours to train you as a pilot, so we’re not going to go down that road, because we don’t want to waste the money in case you can’t make it through the school.” I understood it, but for a while there, I was really bummed out. Then after that, I had to ”suck it up, buttercup” and move on. So I did." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember your first days in the service?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "It was kind of strange, because I was slotted in engineering and services, but initially when they said I couldn’t be in the flight program—and this is just some of the bureaucracy of the military—they put me in a missile slot to be a missile launch officer because this was still the height of the Cold War. My first assignment was to Brandenburg Air Force Base in California to attend school for missile officer. I was in the midst of that, knowing that at some point, my assignment would come through, and I would be reassigned to a different career field completely, but I got through about half the program before they reassigned me, and I up and pulled out of there and went to New Hampshire on the other side of the country to Pease Air Force Base, where I was stationed initially as a full-time member of the Air Force and began training and working in the field. My first days were full of a lot of anxiety, I guess, it’s a big change for a lot of people. Basic training for officers, especially ROTC, occurs while you’re in college, so between my sophomore and junior year is when I went to basic training. It was just a matter of assimilating into the system, and I left home and drove to California. My entire life fit into a Jeep CJ-7. If you fast-forward to where I am today or when I left the military with a family and kids, and it was completely different. I couldn’t imagine my entire life fitting into a Jeep. [laughter]." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "That would be a lot of Jeeps." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "Yeah, it’d be a fleet of ‘em! I went there and was living in temporary quarters as you do when you’re typically in training. It was kind of different, but I got used to it, so it was fun, but it was a little unnerving at times, because I wasn’t sure how long I was going to be there." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember your instructors at all?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "Yes, my flight commander was a really good guy. He had been prior enlisted, and he would work with you, and he wouldn’t ride you that hard, but we had other officers that were part of the whole training contingent and we all had nickname for ‘em. I don’t remember their actual names. I only remember the nicknames, and there was one guy we called Captain Schwinn because he always rode a bike, and he would come out of the fog of Vandenberg, which is where I went to basic training too. He would come out of the fog in the middle of the day, because it was always foggy there, and catch you doing something he thought you shouldn’t be doing—he’d give you demerits. He ruined a lot of people’s lives for weekend duty, and I got nailed one time; we were practicing and practicing after evening chow, military formation, and some parade we had coming up. They kept playing the old military music, and after a while, you get a little stir crazy. You keep doing it over and over. This is like the 10th, 12th time we’ve done this, and some of us, we weren’t talking, because that would be a major breach of protocol, but some of us were a little bored, and we started doing a little dance in place, and I got nailed for doing that from Captain Schwinn coming out of the fog. I spent the rest of that week and that weekend doing various custodial duties that were not very pleasant, but that was just kind of the way things were. My first active-duty assignment, I remember, it was finally when I got to New Hampshire, and they said, “okay, you’re the operations officer for this squadron,” and I had suddenly 20 people that reported to me, and I worked for a lieutenant colonel. My senior NCO, the guy that was kind of my right-hand person, was a Vietnam vet, and he was pretty hard-nosed. I mean he wasn’t like the character that Sam Elliot plays in _We_ _Were Soldiers._ If you’re familiar with that film, Sam Elliot’s the rough and gruff old NCO who answers only to the commander. Well, I had a guy that was like that, but not quite like that. He was a little more personable, but here I was, a second lieutenant, and he knew more than I would ever know, and he worked for me. And so that was always a dynamic that you had to really be prepared for and you had to be very humble, and I was not afraid to say, “okay, I don’t know what’s going on here.” Let’s find a solution. He was very complimentary and kind of took me under his wing. It was still kind of intimidating at times, when you’re a 23–24-year-old. And here’s this guy who’s old enough to be your father, and he works for you, and he’s been through all this stuff and he’s got ribbons, so it’s kind of intimidating." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Which wars did you serve in during your time?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "I was in during largely the Cold War, the majority on active duty, although we did have a lot of contingency operations, so the Grenada conflict was right as I was coming in, but after that, the War on Drugs. I deployed in support of some of those operations. I also went to Bright Star, which was in the desert in Egypt. I used to tell people, I was in the desert before it was cool to be in the desert. Because now, everybody goes to the desert. And then, all the way up through the first Gulf War. I was overseas at the time in a contingency support role; I had basically sent most of my squadron to the desert, and then there was group of us from around the country that were on call to be assigned to the mortuary operations because that fell under the umbrella of my organization. I was on call to deploy to Dover or to Travis Air Force Base to work in the mortuaries. Early on, there was the presumption that we were going to incur tens of thousands of casualties—that never materialized, thankfully. I rode out that war, then after that, there was a variety of contingency assignments, from the Balkan campaign, all in a support role: helping to establish the air base and helping the commanders run those. It was a lot of fun. Kept me busy." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Were there many casualties there in your unit?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "No, I never really had any—we never really deployed into combat zones. We typically deployed to the air bases and worked from there. There were times where there was some pretty contentious situations when you’re on a drug interdiction mission, and you’re out in the middle of the jungle somewhere in South America, and you’re not really sure who the good guys are. You have to be ready, but nobody died that I worked with, in a combat role. We had a lot of people die in peace time, and being mortuary officer, which was one my duties, I had to deal with all those. We had a lot of people killed in training accidents over the years—with aircraft crashes or live weapons, fire, car accidents, and a lot of suicides. Fortunately, nobody really close to me was involved." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Can you tell me about some of your most memorable experiences?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "Engineering services is a support operation that runs on inner base. We were the cradle–to­ grave folks, but we took care of everything on the front end to establish an air base, working hand-in-hand with engineers and with other units to build the air base up, whether it was contingency one—a true wartime environment where you’re living in tents to something more permanent with hard structures. All the logistics associated with that, dealing with building an air base, constructing facilities, runways, plumbing, electrical, all those things. Food services, making sure people had all those basic needs met, housing. Then in the peacetime role, even things like child care centers, all the morale, welfare, and recreational opportunities that we could provide, based again, upon where you were. On the other end of the spectrum was the end of life: all the military honors and mortuary affairs, search and recovery. Some of the biggest challenges I had and most memorable ones was when I was overseas. I was in Okinawa for three and a half years in the 18th Services Squadron, which was part of the 18th Combat Wing, and at the time, Kadena Air Base was the largest operations Air Force location in the world. We supported 70,000 people, including dependents and civilians, on the base through a variety of services, and there was a very, very high operations tempo. The norm was a 12-hour day, and you did things at very quick pace, always with an eye on being able to execute the mission—the wartime mission if it needed to be, on a moment’s notice. Because of that, I really enjoyed working in those kinds of environments, and I got to work with some really outstanding people over the years. One of the gentlemen that I ended up mentoring, General Patrick Gamble, went on to be the vice chief of staff. When you’re around really outstanding people, you can learn so much from them, and in turn, they invest in you and give you a lot of opportunities to do things. After active duty, I went into the Reserves, and I became an executive officer, and I worked in the Air Force Reserve wings in that capacity. Again, working for the commanding general. In that role, you’re exposed to a lot of stuff that most people in your grade, which was either a captain or major—depending upon the size of the unit—most people wouldn’t have that exposure. It was very, very rewarding in that regard, but in all of them, you really had to work hard. I think one of the neat things was I met my wife while I was in the service—the Air Force was really good to me, and I really enjoyed it. I wouldn’t change anything about it." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Were you awarded any awards or citations?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "Yes, it was one of those things that I think, again, because of just the nature of working hard and having good people that looked out for you, I was fortunate in that I earned things like the Air Force Accommodation Medal and the Meritorious Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters, so I earned three of those awards. Then a variety of other peacetime awards, whether it was six Air Force outstanding unit awards and several individual awards, officer of the year for different commands. When I was in the Pacific, I just really tried to apply myself and better myself so whether it was weapon systems, getting your expert marks on multiple weapons systems. I was one of the few support officers in the Air Force that was qualified in, not only the M9, the nine-millimeter pistol, a typical sidearm, the M-16, but the also the grenade launcher and the M-60 machine gun. That was just by luck that I was able to get qualified in those, but I really worked hard to do things, and I didn’t do it for my own personal gain. I did it because I wanted to do it. And along the way, those things came along. It was very humbling, because when you’re standing up in front of a wing of hundreds of other officers and they’re reading a citation about you that sets a very high standard. You have to live up to that, and I tried to do that every day. What I really enjoyed about the service was ... they say joining the military gives you all this training, and it’s absolutely true. When I went into college, I was mortified of public speaking. There was no way I was ever going to be in something like that. That quickly was something that had to change. In the course of just going through the academics of ROTC as well as following assignments once you’re on active duty, leadership is something that you learn, and obviously I think you have to have a good basis to work from, but I really learned so many things. I got my graduate degree in public administration because of the Air Force. I completed a lot of professional military education—squadron officer school, Air Command, and staff college. You just learn so many things about so many different facets of working an organization that it really prepares you for that, and I really feel lucky in that regard. It’s something I wish more people would consider, because I think it only makes you better down the road." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What was the best-run air base or workplace that you ever worked in?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "I would say it would be Kadena in Okinawa, because it was one of those things. When you’re overseas, you naturally kind of band together. Military folks deployed together. You rely on each other for a variety of reasons and responsibilities. But beyond that, you tend to develop a very good rapport, and you become friends with people. When I was in Japan, because of the criticality of the mission, which was largely to provide the air superiority for the Pacific. With Korea being so close, from a standpoint of potential wartime location, it was something you really had to hone your skills and be ready to go. That really high operations tempo forced you to really get your act together if you didn’t have it. In the course of doing all the training, you really became a better person and you saw ways to do things better. We were always trying to find ways to do things better, because we typically tied it into mission execution, and if we do this, then maybe fewer people will die. Or we can achieve the objective quicker. So whether it was even peacetime or preparing for wartime, I found that to be just the most rewarding. I’m not saying it was perfect, but we certainly did very well when it came to the validation from the office of the inspector general through the readiness inspections. I never earned anything less than an excellent rating in any program area that I worked, and I earned a few outstandings even over those years, and those are not easy to do." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did you stay in touch with your family?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "Well, as I like to tell some of the folks here, there was a time when we didn’t have social media and the Internet. When I was overseas, I would try to call my parents periodically, couldn’t really afford to do it frequently, because it was so expensive. I remember one year for Christmas, somebody in my family got me an AT&T calling card, and it was loaded with so many minutes, and I was like, “Holy cow, this is awesome!” So I was able to keep in touch with them. But typically I would talk to my parents maybe once a month or once a quarter. We’d send letters back. This is still at a time when the Internet is not there yet, and I had a huge time difference. It was 15 or 16 hours between where I was and back home, so it was hard. Typically, I think most people at that time just kind of relied on the written word so we sent things back and forth. We also did videos, which was rather amusing, especially after we were married. And my wife and I, we would do some videos of the sights, but mainly the family wanted to see us and hear us. We had a special request one year for them to—they said just set the camera up and just go about your lives, and let it run for a couple of hours, I think was the length of the tape. And I thought, well that’s boring. But they just wanted to see what we were doing. We did that one time when we were putting up a Christmas tree, and that was one of the highlights. My wife sent mine and they just thought it was funny as the dickens. We didn’t have instant communication so it was a little different. Now, of course, it’s so much different than— and people don’t have any context to that, but it was quite a change." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What was the food like?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "I found the food to be wonderful. Of course, you were always working out anyway to stay in shape, but the Air Force always did a great job with the service. In fact, many of the sister services that were stationed with us like in Okinawa or other place I deployed with, they always wanted the Air Force to do the food, because we did it better than anybody else. It was a lot of work, but they did a pretty good job." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Was there something special that you did for good luck?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "No, I did have a bit of a routine about things, but I had that kind of stuff going before I even went in the military. I just get in a routine, and if something worked, I tried not to change that too much. I also played hockey for years and being a goalie, very superstitious, even though we don’t admit it, about how we do things. I would just get in a routine, and I’d have a certain way I would go about getting ready for work and do that and try to do it every day. Even if I was deployed somewhere, I tried to replicate it as best I could. I know it was silly, but I just tried to get into that routine so that I could have a little bit of normalcy or stability, because a lot of times you’re in a stressful environment, and you don’t want to admit it, but you’ve got to get through it, so you try to find things to make it as comfortable as you can and that was one of the ways I think I was able to do that. That was really important for me too when I was doing mortuary affairs stuff, because that was very, very demanding, very stressful, and it was something that took a lot of out of you. Emotionally as well as physically because of the hours you worked, and if you had to do a search and recovery, those could drag on for days or weeks to locate everything. You really found out who were friends that you could rely on, but at the same time, you had to really make sure you were the bastion of strength, because they were looking to you for leadership and guidance, and so I couldn’t show that to the people that worked for me if I was feeling really down or depressed. I had to do the best thing I could to keep everybody motivated, because if they saw me getting down, then everybody else would just get down as well and it would be real unproductive and bad environment. I tried to get into routines, and I tried to find things to perform those distractions for you to cope, like sports. And I might say too that, and this is again, 80s into the 90s when you’re thrown in that role—I didn’t go in the Air Force to be a mortuary guy, no way, that was not my plan, but I took the duties and responsibilities, because that’s what I was asked to do. I did them to the best of my ability. But at the same time, yes, you are human, you can only do so much and we didn’t have the systems that we have today with support to help you through it. We didn’t understand PTSD. We didn’t understand death and dying. It was a job. “Get it done.” And you had to do it, and it was not pleasant; a lot of people had expectations, whether it was the commander or the family and you saw the full gamut of emotions in those roles too. You had to be the bastion of stability, and not let any of that—much like a police officer has to calm down parties in a domestic dispute and try to be a voice of reason. In some ways, some of those things I had to do was like that. You had to rise above all that and keep the mission in mind and get things done and do it in a manner that was not received negatively, which is hard—when you feel horrible about it as well." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did people entertain themselves?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "All sorts of things. We had a lot of intramural sports. Just about everything you could imagine where I was stationed throughout my career. If you didn’t want to do sports, there were typically all kinds of clubs. Obviously, various arts and crafts; there were chess clubs; people with the libraries would have different things going on there. Computer clubs and associations, kind of the same things that you see in schools and universities today. Again, depending upon where you were. If you were stationed in the north—I was stationed in Michigan for a while with great fishing and hunting, there’s a lot of opportunities. If you’re in Okinawa and you wanted to learn how to dive or snorkel, well, that was a great environment. You got a chance to do and learn a lot, and that I found was a way too to meet other people that had similar interests and you typically would become friends. One of the closest friends I have is a guy that I worked with in 1985. He was a young lieutenant like me, and he worked on a mortuary case with me. He was a summary court officer and we became close friends, and to this day we keep in touch all the time." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember any particularly humorous or unusual event that happened to you?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "One day, it was in the winter time, and I was in New Hampshire. We had a snowstorm, and it was dumping a lot of snow, making a mess, and I was coming back from lunch. I was in my Jeep, which I had when I went in the Air Force, and I pulled in my parking lot, and I realized I was a little bit late to a meeting. As I’m pulling in, I’m driving a little faster than I should be, but parking lots pretty vacant, you know, not a big deal. The hardest thing I had to do was find an open spot and so I’m kind of tooling down the main lane and all of a sudden this person walks out in front of me in their full parka and mukluks. And I almost hit this person. Now the neat things about the military and some of the uniforms is you can’t tell gender. So I couldn’t tell if this was male or female. But I said something under my breath like you know, like, “What the heck’s with that idiot,” or whatever. I almost killed ‘em, just walked out in front of me. I found a spot and pulled in and I was little miffed at everything, and I saw that this person was going in my building, and I said, “Aha, this is somebody that works, probably for me,” or, “I’m going to tell them not to be such an idiot or whatever and pay attention so they don’t get killed.” Because I’ll have to deal with that as a mortuary guy. [Laughter] So it was a little twisted. Nonetheless, I went in the building and lo and behold in my office is waiting this individual. Snow dripping off of her parka, and it’s this young lady who’s there to ask me about working on a military honors event that was coming up. She was a second lieutenant; I was a first lieutenant. And I thought, wow! That lady is now my wife of 30 years, and so, it’s kind of a fun story, because here’s someone who doesn’t expect to see anything like that, and of course, as soon as I saw her, all of my anger and everything was gone and so I was just smitten with her. She worked in aircraft maintenance, and so we didn’t work together by any stretch of the imagination, but we obviously started dating and went from there." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What were some of the pranks that you pulled or others would pull?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "Well, there was a procedure that I was actually not part of, I was guess culpable in the sense that I had to keep my wife detained a little bit. My wife worked in aircraft maintenance, and at the time and I would assume today it’s pretty much still probably a male-dominated world. And these are large units of hundreds of people that maintain the aircraft. And she was an officer that oversaw hundreds of these airmen, NCOs that worked in aircraft maintenance in one of the units. So when you left the base where you were stationed at the time, which was in New Hampshire at Pease Air Force Base, long since closed, there was a process that everyone went through that was in the aircraft maintenance and that was there was a kind of, they called it hail and farewell, which sounds pretty innocent, but it was actually pretty degrading in many ways. It’s something that we would never condone today in our society. Somebody would film it with a phone, and it would be posted and the next thing you know, the commander’s fired. But it was all in good fun, and people never got offended by it or anything. But just to show you how far we’ve come. The process was they’d have some big things in the hangar where they would have some food, typical kind of sendoff, right. And they would have some food, snacks, drinks and people would say stuff and they’d give them mementos. They may give them a decoration, a formal decoration if they were able to get it finished in time, an accommodation medal or something like that to send them off on to their next assignment. And that’s all pretty standard. But then after that, they would take this individual and they would put them on a throne, and they had this makeshift throne that they had fabricated from scraps of wood and metal, and it was basically an old office chair-type thing. And they’d put the person in there, and they’d secure the person to the chair so you weren’t going anywhere. They would put a crown on you which was made from something in aircraft maintenance world and then they would proceed to do various toasts and say things, so it was kind of like a roast in many ways, right. So when you get to a point where you get done with your little spiel on the individual, you would do a toast, and they would pour the beverage over the individual. So by the time they’re done, and if it’s eight, ten, twelve people, going through it, the individual is soaked with whatever beverage of choice was there. And these things were always done at the end of the day, so there was no mixing work with pleasure. And at the end of that, the commander would say—and this is a full colonel—colonel would say, “Well, you know lieutenant, you’re out of uniform.” Because your uniform’s all wet, you’re soiled and this and that. And he would say what regulation was violated and so forth and then he would turn to the assembled mass of humanity that was there and he would say, what should we do? And then the masses would say, “To the klong, to the klong.” K-L-O-N-G, klong. And the klong was nothing more than a drainage ditch that was behind the hangar. And it was pretty nasty, because there was standing water in it, and they would take the individual, and they would toss them into the klong. Now, that’s a pretty degrading thing. They would make up for it, because they would take the individual out at the end and then they would take them over they’d get them all showered and everything, and the significant other, the spouse or the boyfriend, girlfriend or roommate or whatever would always have clothes for them to change in. I would say, today, it would never fly. They did this, and they did it to everybody, and it didn’t matter what their rank was. So if it was the colonel, then the general would participate in it. So it’s just one of those things that was just like, wow. That’s amazing. I didn’t actually do a lot of pranks or anything. I tried to have fun, but I never did things that would get me in trouble or come back to haunt me. But I did see people do squirrely stuff from time to time, and I thought that was pretty significant. And my wife went through that—we still have a picture of her in the klong taken just as she is coming out of the water, and it’s hilarious. But when she tells that story, a lot of other people are just like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe they did that to you,” but that’s just the way it was. But it was, again, a close-knit group, and you were not offended, because you knew, that was in some ways a show of affection for what you did. If you got thrown in the klong, you were one of the team. You see a lot of other things in the Air Force too. It’s customary when pilots finish their last mission, if they’re retiring, they hose them down. Sometimes they’ll throw them into a pool. The Air Force has this thing about water. Everywhere we go, we build swimming pools, no matter what the situation is. We had heated pools when I was in Bosnia. We had nice pools in Egypt. We even had a makeshift when I was in Colombia. So we always make sure we have a pool. And somehow, we always end up in the pool. [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Do you remember the day that your service ended?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "I went from active duty into the Reserves and going into that role was a little different because the full-time job was gone, going to a part-time role. But when I left the part-time, we had a little send-off when I was leaving the unit at the end of the day. It was nothing like what I just described. It was something much more appropriate that we would see today. A lot of pats on the back and well-wishing and hugs. At the time, I was like, okay—I was looking forward to a change. I wasn’t necessarily wanting to go. I had some medical problems that precluded me from being qualified. I had had an appendix rupture and I’d lost my ability to be worldwide qualified, and I had to leave. So it was a little bittersweet for me, but at the same time, I was trying to look forward to the new opportunity for me. At the time I was going off to grad school to work on my Ph.D., so I was kind of focused on that, and that helped me get through. Otherwise, I probably would’ve lost it at the end of the day or something, but it was kind of uneventful in many ways. Other than the fact that, this is it, and you’re leaving with a couple of boxes of your stuff, but I really enjoyed it. I was in the field of public policy, because I had my master’s in public administration and so obviously took the various courses, did all my comps, and my dissertation was on a local group in St. Louis called Civic Progress and how that group of civic leaders was really the power behind the community. And not the governmental entities. It was rather eye-opening seeing how that works, the dynamics there, and especially going back over time. It started in after World War II, and there’s all the things that were prevalent at the time from various race issues and discriminatory practices, and seeing how the community evolves and organizations evolve through that period was really interesting. One of the things I found in that was just the by-product. It wasn’t in my dissertation, but Walt Disney was from St. Louis, and he had wanted to build an amusement park in the St. Louis area because there was some land that was available in what is western St. Louis County, and they had plans drawn up. They had all kinds of things and he was ready to do it. Everybody was behind it, but August Busch, the second owner of Anheuser Busch, insisted that this park sell beer, and that Anheuser Busch be the provider of that. Walt Disney did not want that. And the whole deal fell through, and he went to down near Orlando and built Disney World. So Disney World was almost here. [Laughter] I just thought that was so ironic. Disney at first did not have the alcohol in their parks, but now, of course, they do. Kind of interesting." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Lots of sad kids from that area, I’m sure." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "Oh yeah. [Laughter]" }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Was your education supported by the GI Bill?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "Yes, I got my master’s when I was active duty, and the Air Force paid for that. The only thing I had to do was service commitments, so with each course, I’d have to promise to do so many more months and I used the GI Bill for the PhD work that I did, and that helped, ‘cause it was pretty expensive." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Have you ever tried accessing your military records on NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "Yes, mine are at Randall Air Force Base. The Air Force has them. They’re electronic, even though they were paper. I have a copy of them, and we actually take the records here for anyone that’s employed in St. Louis if they have military service and they work here. Our process is we take those records, and we put them in our secure cage area, which has very limited access, and we do that to safeguard the records, because we don’t want the individual who has access to records doctoring the record in any way or a staff member who maybe be upset with someone, doing something to a record. So anyone when you’re hired here in St. Louis, we check to see if you had military service and any other relatives within your family, and we’ll pull those records if they’re here, and we safeguard them. And then when the person retires or leaves, then those records go back into the general stacks. So mine is electronically in Texas, but I have a hard copy that’s in the secure cage here." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did you join a veteran’s organization?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "Yeah, I’m a member of the DAV, Disabled American Veterans. I had some training incidents, things where I got injured a little bit and then with my appendix rupturing and all that, so I’m a disabled vet, 30 percent. I’m active in that, although not really active on a local level, really more on a national level." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "What did you go on to do as a career after the service?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "Well, I really enjoy military history, and I really enjoy project-type work, because I did a lot of project management stuff in the military. For a while, I worked in a family real estate and construction business, and I built homes, but I found that not to be as enjoyable as I thought it was going to be, and so I eventually ended up in civil service, working in what I think is the best job in NARA, and that is to be here as the Access Coordinator or Director for the National Archives in St. Louis as well as four other locations here" }, { "speaker": "in the Midwest", "text": "Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, and Fort Worth. And I worked with some outstanding people, and being around military history and all the records and everything that’s associated with that is very rewarding. It would be great if you had the time to go through all the records themselves, but that doesn’t exist. You have to take care of the customer. Every now and then I see things, and we have to do research on something, but it’s a lot of fun. And I really enjoy it, ‘cause I enjoy public service, and I enjoy military history, so I get to combine the two." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Did your military experience influence your thinking about war or about the military in general?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "I would definitely think so. Coming into the military, I came in at a time when there was no draft or anything like that, and I did it voluntarily, so you’re a bit gung ho, I think at that point. At the same time, when you through the experiences, whether it’s peace time, whether it’s wartime, those things shape your views, and a lot of times I found that what I thought to be true was substantiated or was maybe a little different but generally on tap. I don’t remember anything that was 180 degrees from where I thought it was going to be. I have a tremendous loyalty to this nation, and when I see people in society just doing stuff that to me is almost criminal or certainly treacherous, it really makes me angry, and I just have to turn off the TV or turn off the phone or whatever I was looking at. Because I think if you really value what we have here, you need—if you don’t have that inherent set of beliefs, you need to go live overseas for a while. I mean live overseas, not visit. Don’t go to the tourist areas. Go work in a country, and pick the country. It doesn’t matter. It could somewhere in Europe. It could be somewhere in Asia. I don’t care, but go live out there and live on the economy. Live in the housing the people live in and work in an environment. Drive that commute and tell me about your personal freedoms here and tell me about what you have here and how bad it is. It’s nothing. There’s nothing that compares to America. And I’ve spent time in Japan. I’ve spent time in Germany. I’ve spent time in a lot of other places that are not very nice, and there’s nothing that compares to what we have here. It’s not perfect, but by golly it’s the best thing on this rock." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "How did your service or your experiences affect your life?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "I think in a very positive way, it kind of helped shape who I am. I came in with a strong sense of nationalism, I guess. Along the way, I met my wife and so it brought me my best friend, and my partner, my daughter—my oldest child was born in Japan. You could say that the military contributed to my daughter being here. It really just kind of helped us prepare for the rest of our lives, whether it was through education, like the GI Bill, or just the way you need to embrace what your role is in society, and be a good person and be an active member of your community and raise a family to the best of your ability. I really feel for people that don’t have that type of experience to learn from. I think those times, whether you’re deployed somewhere that’s really hot and sticky and you have to watch your step, so you don’t get bit by something that’s going to put you in the hospital or whether you’re freezing your you-know-what off out on a flight line in the snow—all those things make you stronger and make you, I think, a better person. At the time, you may not feel that. You’re feeling the frostbite or you’re feeling the tremendous discomfort, but as long as you remember there’s a higher purpose, that’s going to be value added. And the other thing is the military really made me resilient. There’s very little stuff anymore that really bothers me. I deal with things, I think, pretty well. I’ve had a lot of medical issues over the years, and other people tell me they don’t what they would do if they had to go through that but it’s just part of the journey we’re on. I think the military just helped me prepare for life in a lot of different ways." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Thank you for expressing that, that’s all very relevant to what the question was asking. It also made you pretty resilient when it comes to being a hockey goalie. I’m sure the frostbite and the strain and the discomfort leads to probably a better hockey performance." }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "Yeah, I mean I was never very good, but I had a lot of fun at it. And I played a lot of recreational hockey, so I was playing hockey until I was 47, and I’m 55 now. And it was fun when you’re out there playing hockey with guys half your age and you’re making the save, or you’re making them look bad. Not in a negative sense, per se, but they think you’re the old man and you’re going to go down. And it’s like, nah, not so fast!" }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Yeah, show them the veteran tricks of the trade. Is there anything you would like to add that we haven’t covered yet?" }, { "speaker": "MR. MCGRAW", "text": "I think military service is one of the most honorable things people can do. And I have people here that work for me that are Marines, Navy, Army, Air Force, and Coast Guard. I think it’s a very commendable thing. I don’t think the rank matters. I don’t think that the duty or the MOS or the specialty you were in matters. It’s the fact that you served, and that makes all us better. I can see it in people. When I worked in other places around, throughout my career whether it was in the private sector or in government. A lot of times you can pick up on someone and say, that person is probably a vet, because of their view of things, the way they handle things, the way they approach work. And nine times out of ten, that whole process is one that ends up being true. That they were a vet, and it’s because of that experience, because of that training, that they seem to have a little bit of advantage, and I mean, we hire veterans in the government. They get preference, and I think that’s a good thing, because there’s a tremendous talent base there that is something that should never be overlooked, and I just wish more people had a view of service beyond just themselves, whether it’s military or is it WPA or Civilian Conservation Core of the old eras, but I think service is something that we all benefit from." }, { "speaker": "MR. MOSHE", "text": "Thank you for your service, Bryan, and thank you for the interview." } ]

[ { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Congratulations! How did you come to work at the National Archives, and why did you choose to work there?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "My neighbor was the Marine Corps liaison officer there, and I was looking for a job and was working at a small little store where I lived. And in talking with him, I told him that I had worked for the government before and had almost four years. And he said, \"Why don't you come to work? You have reinstatement rights. I'm going to get you an application. Call CPR and get a statement of service.\"" }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Did you have any impressions of the agency at the time you began your career? Did you know anything about them?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "I knew nothing about it. I saw that a record center had burned on the fire in July of '73, but I had no idea what records they were referring to." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay. So when you started, did they give you any particular kind of training?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Oh, yes. Training was short. It was mostly typing from drafts that the archives techs prepared in response to requests. But working with them taught me more than I could ever have learned otherwise." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay. Very in-hand sort of learning. Yeah. Awesome. What aspects of the work did you enjoy? Was there anything in particular that stood out?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "I favored being either a typist or secretarial type, but I did work cases for about a year and a half, and then I was offered a reassignment to a secretarial position, so I took that." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "What was your work like in the secretarial position?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Well, a lot of it had to do with disciplinary actions. And at that time on, you know, electric typewriters, we had the original and five carbon copies. It also involved typing responses to requests that the Branch Chief handled. Also keeping time cards and just general clerical duties." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay, so what made you want to move to the secretarial position? Was it just that you liked the work more? Did they offer different hours?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "I just enjoyed answering the phone, interacting with people, that type of thing. You know, having visitors come or setting up a meeting rather than just typing from drafts." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay, that makes sense. Do you recall any particularly unusual, challenging, or anything that sticks out in your mind regarding your job in its entirety from the beginning to the end?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "No, not really." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay. Do you know if changes in Presidential administrations or changes for the Archivists of the U.S. administrations, did that change the nature of your work at all, or was it pretty consistent regardless of who was President?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "My work was pretty consistent." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay, that's what we're getting from a lot of people." }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Well, you know, veterans write in that they need this, this, this or that from the record, and we provided it hopefully." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "What would you say were the most significant turning points in your career?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "I guess when I was selected to be the secretary to the Assistant Director. And then when the Director's secretary retired, I applied to be the Director's secretary. Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "What was that selection process like?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "For the Assistant Director. I think back then, I can't remember what year I was selected for that position. It was like a written resume or he was aware of the work that all the applicants did because we were all in the center. For the Director's secretary position, it was done online." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay, did you have any relationship with the other federal agencies like the Army, the VA, Air Force, any of those?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "I began working for the government at the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center. It became Defense Mapping, and it now has another name, National Geospatial something or other." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "What do you think was your greatest accomplishment while working at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Well, becoming the secretary to the Director brought me to a grade level I'd never thought I would achieve and felt very proud of myself for accomplishing that." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "As you should. That's a very competitive position." }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Yeah, it is." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay. What kind of technological advancements have you observed throughout your career there?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Well, starting with doing everything with pencil and paper to getting computers, learning how to do time and attendance on computers, searching for records on computers, or requesting records on computers, everything. It just was a whole new thing because everything in the beginning was paper and pencil." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "And carbon copies." }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Yes, carbon copies." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Do you recall your last day at the National Archives? What did that feel like?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "My work day or my retirement day?" }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "I was thinking work day, but we can go with retirement day." }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Retirement day was amazing because I don't think I even went up to my office until after the party and finished cleaning out. But it was quite humbling. There were a lot of people there. My family was there, but the highlight was when Jay Trainer put on a St. Louis Cardinals hat for me. That was just shocking. Jay was a good guy. But for him to do that, I think it caused him a little bit of pain." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Not a fan of the Cards?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Oh, I can't remember who he likes. Cincinnati Reds. It was not his team. It was not his team." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "That was a sacrifice then." }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Yes, definitely." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "How do you view your time in the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "What do you mean?" }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "So, looking back on it, are you like, do you kind of miss it? Are you proud of it? Are you like, \"I am retired now? I'm done with it all.\"" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "I am retired now. I don't miss it. I do think of some of the people I worked with. It was a very good work experience. It was a good, good place to work with a lot of nice, very smart people. And there was a lot of history, and I learned a lot of things working there well." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "So what message or advice would you give to someone just starting at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Do your best. Work hard. I mean, today you have a much better chance of advancing and making a fairly good salary than we did back when." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Is there anything else you would like to add to the section of the interview that is obviously career specific? Anything else in your career you'd like to mention?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "No, not really. I think most of it was very good, you know, I mean, there were a few things I didn't care for from time to time, but that goes with anything. If I'm going to shout out to somebody, it would be to the mailroom people. They were always there to help. They were great. They were great." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Awesome. So now, because the oral histories are in part looking at the 1973 anniversary of the fire, I'm going to move on to questions that are a little more specific about the fire and its aftermath. Okay. I know that you didn't start until 1974, but I'm sure that there was a lot still going on with the fire. Well, first of all, do you remember anything about hearing about the fire before you started when it was happening?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "I saw it on TV. It was on the news that the record center was on fire. I had no idea what records they were referring to. I had never heard of the record center." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay. So I bet it was a big shock to come there '74 and realize just how much that affected things. What was it like starting at the National Archives right after the fire? What kind of impact did you see on how people did their job day to day? How did it affect everyone?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Well, I was a little bit nervous about starting. I hadn't worked in about 12 years. People seemed to be pretty conscientious about doing their job. The offices were in a huge room. Everybody was together and the supervisors were able to see if you were not doing your job or kind of goofing off, they could see and fix that right away. But it was a good place. And it seemed like people were there to do their work, do their job." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay. At that point in time, did you interact with the burnt records at all? Did you see the burnt records in any capacity?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Actually, I saw records opened up on the window sills in the offices with the windows open, trying to dry them out. And we have come such a long way from that. But upon entering the building, you could smell the dampness and then you could see maybe water stains or wet stains on the wall still. And then you would maybe see a little puddle here and there. But for the records when I worked cases, that was an eye opener because I worked in the Records Reconstruction Branch, where we did get all the burnt records." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "So during your job in the Records Reconstruction Branch, what were your responsibilities there at the time?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Basically, I was a secretary to the Branch Chief, but I had been an archives tech and worked cases, the position right before that. And so I knew how to work cases. I worked in the Air Force Reference Branch." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay. When the fire occurred, it was largely on the sixth floor. So it affected the records on the fifth and the sixth floors. Where were the records being stored at this time? Immediately after, when you started work, do you remember?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "The records that were not involved?" }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "So the records that had been burned but were still salvageable." }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Oh, I really don't know. I don't know. I'm not aware that they were able to salvage any of them on the sixth floor. But I could be wrong about that. I don't know." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay. Where was your office? What floor was it on?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Mostly on the second floor." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Recon [Reconstruction Branch] was started on the ground floor at the east end of the building. And then we came up to the second floor." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay, What did Recon do at the time?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Well, mostly they worked with the burnt records or fire-related records, I should say. And they had different sources they could go to to help verify service if it wasn't contained in the record or if they couldn't actually get through the record. They had an organizational records section which searched organizational records, and we had our own search section, which had service number index, pay vouchers, and documents like that that you could go to verify certain parts of a person's military service." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay. Yeah. We still occasionally have stuff like that. We still go to that. Do you recall how many records requests were coming in per week at the time?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "I could be wrong here, but I think when the backlog would reach 100,000, the center Director would go, no way. So yeah, I don't know how many were coming in, but I know when the backlog hit, if it came near 100,000, that was not acceptable." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay, so at the very beginning when you did actually work as an archives technician, how many of the requests for records would you estimate were for ones that were burnt versus ones that were not damaged." }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Well, when I worked in the Archives as an archives tech, I worked in the Air Force Reference Branch, so I did not have burnt records to deal with." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "You got to avoid those ones. So did you ever have to deal with the original burnt records at any point in time? Did you have to physically handle them?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay. What did they look like?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Well, they varied from just being singed around the edges to opening a record and finding half of the document was burnt, and sometimes because they had had water damage, when you tried to separate the pages, they would crinkle and crack. So you really couldn't get into the record at all." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "So when you were handling them, did you have to wear anything like masks or gloves at the time." }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "None of that was needed at the time?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay. Did they smell like smoke?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "They had a certain smell. I don't think it was smoke. It was more like wet paper, damp, you know. And sometimes when you'd open it up, you'd kind of start itching because maybe there were like little paper mites or something in them." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Were they moldy?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay. In the years immediately after the fire. So let's say '74, '75, '76, how much did people commemorate the anniversary? Did they pause and remember and think about the fire every July 12th? Or was it just kind of going about your business?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Yeah, it was. I mean, we knew the date, but no, nothing specific was remembered or celebrated or whatever." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Okay. Yeah. Did your work change the way that you view records or the importance of records?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "Absolutely. Well, not knowing that the records even existed or not ever having thought about it since I didn't know what records were there on Page. Yes, for sure it did." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Yes, okay. Is there anything else that you'd like to add?" }, { "speaker": "Margaret", "text": "We sure have come a long way from when I started, because everything was done manually. You know, searching, requesting, opening. Everything was done manually, so." }, { "speaker": "Jen", "text": "Yeah, there's a big difference there. Oh, yeah. Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for this. I appreciate it immensely. I'm going to go ahead and pause it." } ]

[ { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And always in the Preservation Department?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Well, I worked in the Preservation Department until 2013, and then I did a special project with the Iraqi Jewish Archives, which was an imaging project conducted at College Park, Maryland, with some community records that NARA had possession of that came from the secret police building in Baghdad, Iraq. They were community records of the Iraqi Jewish community, and they needed treatment, but they also needed digitization so that they could be shared broadly with interested individuals, in particular the Iraqi Jewish population throughout the world that no longer resides in Iraq. So that was a two-year project. And we made available all those community records for anyone who wants to find them on the internet. So I worked on that project. Then I came back to my permanent position, which is in St. Louis. That was in 2015." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. When you first started at the National Archives in the Preservation Department, was the preservation program still getting off of the ground there or was it in full operation mode at that time?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "It was at full operation mode. It had been started in the early 2000s. But they had one primary project, which was a microfilming project. So the microfilming project ended about the time we moved into our new facility, 2011–2012 timeframe. And at that point, we started doing a broader array of projects, including more digitization of high-value military personnel records and digitization of award cards and other records." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay, so you started at the old location, so that would have been where the fire happened?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Yes. Yes." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "What was that building like? Did it still smell? What did it look like?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "No, it didn't smell. In a lot of senses it was an incredible building. It had wide corridors and escalators and it had a nurse's office. And it was like a little city community. At one time, because the Army was there, it could have held maybe 1300, 1400 people. The storage spaces were terrible. But there are aspects of that building, the common area—there was a little garden in the center of it. There were a lot of things I really liked about that building then, although the new building that we have is much better for records storage. There was a certain pleasure in working in that kind of a structure that was different. Like, I feel like our current building's a little more institutional like a hospital building or something. But it has great records storage areas, which is, you know, our primary role is to preserve and protect the records. So it's a fair tradeoff." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Did you have to help with that move?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Yeah, I did. I specified a lot of the space planning for our labs. I didn't work on moving the records. Some of our staff did work on that move. We had a contract with a mover, and NARA staff would assist loading boxes, unloading boxes, and shelving boxes. They would assist in terms of tracking it all, but they didn't do the manual labor of filling up the stacks at the new building." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So for the burned records, the burnt files, did they have to be prepared a certain way in order to be able to move them in the first place?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Not really. But you should ask others about that, because it's possible that there was more going on that I wasn't aware of." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Okay." }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Well, we moved them into cold bays. They're not technically cold storage, but they're 50 to 55 degrees." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So you said that you are a supervisory preservation specialist. Can you tell me a little bit about what your day-to-day job looks like? What are you working on?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Sure. So, one of the big functions of our job is to care for the burned records. So staff who report to me are always going to have the task of when a burned record is requested and pulled, they're going to do a quick condition assessment of the record to see if it needs any stabilization, or any surface cleaning prior to being released to the requester of the record, which could be an internal employee. It could also be an outside agency like the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs], or a requestor in the research room. What we're trying to do is we're trying to make the record serviceable, meaning that it won't degrade or flake or break apart during its handling by the requester. And we also want to ensure that it doesn't represent a health risk to the person with any active or inactive mold that might be in there. So we do give all of the records a sort of triage, and then we route them appropriately, depending upon what their needs are. So that's about 50 percent of what our department does and the people I supervise. And then the other 50 percent is trying to make access happen in terms of digitizing records in the unit here, not just the burned records, but non-burned records, high-value records, name indexes, anything that can be used to assist reference. We digitize where it's appropriate to digitize. We put items in the catalog [National Archives Catalog]. There's a preservation component of getting something on the catalog. If it's available via the catalog, then it's likely that it won't be handled as frequently. So certainly our high-value records like the military records of famous people are mostly now on the catalog. There's a specialized imaging process for the burned records that we employ as well. It doesn't apply to every record, but it's a topic of interest for people because we're able to recover content in charred areas of records." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's amazing. And is this something that just recently came about? Like the technology has evolved enough that we're able to do this or has this been going on since the fire happened?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Yeah, no, what happened was, well, it's a technology that's been used a lot in forensic applications and even a little bit with cultural heritage. For example, the Dead Sea Scrolls were photographed using infrared. They weren't burnt, but were just deteriorating. And so the best images of the Dead Sea Scrolls were infrared transmissive images. That was in the '50s and '60s when that took place. Infrared is used in forensics, everything from detecting whether a banknote is real or being able to better visualize blood splatter on a dark piece of cloth and check forgery. These are things that infrared has been used for for a long time. It's just like regular photography. The only exception being that instead of visible light being reflected and absorbed and then captured by the camera, the visible light is blocked out and only the infrared light waves reach, in our case, reach the paper and then reflect back to the camera. And for a burned area with char, we view that as just a dark mass. But in infrared there's actually infrared light being absorbed by the carbon and the ink, the residual ink in that charred area. And infrared light is reflected by the charred area without that ink. So an image is formed in the camera that shows the text under that charred area so that we knew that effect existed. So when I started working here in 2008, 2009, we first experimented with the process. We bought a small camera and had it modified to be infrared and started doing it. The problem with the small camera systems at that time was that although we can make the content recovery effect of revealing text happen, we had to use a lot of manipulations in Photoshop, and it was more of an art project than an actual reliable, consistent method for revealing the text. So it took a few years to work up to the point where we could get to the technological level in terms of procurement and specification and working with a vendor. So when I came back from the IJA [Iraqi Jewish Archive] project, this is the 2014, 2015 timeframe, we were able to work with the vendor and experiment with different camera systems and filtration systems and put together a system that met our requirements. It was installed in 2015. So we've been doing that process since 2015. We've done approximately 500 records. This way there would be the worst condition records that come through our request queue. These are records in which they have a lot of intact charring. Mostly when records burn, paper is consumed. But if the paper is more or less roasted and not burned or consumed, then the page is browned and charred. And if that char is still intact, then it obscures the text. So as we look through all these burned records, as they come through our system, we find ones with intact char and we'll route those to that process." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So you are not working on some of the worst burned records, but ones that still have that char intact?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Yeah, exactly. Because in a lot of cases, char will just flake off. And there was a time when the employees here got a record with a lot of intact char, before they photocopied it they would wipe off the areas that would break apart. And so we're lucky when we find ones where we can recover text in charred areas." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So these records had not been treated previously. This is the first time that anyone is seeing them since the fire, essentially." }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Yeah. There could be a few re-requests in there, but if a re-request has happened since the Preservation Unit existed, then we would have stabilized the record. So part of what we do is when we have a poor condition record, we may humidify it to flatten it. We may put it in a mylar sleeve to prevent sections from breaking apart and becoming disassociated. So we know when we encounter something we've already treated. But most requests when they come through as pulled from the burn bays are first time requests for us. If they're in poor condition, we would know that we had handled them before because of the way they've been treated." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. You also mentioned health concerns with some of the mold or anything else. Was there something that you did to kind of lessen those effects for the staff? Or how do you protect the staff?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Yeah. I'm tangential to this sort of thing." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "But definitely we've always had four-hour shifts, so we limit time. We've done respirator fit testing in the past. We currently have some positive pressure respirators for staff to wear. The records themselves are kept in a cold environment. And we also have fume hoods or biosafety cabinets under which a record with a lot of mold can be processed. But you'll get a better description of that from other individuals." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. This is the first time that I've heard about all of these methods for protecting the staff, so I appreciate you mentioning that." }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Yeah, there's good stuff that we do about that. We're also very concerned with repetitive injuries. Like some of our processes are very ergonomically difficult, so for that reason, we don't assign more than four hours on these processes." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. Okay." }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Four hours a day. We split up the shifts." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. When you're digitizing the records, do you have to adhere to certain standards? You know, the PPI [pixels per inch] or anything? What level of quality does the stakeholder or the requester need usually?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Well, initially we have standards for archival preservation masters. Those are very high standards." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "So, for example, with the high-value records, we did the famous generals, the actors, those records. I have a set of images that are very large TIFF [Tag Image File Format] files. The basic requirement, though, for accessing these images is just that you're able to read them. Although we have a very high resolution version of it, unless you really want to inspect some close feature on a document, that file performs exactly the same as a smaller file like a JPEG [Joint Photographic Experts Group] or a PDF [Portable Document Format] would. So we don't use the TIFF file for any form of distribution. Instead we make smaller images that are used for distribution. So those are our high-value records and the heavily burned content image recovered records. These are unique imaging products, very high resolution. But, once again, by the time it reaches a person who's reading it, they're more likely to be using a smaller file. We have other imaging projects that go straight to catalog, like index cards that run through an automatic scan feeder. Those don't reach an archival standard of high-quality imaging, but they're being processed very quickly, and they're going up to the catalog. And when this project was initiated, we sort of looked at the trade-offs in terms of storage space, in terms of ease of handling, and where they would ultimately reside. And we kind of came up with a specification for that based on those criteria. So it depends. It seems like every project is different. I get asked a lot about DPI [dots per inch], and there are a lot of factors that go into whether a quality of an image is high or not that have nothing to do with resolution and have more to do with the type of imaging that's taking place. But we're learning more about the federal agency government's standards, the FADGI [Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative] standards, for characterizing image quality and image devices. And soon I hope St. Louis will have the FADGI system employed with the golden thread target to better understand what level of quality our images are being produced at on various imaging devices." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "You brought up the FADGI. And I know that NARA just put out their permanent records digitization requirements. Were you part of providing input for that requirement?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Not really. That's more done in the DC area because of the collaboration between different government agencies, I think." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "I think still imaging specifications are not as rich because they don't cover things like audio compression and video formats and frame rates. A still image is just pretty simple. You can say it has a certain DPI. You can say it's in this particular file format. But it doesn't have as much nuance as those other categories. But you know, I've always felt throughout my career that it's really important to create files that are usable, and there's nothing worse than when you digitize something and then it's too big to attach to an email or it crashes somebody's computer when you send it to them. [laughter] And as the creator of those things, I'm always trying to find ways to make the files good, but more accessible. And then behind me, I have these lurking standards people telling me I need to make the files larger and less accessible. I'm not going to lie, there's a little bit of tension there. [laughter]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, I guess for keeping something permanent, you know, having those standards are good. But if you're providing access to a requester, like you said, they don't need all of those big requirements. Right?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "So yeah, looking at the fibers in the document–yes, that's true. Also, if there isn’t a paper original, or it’s being disposed of after digitization, it’s particularly important to digitize to a high standard." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So now in some of the...[cross-talking]. Oh, go ahead." }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "I was going to say, and we've yet to put our highest resolution TIFFs into the NARA repository, but we stand by ready to do that when the ERA accepts the digital surrogates of the military records, the high-value military records, we digitize." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So right now you're just keeping these files on the server somewhere?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And then do you keep the actual burned paper also?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Yes, we keep the burned records that we digitize. A lot of the highest value records that we digitized aren't burned at all. They're the famous generals, the actors, the sports celebrities-types of people. But just whenever we get a military record that's heavily burned, we don't discard the original. We keep the original. But we put what we call a charge-out, or basically a charge-out card, in that location in the stacks. So if that record is requested again, that card says “Come to preservation. There's a digital version of this file.” So what happens is then we supply the digital version on the request." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Are there any photographs in these papers as well? Or is it strictly just a document that's got their service history on it?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "So, sometimes there's induction photos, and if anyone was an officer, there's officer photos. Like Navy always has an induction photo in the burned records. And a lot of our high-value OMPFs, like famous people, would be military officers; they'll have several photographs in those. But for the average military record, enlisted, unless it's Navy, it's unlikely that there's going to be a photo. But sometimes there's chest X-rays. If medicals are in there, we'll have some chest X-rays." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. So that's kind of unusual, or at least to me, it seems unusual. Have you found any other things that were unusual that you've come across in those files?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Well, yeah. There's been a lot of stuff that's been found in the files. But I'm not the right person since I don't handle them every day." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Okay. So, you're not doing anything with that chest X-ray? [laughter]" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "No, no, no. Occasionally there's the DPAA [Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency] and JPAC [Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command]--I'm sorry to throw all these acronyms at you. It's based out of Honolulu, and it's the unit that goes and looks for remains. So, they'll either come to our facility or they'll queue up a bunch of records requests. When present, X-rays are useful for identifying human remains. So, that's an interesting process here in the building. The research room deals with that. The archival unit deals with that a lot. I just kind of see that occasionally from afar that that's going on." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's remarkable. In terms of the records, the burn records that you're working with, it sounds like there's a set process in place, that they're stabilized and then you're actually imaging them. How long would you say that it takes to image one page, one document?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Just 15 or 20 seconds. And we'll take a photograph of it under visible light and the nice thing about our camera is we can switch it to infrared without moving the document. The same camera does the visible and the infrared. So when we're doing that process that we call content recovery, it's pretty fast. We can do a whole record in a couple of hours. And a record may contain anywhere from 60 to 250 or more images. But so that's just the specialized process. And then for the routine digitization that we do, we do that on a different style of camera or scanner, and it's about the same–10 seconds per page, perhaps–but that doesn't do any infrared. That's just standard imaging. We do a lot more of that than we do of the infrared imaging. We've increased the amount of imaging that we do to release a file as digital. So at different condition levels we make a determination, well, this can go straight to the cameras and be imaged or this requires a little more treatment and stabilization. But if we can go straight to the camera and image it, then that's a productivity gain for us. It speeds up the window in which we have the record in our lab and the release date. Over the years we've been able to image condition levels getting worse and worse in order to improve our own efficiencies and reduce the turnaround times." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So it sounds like it depends on the condition of the record when you first get it, how long it might take, how many pages are in that file. You've got kind of an assembly line." }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "It is an assembly line. And when I quoted 10 or 15 seconds a page, that was just the portion that you're at the camera. There's other processes like pulling fasteners and surface cleaning that takes place that take more time than that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And is that happening in your location or is that happening with a different team? Where does that take place?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "I supervise those individuals, but really it's a different functional team. And as you talk to more employees in preservation, you'll learn more about what we call the “decon lab” [decontamination lab]. So my technical specialization is more imaging and imaging technology. And so my functional area is in the reformatting and scanning of records. But my staff do both reformatting and the records triage, records cleaning, and records stabilization activities in the decontamination lab." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Are there any new technologies or new methods that are coming out or that you're looking at that might even improve the efficiencies, improve the process in the future?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Yeah. A lot of this depends on what we're actually attempting to digitize. So, they’re certainly doing the touchless scanning approach at DC with the conveyor belt-style scanner. The benefit of that is that you don't have to run archival records through a document feeder which is something that is prohibited or only allowed under special permissions and with good reason. Document feeders tend to grab—they grab the documents, they grip them, and then they run them through a series of tight curves, all of which could cause any document to shred or jam. So the benefit of the drop-feed scanning system is that there's no gripping and turning of the paper through a series of rollers. So that'll take place in A2 soon. You still have to remove fasteners from documents. So it's not a panacea. There's still a lot of what we call prepping in order to get an image, an original, ready to scan. Images then have to be compared against the paper at some point in some quality-control process and refoldered and put back in a box. So imaging is just one step on that assembly line, obviously. We have that content recovery, our infrared process, and I'm always looking to improve that. I can improve it with a different light source, LED light source, where some of the diodes in the panel are infrared diodes, and some of them are visible light diodes. So a custom lighting approach is what would really improve the quality of the image. And so that's something we'll work on. One of our technicians is researching the possibility of pattern matching for fragments. So we do a process called mending. If a piece of paper falls apart and gets torn off and then is separated from its parent page, we reattach it physically. The digital equivalent of that could be software that recognizes a certain shape and reassociates two pictures to perform a digital mend. So when we photograph these poor-condition originals, we photograph the fragments as well as the pages with the hope or expectation that maybe there'll be a way in the future to combine those fragments with their parent pages. So that could be a future thing with this process." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's amazing. So could the fragments potentially then belong to someone else's file or it would just belong to that person's file that you found it in?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "I think it would probably belong to that person's file. What we do is we photograph all the intact char and then if there's loose pieces of char in the folder, we set those out and we photograph those. We don't have time to analyze this stuff. You know, we're in a production mode. We're getting these records digitized. These aren't single items or works of art. These are records. So we're not going to labor over them and to make these sort of connections. But it's possible that, let's say somebody's researching one of these records for genealogical purposes in the future and they get a digital version and they want to spend the time to re-associate those fragments to the parent pages. Then maybe there could be a program that looks at those shapes and tries to do that for them." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. That would be incredible and time saving. Better to provide access to that." }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "But, you know, of all the things I've wanted to say, and I don't know how this gets into the oral history though, is that when I walk people through on tours, we always show them the infrared content recovery and it always gets lots of oohs and ahs. But there are a lot more mundane things that happen that provide access to many, many more records. So I don't really like to play it up too much. But it's also a topic of great interest to me. It's very interesting, but it's not the biggest impact. Like little things can be done that you wouldn't even notice that make it possible for many more records to be available. So infrared only applies to a small percentage of the records that come through. And I try to emphasize this fact because I don't want the impression there was a fire that left all these charred, and through the magical process of infrared, NARA is now able to whole cloth recover all the fire damage." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "So, I try to control the narrative a little bit by tamping it down a bit. There's going to be an article coming out in _Wired_ magazine that talks a little bit about what we do in our unit, and I made sure that less than one percent of records goes through that process was part of that article." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "But for a veteran or a family member, they don't care if it's one percent or what that percentage is as long as they're able to access that record." }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Right. And in a way, the good thing about this is it’s a record that would be nearly impossible to access otherwise. So that makes it, like you were saying, every record has a requester behind it." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Has this whole process, your whole experience working there, has it changed how you view records? Maybe just how important they are? I don't know. Has it changed your mindset in any way?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely made me appreciate the historical sacrifices of servicemen and the fact that I'm just a lot more interested in the history just being exposed to all these records. The sheer scale of it is remarkable. And yeah, there's a huge side of this operation, which is just about enabling people to get their benefits. And that's so important. And it's ongoing. And then also just genealogy. As people age, I think they become more interested in the lives of their parents and grandparents. And then they want to find if there's a record available that they can research for genealogy. That's really interesting. I've helped friends of mine look up information about family members and assisted them in their research of these records as well. And that's been a really fun thing to do." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I forgot to ask earlier when you did move to the new building, how challenging was that? Were labs already set up by the time you got to the new building? What was that process like? That had to be pretty challenging to start fresh." }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Well, we did such a—it was such an upgrade really. We planned a lot of space in our labs. We planned a lot of network connections in our lab. And we have really first-class spaces here. So, it was a huge upgrade. We have electrical outlets everywhere. So actually it went really well. And we were formerly in a basement, so in a much smaller space. So it was a huge improvement. And we occupy a pretty big footprint in this building. So we can expand, and we can do more here. We can become a resource for the regional NARA facilities that don't have digitization or treatment capabilities. So our future plans are aligned with not just servicing the records here but also assisting other NARA offices in treatment and digitization." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "How many people do you have working there–just in preservation?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "In preservation, we're 17 currently." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. So you make it sound like it was a pretty smooth transition, though, to that that new building. Is that pretty accurate?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Yeah. I know you could probably find others who would say it was a headache, but no, it seemed like a smooth transition. When I think back on it, they had prepared all the computers ahead of time so that they were all functional. We didn't have to move anything at all. Now for the process of going out and finding records, I don't do that. So I don't know how that necessarily works. I planned the physical space around my lab, but I didn't plan the stacks and the systems that govern the casework here, the case management programs and applications." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. So we're kind of coming up towards the end of the hour here. I just wanted to ask, what do you think would be maybe your greatest accomplishment so far working at NARA? You've worked there for a number of years now. And it sounds like what you do is just amazing, and it's high tech and it's very specialized. What do you think is your greatest accomplishment so far?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "Yeah, well that's very flattering, but I think my greatest accomplishment was, and I know this isn't related to the fire, but just on a personal level, it's just learning to be a good supervisor and operating my unit with integrity and care and concern for the staff. That would be my main thing I'm proud of. For my cool experiences with NARA, I think doing the Iraqi Jewish Archive would definitely top that experience. Then generally just being a resource in terms of digitization and access, trying to create good products and make things happen. NARA is not the most technologically advanced kind of place, but we can do cool stuff when we have a chance. And I was lucky because I got to do some neat projects and processes here. There are tremendously competent people in the digitization and the cataloging spaces that I interact with. So I'm always learning new stuff." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Is there anything else that you can think of that we haven't covered and might be a good addition to this interview?" }, { "speaker": "Noah", "text": "No, there's nothing else I can think of." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Well, like I said, I'm going to transcribe this interview, and then once you have a chance to review it, if you think of anything else that you know that you want to mention, you can put it in there. So we're always open to additional information." } ]

[ { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So you were at the NPRC’s civilian records center when you started there. So where was that in relation to the NPRC’s military records center?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "It was part of the National Personnel Records Center, and the civilian building was in south St. Louis on 111 Winnebago. All of the civilian personnel records of government employees and other tax records were at that location. At the time, they were designated to serve as one of the two locations where the records recovery would be processed. So there were a number of people there that were involved in it. Lee Gary was the assistant director for civilian records, and Earl Rengstorff was the civilian branch chief, who had oversight of the project. I was a first-line supervisor. We came to have over 100 intermittents who worked on two shifts, a day shift and an evening shift, processing those burned records. That came in what they called \"tiger cages,\" which were about, as I recall, 10 feet high. The cages had big metal bars where the records had been put into the freeze-drying chamber. I think it was in eastern Ohio. Once the records were sufficiently dried, after the initial recovery, they were shipped back to one of the two locations: at the military building or the civilian building. And we would open the cages and then just gradually lift out chunks of records to identify names and service numbers." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So when you started at the National Archives, this was just a few months after the fire. Right? This was in December or so?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Correct." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Okay. Did they–[CROSS TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Go ahead." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So did they–you started talking about, you know, kind of the records recovery process there. Did they give you training ahead of time on what to do with these records, or did you have some of this experience coming in?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "No, I didn't really have any experience with that sort of thing. But I think they felt like, given my educational background, they didn't really need to give me training. There were a number of jobs that I had, and I said, \"Well, will I be given training on this or that?\" The managers indicated, \"Oh, no. I'm sure you can figure it out.\" It wasn't really all that complicated, Stephanie. There weren't that many steps, really. People would take a portion of the burned records and lift them out of the tiger cages. You might take, like, a couple of armfuls of them or handfuls of them, and then basically just start looking through to see if they all were for various veterans, or if it was all a record that was pertaining to one veteran. When you had that identified, you put it in a manila folder, and then put it in a fresh box where it would go into like a keypunch process, when you filled up an entire cardboard box. They had a group of people who did keypunching at the time, in the morning or like a day and an evening shift, I think, as I recall. The keypunch process would then put a registry number on each one of those manila folders, so that it was possible to identify the veteran by the service number and name. I wasn't given any specific training on it. It was just a fairly simple process of three or four steps." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. And so at this point, you were a day supervisor for this recovery project, is that correct?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yes. We started at 7:30 a.m., and my shift was over at 4:00 p.m. There was an evening supervisor to process those records as quickly as possible because, as you could imagine, there were people all across the country already writing inquiries about those World War I and World War II records, and veterans, you know, trying to get military benefits. So managers had two shifts going. The evening supervisor was John Carver." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "That was his first government job, too. He came from the private industry, and he and I had known each other earlier. Basically, he was the evening supervisor. I was the day supervisor. We also worked mandatory overtime. When I first went to work there, we worked Saturdays and holidays to try to process those records as quickly as possible." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. Okay." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "It wasn't really an option, but it wasn't that terrible, because I was young, and it wasn't that much of a burden. It was difficult, but we worked holidays and Saturdays to try to get those things processed as quickly as possible." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay, so you said the records were freeze-dried. What does that do to the record? Why were they freeze-dried?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "It doesn't do any damage to the record. When the records were taken off the sixth floor, they were wet, because the fire had burned for days and days, and the fire department continued to spray water onto the sixth floor. The records that were recovered were all damp and various degrees of wet. NARA managers tried something that was relatively new at the time, and you probably know about it. The NARA managers shipped those records to a freeze-drying chamber. That was, I think, part of—I'm not quite sure at this point. I don't recall. But it was a large freeze-drying chamber, where you could drive large, large groups of records into the chamber, and then it would be sealed, and the moisture would be gradually withdrawn, because it created a vacuum, which took the moisture out of the records. Once they reached a sufficient level of dryness, the records were ready to be shipped back to St. Louis. It was called a freeze-drying process. It was actually more of a vacuum-drying process, although in the process of drying the records, I think they may have been actually frozen to draw the moisture out of them." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And then when they arrived at the Civilian Personnel Records Center, they were dry, but they could still be moldy or discolored or—?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Well, they were moldy and brittle records, but the mold had been deactivated, or should be. I guess it was dormant, because the records were dry. If they had remained wet, the mold would have continued to grow. But by being dry, the mold spores that were on the records were inactive. As long as they remained dry and cool and not in a high level of humidity, the mold spores were just basically inactive. And that was one of the reasons they were put back into air conditioning, and why they're kept under environmental controls now, in St. Louis, once they've become archival. There were brittle edges on them, and part of the process was to start to shake the brittle edges off until you got something that was the core of the page, and that was what was put into the manila folder. A lot of brittle crumbles fell off the records once they started to be handled." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Were all of these shipped to NPRC’s Civilian Personnel Records Center? Or did some of these go back to NPRC’s Military Personnel Records Center?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "About half of them were sent to the civilian records building, which was part of the National Personnel Records Center. The other half was sent to the military personnel records building, which both parts comprise the National Personnel Records Center, much as it is today in St. Louis. So there was, like, a 50-50 division, I guess, close to that, where half of the records went back to the civilian building, and half of them went back to the military building." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. And this is just for space reasons?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yes. [CROSS TALKING] They didn't have enough room at either building to do all the records because, as I said, they took one of the bays in the civilian building and took the records down off the shelves and took the shelving down so that you had open space to work at tables. We had over 100 people. I think that the military building probably had close to the same number of people, who came in on an intermittent basis. They were mostly students, and they came in at various times during the day and processed the records. They were not full-time employees. They were hired specifically for the project. A lot of them want to work full time for the government because they were students." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. And then they were putting these freeze-dried or vacuum-dried records, you said, into manila folders." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yeah, they were like typical manila folders you deal with, you know, whatever. They are 8 1/2 by 11 inches. It was just a small fragment. They also had a smaller envelope that was, like, a half-envelope, and you could drop portions of records in–if there was just this very small, one document, they would drop them into a half-file. And so you had the two different types of manila folders, the full-size and the half-size, but they were the same kinds of manila folders that you see today on your desk, probably." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And then were those being entered into a system, like, for data entry? Were they being entered into a system at that time, or was that done later?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "No, no. It was part of the process. Once you got a cardboard box—and they were, like, records center boxes full of files, because as you gradually processed them during the time you were there, you would fill up a box with the manila folders from front to back or from back to front. When you finished a box, and it was full of recovered records, they were sent to keypunch, and the keypunch people worked, then, subsequent to that recovery process and entered it into a registry system. So it was pretty much, if the record was recovered one day, within a couple of days after that, they were entered into the registry system by being punched. Does that make sense? It wasn't simultaneous. It was two steps in the process: the recovery and folderizing, putting it into a box, and then when the box was full, sending that box into keypunch where there were probably, I think, between 25 and 30 people who worked full time keypunching those records and putting them into a registry system." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. And you had to supervise this entire process?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "No, I supervised the recovery and the boxing process. Once it went into the keypunch operator, it was handled by a different supervisor." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I see. Do you know what kind of information they were putting in that registry system? I know that was on the other side, but what information were they putting in there?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "I knew what they were putting in. They were putting in the person's name and their service number, or the name and Social Security number, whatever could be identified on that record in terms of the name, service number, or Social Security number. And if you had a partial record with the name and a date of birth, but you didn't have a service number on that document, you underlined the birth date so that it was, name and birth date, or name and service number. Then that was put into the registry file, which was computerized, and then it was assigned to a registry location so that you could search them by their registry location." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I see. So kind of whatever information they can pull from that record." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yes. Whatever you pull from the recovered portion of it. In some cases, you know, the service number was burned up. So they didn't have that. But you had portions of documents with the man's name and birth date. I'm saying men–it was mostly men–and birthdate and his name. Then you put that into the registry. If you had a service number, so much the better." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Now, these records, you said that there's sometimes fragments there. They can be brittle. They obviously had gone through some damage there. Are there any sort of precautions that the intermittent staff had to take when they're handling these records?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "I guess, to be as careful as possible. But pretty much their job is to basically identify a name, a service number, a date of birth, and to start to shake the brittle, completely burned, you know, edges off the record, because some of the records were pretty much intact. But there would be like a half-an-inch or an inch of burn around the edges. You basically sort of shuffled that off the record, or kind of shook it off the record, or brushed it off the record before you put it into the manila folder. At the end of the day, the floor was littered with brown ash from these burned papers. It was really a filthy job that, you know, you didn't particularly wear your best clothing to do that, certainly not like you're dressed, probably, today. Most of the guys were, you know, in very casual, older clothes and, you know, t-shirts and stuff like that. People didn't dress up. So it was a very dirty job. And sometimes you got covered with soot by the end of the day." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Mm. Did they have to wear masks or gloves or anything like that for health reasons?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "In some cases, the people wore masks to keep from inhaling ashes. Also, some people who were very sensitive to it would wear plastic gloves. Not everybody did that, because it was sometimes kind of difficult to work in latex gloves. But they weren't handled quite as carefully as if a preservation person, who has been trained in preservation, is handling the record now. I mean, the way the records are handled now, by the people who are actively involved in archival preservation, is much more carefully [done] than those records [were]. But the essence of the project was to try to process as many records as possible as quickly as possible, so that we could get a portion of the information back online to answer inquiries." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "At the time, Stephanie, those were not yet accessioned records into the National Archives. They were just in our physical custody. They were still in the legal custody of the Department of the Defense [DOD]." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So these were not considered, at the time, permanent records that would be accessioned into the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "That's correct. They were not permanent. They were considered–geez, what's the archival term for that? Um, they were–[CROSS TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Temporary?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "They were unscheduled. They weren't considered temporary, and they weren't considered permanent. They were just considered unscheduled. I think part of the process involved, subsequent to that, was to negotiate with the DOD the length of time before they would be accessioned by the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So then at what point–you said that you became a management analyst? At what point were you hired into that position?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "That was late August or early September 1974. There were a number of management staff positions that were open, and since the project was winding down and, obviously, I needed another job where I would either be assigned to correspondence or some kind of job, and I applied for a management analyst job. And so I went into that position. Then in September, which was initially when I was the supervisory archives technician, I was a [GS-]5. And then when I went into that management analyst series, I guess, much as it is now, it was like a [GS-]5/7/9." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. And you said–[CROSS TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "So that was when I joined the management staff." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So previous to that, you said that the other project was winding down when you applied for this position. So you're saying that all of those records that had been damaged, by that time then, were already in the registry system, and they were re-boxed or...[CROSSTALKING]. So that just lasted a few months?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yes. So it took the process of working at both of the buildings and working, you know, two shifts. So pretty much by August, it was finished at both of the buildings. Now, I wasn't at the military building, so I don't know. It may have gone on for a couple more weeks there, or it may have already been finished. But pretty much by the end of August, after having worked with this, you know, the freeze-dried records for eight months, they were pretty much processed into the registry system, and they were all kept at Page [9700 Page Avenue, St. Louis]. So the ones that were at the civilian building were shipped back to the military building. The ones that were processed at the military building just remained there, because the registry files were all at the military building, where they would be referenced by people who were familiar with military records. They didn't keep them in the civilian building after they had been processed." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Wow. That seems like it was a pretty efficient process. It went pretty quickly." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "It went pretty quickly, because there were a lot of people involved in it. As I said, we had over 100 intermittents who worked for us. So it was a very large staff. There were not that many supervisors involved in the process, so we were spread pretty thin. There were a lot of intermittents who came and went and processed records. It was all finished pretty much within eight months. But, frankly, after having been working with burned and sooty records, and looking a bit like Pigpen, by the end of the day—the character from _Peanuts_ , if you're not familiar with that—we were ready to be done with the project. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I bet. So as the management analyst, were you still at the civilian facility, or are you now over at the military facility?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "I was at the military building on most days, and occasionally I worked at the civilian building, if there was a project. But when I worked on the records monograph for the recovery process, I was only at the military building, because, I believe, most of the resources for that were already at the military building that we used, like pay vouchers and morning reports and all that sort of thing. That was at the military building. So once I started on that monograph, I was just pretty much exclusively at the military building." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Can you talk about the monograph? I know that you compiled this directory of sources, so maybe just describe what you were doing with that, and what the end result was." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Well, we were trying to list every possible source of information for records recovery or, you know, verification of information that could be used to verify military service, like the pay vouchers and the morning reports and sick reports and a lot of those things. So, let me look at the date here. I finished that, I guess, by July of 1975, because that's the date that's on the monograph. And it lists the microfilm records, the paper records. And then part of it is also where there were state resources that people could write to. So it was divided kind of by chapters, and it was also divided by World War I and World War II sources of information. So there's [CROSS TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Go ahead." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Pardon?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Oh, go ahead." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "The sources—some of them were still in the states. There were sources of medical information, too, from clinical records. So I tried to list all those, too. But by the time I got done, there were literally hundreds of alternate sources that you could go through to try to verify military service or the character of military service, and also verification of states that had collected separation documents that you could write to so far. The states were willing to assist you in sending back information, and sometimes copies of the DD form 214 that was issued to the veteran when he was released from service. There were also things like the court-martial records that were in Suitland, Maryland. If there was a suspicion that the veteran had been court-martialed or received less than honorable service, you could go to those court-martial records. So, does that give you a little bit of the flavor of that monograph? It was given as— [CROSS TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "These were sources that were..." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yes, it was compiled like a training document for the people who came into the records reconstruction process. There were a lot of college graduates that were hired. Some of them were college people who had had some college and maybe had not finished a degree. There were literally, I think, several hundred that were hired for the course of, like, February through the summer of '74, because a lot of the people who had been World War II veterans—and when I say World War II veterans, the people who had come into the records center after World War II were 55 and 60 [years old], and they already had 30 years of service. So, they left at that time having had a sufficient number of years of service. At that time, people were—the civilians at the military building, certainly, and the ones at the civilian building were more inclined to retire at age 55 and then go on to some other endeavor in their lives. It was really much less common that people worked much beyond 55. There were large numbers of people that left in '73 and ‘74 and '75 and were replaced with younger people in the Records Reconstruction Branch. When I went to work there, they had about 125 people at the time working in that area, the Records Reconstruction Branch, and it was the largest branch at the military building. There was an Air Force branch that was much smaller, an Army branch that was subsequent to the fire, and a Navy branch. But the Records Reconstruction Branch was the largest in terms of personnel." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "This was established after the recovery process at some point?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yes, it was established in 1974, as the records came back into the registry system. There were some people who were working in other parts of the center who were reassigned to the branch. There were also new people who came in from the private sector who came to work in the Records Reconstruction Branch. It gradually grew in '74 and '75 as more people were trained and worked in that area and the number of requests built up, due to the publicity from the fire. In addition, a lot of the World War II veterans, at that point, were in their 50s and 60s, and people were writing to try to get, you know, copies of the medals or medals that their father had lost or misplaced. There were men that were going to the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs] for the first time to try to get medical assistance, and they had misplaced their separation documents. So there were thousands of inquiries. Those records were also used by local police agencies and federal agencies that were verifying military service." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And so the Records Reconstruction Branch is more about-–you're not so much piecing fragments together. You're using these alternate sources to, basically, kind of recreate the information that was on the original record?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yes. Both. They used the fragments if there were fragments or portions of records. In some cases, you were really lucky, you found almost a whole [record] when they pulled from the file. It was almost a complete record. Obviously, some of the records that were recovered from the fire were complete records. If the man—and this is getting really detailed—if the man's record was filed, probably in a box that was on the bottom shelf, chances are it was almost a whole record, because as the records exfoliated during the fire, and as the water was poured onto the fire, the records that fell off in the aisle made sort of a barrier so that, if you were one of the lucky people and your record was in a file on the bottom shelf, chances are your record wasn't too seriously damaged. It was just wet. Does that make sense?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Interesting. Yes." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "[As the] fire burned, it exfoliated the front of the box. And then records came loose and fell down to the floor, and the fire department poured water on the fire. It collected on the floor and made sort of like a protective barrier for some of the bottom boxes. So, if you were on the bottom shelf, all through the sixth floor, chances are your record was mostly not burned, just wet. Or it might have just a little fringe around the edge, because those boxes basically were almost intact. But the ones on the top shelf, if you were unfortunate enough to be in the top shelf, those were almost completely lost, because they were the boxes exfoliated, and that's where there was the most fire and the least amount of water. So that was something that when you got an inquiry, you might be lucky enough to get almost a complete record, or you might be unlucky enough to only get like a name or a service number or something like that, some little tiny fragment, in which case you had to go back through a much longer reconstruction process and write to state agencies or pull pay vouchers and different kinds of things or go to morning reports. So there were people that were specialists in the branch in just servicing the morning reports, and they sat all day long at readers and looked up information that was on microfilm, because the morning reports had been microfilmed, and the sick reports had been microfilmed. So there were people who actually sat in front of a reader. I'm assuming they still have those in the Archives. And that was an incredible job, because it was difficult to watch those images flying past the front of your eyes for eight hours a day, as you can imagine." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yes. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Have you ever used one of those machines?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I have. Yes. And I know exactly what you're talking about." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "People used to sometimes fall asleep, because it was so difficult to focus your eyes hour after hour on the screen. And I never was that upset with them when I would walk through the aisles if somebody dozed off, because it was hard as heck to be alert for eight hours a day, looking at all those images flashing past your eyes." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. Did you work with, or did someone at NARA work with, the military services to determine which records could be used to help reconstruct the military record?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "No, not really. We mostly knew things that were available and gathered information, and we had the pay vouchers in St. Louis. They knew that the court-martial records were in Washington [D.C.], and we had copies of all the morning reports from World War II and World War I that were already on microfilm there. They hadn't been used as much, but once the fire occurred, and you had to use them more frequently, we had access to all that kind of thing. And I can’t say that, as far as I know, that they dealt a lot with the military to ask for other sources, because I'm not sure that the military knew of any more sources for, like, World War I and World War II that, you know, the military is more focused on the present day—the branches of the service, as opposed to historical records. There may have been some contact with the Archives [and] the Army and Navy and the Air Force to see if there were sources that they knew about that we didn't have. But that wasn't a real frequent kind of interaction, I don't think." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So as the records reconstruction branch chief, what were your responsibilities? Were you overseeing the staff using that monograph that you had put together? Or what were your responsibilities as the branch chief?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Well, my overall responsibilities were to try to manage the flow of work and the answering of inquiries. If there were unusual complaints or congressionals, because as you currently have, you have congressmen writing to the National Archives specifically on behalf of their constituents. So my job was to manage the personnel, the flow of work through the branch, and to ensure that the oldest inquiries were processed first. That was part of the management process, to ensure that the people were working on the oldest inquiries as opposed to the newest inquiries. The way they do it now, I think, is separated more by the type of inquiry. But at the time, all the inquiries were treated the same, and they were all handled by the date they were submitted so that you were always working on the oldest cases first to try to answer those after the veterans or the federal agencies or whomever had written or contacted the Archives. So it was more of a workflow management thing and personnel management. When you lost people, then [you had] to be involved in the interview and hiring of new people. As you can expect, when you had 120-some people, there were always people that were promoted or were leaving to take other jobs in the federal agencies. You [were] constantly involved in recruiting and interviewing and training. So, that was all of those functions. It was more of management, as opposed to actually being involved with inquiries. But, if there were sensitive inquiries, I got involved in those, and sometimes I would get personal calls from people who called in and managed to get hold of the branch chief." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you know how many inquiries were coming in at the time, I don't know, say per week or per month or so?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "On an annual basis, it was several hundred thousand that we processed. So, sometimes, it was several thousand a day that we received." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "There were certain days when you had heavier receipts, like Mondays, because it would build up at the post office over the weekends, and you might get, you know, like a thousand inquiries in one day. But, generally, it was, you know, between several hundred and a thousand inquiries you got everyday. So that, at the end of the year, we had processed several hundred thousand inquiries. I can't recall, I'm sorry, the exact number, but there were generally between 200,000 and 300,000, I think, that we processed in the course of the year." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And when you say that you've processed them, so there's this whole process going on behind the scenes, then, to recreate that information, right? I mean, the staff working on, like, mold remediation if they need to, or are they piecing things together? What are they doing exactly to process those?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Well, they were getting the—if there were multiple or one B-file [Burn file], that was pulled from the file, initially, and then you looked at what the inquiry was seeking, like maybe verification of military service, so you might have had to go to pay vouchers then or to morning reports to answer that inquiry. That was the purpose of the branch, to answer inquiries from veterans and federal agencies and state agencies that were seeking to verify the character and length of a man's military service. If it was possible, we would also try to—for those people who wanted to verify the medals that they were entitled to, then those actually were referred to the department for actual issuance of the medal. So that, as I recall, like the Department of [the] Navy or the Department of [the] Air Force would then issue, actually, the medals based on the information that we were able to put back together. But the purpose of the branch was to assemble information required to answer the inquiry. There wasn't any particular archival—I always thought there should be, but at the time, there weren't the resources. There wasn't an archival portion to it. You just handled the record, basically by people who are not trained in preservation techniques, and if there was damage on the record, you sort of brushed off the burned parts as well as you could. And there wasn't anything done at that time to enhance preservation, because the records were still unscheduled, and the Archives didn't treat them as being permanent records, because they really weren't. Everybody thought they would become permanent records, but at the time, they were unscheduled, so there weren't any preservation efforts made as part of that reconstruction process." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So, whether the staff were working with the original record, or if they're doing that research, you know, through the other sources that they could use to reconstruct that record, it's taking quite a while, it sounds like, or at least it seems like it would take quite a while, for each request that came in to compile that information, right?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "In some cases, yes. If you had to go to a state agency or write to them, it took weeks, because you would send out an inquiry, and you'd have to put the record in the inquiry into suspense on your desk. And then it might be weeks before the state agency gets back to you. If you needed pay vouchers, you had to put the record into suspense on your desk until the people who were working in search could go out and pull the pay voucher, because everybody didn't run out into the file areas to pull pay vouchers. There were people that were specifically trained in that, and they would pull the pay vouchers and then route them to the person who was working on that inquiry. So you married up the information. So to answer your question, yes, it sometimes did take weeks or even months to answer an inquiry once it had come onto your desk. In other cases, you had a complete record. You could answer it that day. So it varied widely, you know. And, in other cases, if you had to get some kind of a specific detail—if the person was alleging they were injured at a certain place, you would send the record to the OR—Organizational Records—where they would look at morning reports or sick reports to verify information printed out from the microfilm and then send it back to the correspondence person to be married up with the record, so the correspondence clerk could answer the inquiry. Again, there were delays in that, because the OR people had a backlog of work, which could take several days or a week, or more than a week, to act [respond] to the person in correspondence, who was working in the same general area of the building but was, you know, more confined to correspondence as opposed to working with organizational records, because some of the people were simply better at that organizational-type search with microfilm; it tended to be the older, more experienced employees who were good at that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, it's just amazing that the branch was able to process, you said, 200,000 or 300,000 requests a year when there is so much work going on behind the scenes, and you're still able to process that many. That's wonderful!" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Oh yeah. Well, at the time, I think our customers didn't think it was wonderful, because there were long delays in answering their inquiries. So it was—we were doing the best we could with the resources we had in reassembling info—and see, that's why I'm talking about records reconstruction. You're actually not reconstructing the original record. You're assembling information. I was thinking about this the other day. A more accurate title for the branch would have been like the “information assembly branch,” where they were putting information back together about the veteran and his service as opposed to actually reconstructing the original records, which you couldn't do. But it was a little bit easier for people to understand records reconstruction better than any other title. So that was, I guess, what the managers at the time settled on." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Were there any letters or phone calls where, you know, where some of the patrons were upset, that you had to handle those types … ?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Oh, yeah. A lot of time—well, there were section chiefs in correspondence, and they handled some of the complaints. You did get the telephone complaints. In many cases, the veteran would be upset if there were long delays. The veteran would write to his congressman, and then the congressman's office would write in and say, “We need to … ,” you know, this or that. Those inquiries were handled as a priority because, of course, you didn't want to offend the people in Congress. Very often then, you would be working on—there would be people that would actually be working on the original inquiry from the veteran, who then became involved in the congressional—to try to answer the congressman's office. So they tried to handle those with more priority, but often, it took about as long to answer those as it would have initially to the veteran or to the Veterans Administration, or to whomever wrote in, because you simply couldn't make the process happen overnight. In some cases, I guess, the supervisors were able to call the state agencies or call the Veterans Administration, if they wanted to retrieve medical records to try to speed the process up a little bit. But there was only a certain amount of things you could do to speed up the process." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. Yeah, it sounds like it was as efficient as it could be. And maybe just the patrons, the veterans or whoever was asking for the information, just didn't understand the behind-the-scenes kind of work that's going on that needed to be done." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "That's correct. There's a perception that all the records had been microfilmed, and all you had to do was then pull the microfilm to service that. There were any number of times people called me, as the branch chief—I was only the branch chief there for a couple of years before I left to go to Suitland—but there were any number of times people said, \"Well, weren't all those records microfilmed and across the street?\" I don't know where that perception came from, but I heard that many, many times. I said, \"I wish the records had been microfilmed. I wish there had been duplicates of the records, but the records were original, and the original was in the building on the sixth floor.\" So most of the records were on the sixth floor. There were some on a couple of other floors that didn't get damaged by the fire, but I said, \"The records were in the original only. They were not microfilmed.\" The military departments didn't go to the expense of making a duplicate. The paper record was retired and turned over to the physical custody of the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "At this time, were you also presenting at various venues, at various places, on the process of reconstructing these records?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yes. And yes, occasionally, we were called to veterans’ meetings or to some public–there weren't a lot of instances of that. And in some cases, the assistant director took care–for military records, [he] would handle that. But if it happened during the course of the year, yes. It was just part of an assignment that you got, and you were out of the building, you know, for a day or for a portion of a week. So it went on simultaneously. And it even happened after I left there. I know there were a couple of times when there were military organizations in the Washington area that wanted to have a representative from NARA come to talk about the fire and the recovery of records. And, I know, a couple of times, I went to Alexandria and so forth because I was on the scene, and people knew that I'd been involved in the process virtually from the beginning. It's a shame there—are you aware of any of the people who talked about the actual work of recovering the records from the sixth floor?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "A couple." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Okay, good. I wasn't involved in that part of the process. Those people were people who were already actively NARA employees. And I'm saying NARA, you know. At that time, it was NARS, the National Archives and Records Service. We were part of the GSA, unfortunately, in 1973. And there were people who went onto the sixth floor and actually recovered the records from the floors and the boxes and the shelves. I wasn't involved in that process, so I was kind of in the second step, once the records had been dried and were sent back to either Page or to Winnebago. But one of the men who handled that, unfortunately, is deceased. It's a shame you didn't have the chance to talk with him. But Cliff Ambler was the supervisor who worked on the sixth floor and actually recovered records from—you know, that were wet once the fire was out, and they were able to go back on the sixth floor and start moving those records out onto the parking lot under tents, so they could start the drying process. I, unfortunately, wasn't involved in that, or else I would have been involved in every step of the process." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So was he also involved, then, in going around to various places to kind of talk about this process?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Oh, Cliff then went into correspondence on current Air Force records and worked in the Air Force and then Air Force Reference Branch. And then subsequent to that, he left and went to work at the Chicago Records Center and then San Francisco and then Boston. He was all over the country. But after his initial work on the sixth floor in the recovery [of records], immediately following the fire, and when the fire was out, and it was safe to go back onto the sixth floor, he didn't work in the subsequent steps." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. And in terms of you and others that were going out, it sounds like organizations would invite NARA staff to go talk to them about this process?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yeah. If it was a veterans’ organization, I think—one time I remember going to a VA hospital in Hannibal and another time to, like, a Purple Heart organization in Alexandria. They would write to the National Archives and ask if there was someone available that could come and talk to a group, on a certain date at a certain time, about the records, you know, the records that were recovered and what was available and how the inquiries were answered. When I spoke at that conference at the University of Iowa, I met one of the ladies who subsequently became one of the great preservationists, Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler, who was actually involved in some of the preservation for the Declaration of Independence. But that was a preservation conference. And so they talked about how you recovered records. And at the time, that freeze-drying or vacuum-drying process was first really on a large scale. It was pioneered in 1973 after the fire. Before that, that process had really not been used or explored too widely when paper records were wet, and because the technology wasn't available to do that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Interesting. So you did mention a minute ago about NARA or NARS, at that time, being part of the General Services Administration [GSA]." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So, I believe it was in 1985 when they separated out and became an independent agency. So let's see here. I think you would have been in the Reconstruction Branch then. Did you notice any changes when that occurred?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "No, I didn't. I was already in Washington when that occurred. And when they celebrated the independence, I was already the assistant director or the deputy director at the Washington National Records Center. So I was in Suitland, and there was a large celebration at Archives at that—well, what we subsequently called Archives I, which was the building downtown at the time. We didn't have Archives II in College Park. Have you been to that building?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "At College Park? Yes." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yeah. That building didn't, I think, come online until, like, 1993 or 1994. So there was just the original Archives building, and they had a big celebration in the Rotunda at Archives I when they celebrated independence day. And I, as the assistant director at Suitland, was invited to attend that. So I was very fortunate. I mean, it was one of the first things I did when I went to Washington, because I went there in May of 1984. So I got there in time to celebrate the independence." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, that's pretty neat." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Oh, it was very neat, because we were all very restive under GSA. They didn't particularly like the National Archives, because they considered us to be sort of, like, intellectually snobbish persons, and the GSA resented us greatly. You know, I don't know what your educational background is, but mostly the National Archives people were at the higher levels. Management levels were college graduates and had advanced degrees. So they did think of us as being, sort of, snobbish and intellectually superior. And I suppose we conveyed that, too, because I think we felt like a lot of the people in GSA were sort of stupid, frankly. I guess I treated them like that, too, so I probably fell into that trap. But we were greatly relieved, because I think most people at the National Archives and Records Service felt that we never should have been part of the General Services Administration to begin with. We were a cultural agency, as opposed to being, like, a service agency that serviced other parts of the government. We did do that too, though." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Did you notice a transition period when the agency did become independent?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "At the transition, which was in 1984 and 1985, there was a lot more publicity. It was kind of odd, but GSA, I think, always tried to keep NARA/NARS as, sort of, subservient and not involved in publicity so much. So basically, I think there was sort of a new sense that we needed to advertise to the American people our services and the fact that we were an agency that kept government records and so forth, and to try to establish a more independent identity and more of a recognized identity nationwide. So yeah, there was a definite transition period, and that went on for years, because as they gradually added more and more people that were involved in those kind of processes, we had more of an outreach to the federal community and to the public than we were ever allowed to have when we were part of the General Services Administration. A lot of what's involved, actually, in establishing that, in the types of activities you're involved in [federal agency records management inspections], we weren't encouraged to go out into federal agencies and review their records practices and things like that when we were part of NARS." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "You know, I'm not sure how long you've been with records management, but that was something that kind of grew in the years subsequent to that where we, sort of, took a more active role in trying to go out, establish good records management processes in the federal agencies." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So I mean, that's understandable...to take a few years or so to really get, you know, get your feet under you and figure out what is the mission and what do we need to do as an agency." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yeah, there was more of a redefinition of the agency's mission." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And so you said that when this occurred, when the agency separated from GSA, you were the deputy director of the Washington National Records Center. Is that correct?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yes. I went to work there in May of 1984. So I was already in Washington at that time." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. What were some of your responsibilities?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Well, I had, sort of, the same responsibilities as a branch chief, only much more so, because I had responsibility for the building, for staffing, for management of the workload, for recruiting and the whole management of a large entity. I spent a lot of time with outreach to federal agencies talking to them about, you know, records. I wasn't so much a strong records management person, but that was a focus of part of our outreach. When you would talk to the agencies about their records and how they were managed, and how they were retired, and so forth like that, there was an outreach focus as the assistant director. And then there was also a lot of time spent managing the building, because there were a lot of facility problems at Suitland, as there continued to be through the years, you know—leaking roofs and hot areas and air conditioning issues and termites in the stack areas and all kinds of things like that, that I was involved in—that just really basically ate up your day. And then, of course, there was employee discipline and recruiting and just the whole range of activities. I wasn't so much involved in answering inquiries from the federal agencies that had records there. But if there was a problem, then I got a telephone call from the Selective Service or the other agencies, daily. We had a lot of DOE [Department of Energy] records. And there was also involvement in overseeing classified records, because that's a large repository for classified records. In fact, it's the largest one for any of the Federal Records Centers. I think, right now, there are only a couple of them that keep classified records at all, maybe Seattle and Suitland. Other than that, I think all the classified areas have been closed down in other records centers." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I talked to a former director of a Presidential Library, and that came up. It sounds like the NARA facilities are sending the classified records to the Washington National Records Center. It sounds like they're consolidating them there. Is that right?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yeah. That was a consolidation that went on, really, after 1996, because when they set up the revolving fund, the director of the revolving fund didn't want to pay for all those clearances, and all the special, you know, bells and whistles for vaults and things like that at a lot of the regional centers. So they were encouraged to, or told to, send their classified records to Suitland, where they were consolidated into three large vaults that we had there. And that process went from '96 to the time when I became the director of the Washington National Records Center later. I was reassigned to be the director there in 2000." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So at that point, were you over the entire federal records center operations or … ?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "I was for a time. And that was from about '90 through '96. I was the director of all the regional record centers, and our office was on K Street, and then subsequently, at Archives II, once they opened that facility and closed the K Street offices. And then after that, I was reassigned to be the director at the Washington National Records Center, which I did in the last, I guess, 10 years of my career." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. What kind of decisions go into running the entire federal records center system?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "The biggest thing that we had at the central office was management of the budget, at that time, because each of the centers had a budget that you had to very carefully monitor staffing and budget throughout the year to ensure that you didn't exceed what we were appropriated, in which case, we would have been, you know, technically in default, in violation of, I guess, whatever act controls that—and also to manage the reimbursable activities that we did, like, for the IRS, because most of the work that we did for the IRS, including the storage and all the reference, was a reimbursable function that involved transfer of millions of dollars from the IRS to NARA in the Federal Records Centers to maintain their records and to service them, because at that time, in the '90s, they were very heavily referenced, and there would be, like, maybe 16 or 17 million reference requests in the course of a year, for IRS records, because they were all paper. There were very few electronic records. And so, any time there was a subsequent audit or an inquiry from the person, you had to go back and pull the IRS tax records for that particular year and that particular person, and those IRS records were very heavily referenced." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. Yeah, that sounds kind of complicated. And there's a lot involved in everything that you had to do with that." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yes. Well, it involved a lot of constant, daily contact with the Internal Revenue Service [IRS] about their inquiries and money and so forth like that. So I dealt with—I had a liaison with the IRS, Peggy Fitzpatrick, and I dealt with her, basically, multiple times during the day, because that was a very large interaction with the Internal Revenue Service. And then we also had that kind of activity with the Social Security Administration. We kept a lot of their records, and that also was a reimbursable activity. So, I had a lot of interaction with them, too. And then a lot of it wasn't just involved in the space management, because, Stephanie, there was constant pressure to get more storage areas, because our holdings of paper records continue to grow each year. So I was involved in procurement of additional storage areas like in Dayton, where we went from one building to four. Just to manage all that—and, also, to get additional annexes in various locations. I think, at one time, Denver had an annex." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I'm not sure." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Fort Worth also had multiple locations." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Yeah. Do you think, over time, this will slow down with that Presidential memo [M-19-21/M-23-07] that came out?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Yes. Well, that really will drastically—yes. It's already happened, because in the last 10 years, the IRS, as you know, converted to electronic records, and you probably file your tax return electronically. Well, that is all they kept. And the Internal Revenue Service keeps those electronic records. So gradually the volume of paper has diminished, and you need less and less and fewer storage areas for all those internal revenue records. And the same thing has happened for Social Security. So as agencies have converted to electronic records over the last— and I'm kind of out of the loop, because I've been retired for over 10 years—but as agencies have converted to electronic records, there have been fewer and fewer—there's fewer and fewer need for storage of textual records. And I think, at one time, Denver was much, much larger in terms of its holdings, because it kept all the paper records from Ogden. So I think if you look at the Denver Records Center, it's much, much smaller now than it was, say, back in the'90s." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Interesting. Well, we have a new facility now north of Denver." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Well, also, as you mentioned, too, under the Archivist Ferriero, they decided that they did not want to take any more textual records. So that, also, is going to have a very dramatic effect and downsizing of the record center system, because there won't be paper records coming into most locations. Suitland, though, will remain large, because a lot of the pre-archival records are stored there. And when I was the director, we looked at projections, and there would be large amounts of paper records stored there through 2050, because so many of those pre-archival, or records that were scheduled permanent, had really long retentions, before they would be turned over to the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. They're like permanent, or they're really long-term temporary?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Oh, yes. Well, there were some long-term temporary, but there were also a lot of long-term records that were considered to be permanent, where the agencies would retain legal custody for, like, 50 years or 60 years before it was turned over to NARA." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. So, they'll be there for a while. [LAUGHS]" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Oh, yeah. Suitland will be there for a long time. It'll be one of the last record centers to close. The St. Louis military building, I guess, will never close, because they're getting electronic military records to service. So they will continue their correspondence functions for the foreseeable future." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "You said that you've been retired for how long?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "I retired in 2011." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you remember what that day was like?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "What? Pardon? What that day was like?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Do you have memories of, you know, did someone throw you a party, or did they do anything special for you when you retired?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "I tried to keep it as low as possible, and keep it a low-key thing. And there was a small reception at the Washington National Records Center. But it was during the Christmas holidays that carried over into January. So, mostly, there were a handful of people there from the building and a few people from the central office who came out. But, for the most part, most of the senior management people were on leave for the holidays, which was okay. I didn't want a large celebration or anything like that, because sometimes some of the things that are said at those kinds of anniversary or retirement parties are not things that people felt all along, up through your career. And, at the end, it seemed like there was a certain amount of insincerity, and I just didn't particularly care for that. And I didn't really feel like I wanted to have that kind of a big celebration or anything like that. I wanted to, just, sort of keep it. So I sent out an announcement to a lot of the people that I'd worked with in the regions. The people I worked with in Central Office, said that I'd worked for NARA, and it was the only agency I worked for, for 37 years, but that I felt like it was time to retire." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. Is there anything that you miss about it?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Oh, I think I miss talking and working with some of the people. There were very nice people that worked in Archives II. Some very nice people. And also some very nice people that I worked with in the regions. And I sort of miss that. Occasionally, I still have some interaction with them, if they write, or I talk to them on the telephone." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, it looks like I've kept you over a little bit in our scheduled time. Was there anything else that you wanted to add to the interview? Any words of wisdom or stories that you remember?" }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "No. I think we covered it pretty well. I can't think of anything. Maybe when I look at the transcript, there'll be other things that might occur to me as I think about it, and I read through it. No, I think you covered it pretty well, and [I'm] not the only person you talked to. So, I'm sure that other parts of the process and the whole activities have been covered by some other folks. And that link [[https://www.archives.gov/about/history/nprc-oral-histories]](https://www.archives.gov/about/history/nprc-oral-histories) will have their contribution on it too." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yes. Yes." }, { "speaker": "Alan", "text": "Okay. Well, then I'll read through some of those, and see if anything else occurs." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Yeah. So, thanks for taking this time to talk with me today. We've really covered a lot of ground, so I'm going to go ahead and end the recording." } ]

[ { "speaker": "Caroline", "text": "Can you just provide a brief overview of your career at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Thelma", "text": "I started working for the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC), Military Personnel Records (MPR) on September 20, 1972, as a GS-4 archives technician. I worked for the Army Reference Branch as a GS-4 work-in-file technician." }, { "speaker": "Caroline", "text": "Could you tell me a little more about that?" }, { "speaker": "Thelma", "text": "Yes. A work-in-file technician responds to reference requests mainly from the Veterans Administration that are submitted on the VA 3101 form. The request is completely processed in the file area rather than in the office at a desk. I searched and withdrew the pertinent military record, completed the form, and refiled the record. Several months later I was promoted to a GS-5 management assistant position for the Military Management and Technical Staff (MMTS). I mainly wrote and made changes to the instructions that correspondence technicians used to respond to requests. About a year later I was promoted to a GS-7 management analyst position. I worked on various studies and projects. One of the most interesting projects was working with a team to develop engineered standards for the reference branches. I worked for the MMTS for about three years. After that, I spent the next five years at MPR in various supervisory positions: GS-9 Section Chief for the Air Force Reference Branch, GS-9 Section Chief for the Navy Reference Branch, GS-11 Assistant Branch Chief for the Navy Reference Branch, GS-11 Assistant Branch Chief for the Air Force Reference Branch, GS-11 Assistant Branch Chief for the Army Reference Branch, GS-11 Assistant Branch Chief for the Navy Reference Branch, and GS-12 Branch Chief for the Navy Reference Branch. So, from 1972 to 1980 I worked at NPRC [MPR] for eight years. Then from 1980 to 1991 I worked at the Civilian Personnel Records facility of the National Personnel Records Center [NPRC, CPR] for 11 years as a GS-12 Branch Chief for the Civilian Reference Branch. Then I returned to NPRC [MPR] for a brief time as Branch Chief of the Army Reference Branch and the rest of the 11 years as the Branch Chief of the Records Reconstruction Branch, then as Manager, Reference Core Two and Manager, Reference Core Five. Cores Two and Five while I was Chief provided reference on fire-related requests just like the Records Reconstruction Branch. Then in 2002 I returned to the Civilian Personnel Records facility for five years as the Assistant Director. I retired in September 2007. So, was that totally confusing?" }, { "speaker": "Caroline", "text": "No not at all. That is a really awesome trajectory. And it sounds like you got to work in a lot of different areas." }, { "speaker": "Thelma", "text": "Yes, that is true. In varying degrees I learned about all the operations at MPR and CPR either through studies and projects [e.g., mailroom, accessioning and disposal of records] or working in them [e.g., management staff and reference branches]." }, { "speaker": "Caroline", "text": "Wow. Just zooming out a little bit. Can you tell me a bit about what you were doing before you came onto that role or kind of what got you interested in this line of work?" }, { "speaker": "Thelma", "text": "You mean what caused me to apply for the GS-4 archives technician position?" }, { "speaker": "Caroline", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Thelma", "text": "I graduated from the University of Missouri at St. Louis (UMSL) with a BA in English and received a lifetime certificate to teach secondary English. However, during my senior year I decided I wasn’t really interested in teaching. I met with a guidance counselor in UMSL’s placement office who told me to check out the bulletin board that had listings for job opportunities and application forms for the civil service exam. I took the Junior Federal Assistant exam that qualified me for a GS-4 position with a federal agency. Sometime after that, I got a phone call to report to the National Personnel Records Center for an interview, which at that time was at 9700 Page Avenue. The Assistant Director interviewed me for a GS-4 archives technician, work-in-file position for the Army Reference Branch. I didn’t know anything about the National Personnel Records Center, but the job sounded interesting and I needed a job, so I accepted the opportunity. Little did I know that job would be the beginning of a 35-year career with NARA." }, { "speaker": "Caroline", "text": "So tell me a bit about after you came in after the civil service tests and such. What kind of training did your unit provide you? Like what kind of stuff did you learn and do?" }, { "speaker": "Thelma", "text": "During orientation, I received a general overview of the mission of the National Personnel Records Center and its two facilities, MPR at 9700 Page Avenue and CPR at 111 Winnebago Street. The training I received for the GS-4 work-in-file position in the Army Reference Branch involved learning how to search for the military record needed to answer the request, how to respond to the request, and how to refile the record. That was the beginning of learning what it meant to provide reference service on a request that was received by the Center. But, it wasn’t until I became a management assistant and management analyst working on studies and writing standard operating procedures that I learned about the other positions in the Center that were indirectly or directly involved in providing reference service. By interviewing the best technicians, I learned how the higher level requests were processed, which helped me recommend changes to the current procedures that ultimately led to improved productivity or eliminated redundancies. The transition to supervisory positions in all of the reference branches at MPR and CPR led to more training and learning about records management, records center operations, fiscal and human resource management, and customer service operations. With each subsequent promotion, the expectations became higher for me to “get the job done” as efficiently and effectively as possible by proposing, developing, and implementing ideas with those goals in mind." }, { "speaker": "Caroline", "text": "So that was a great overview of sort of your day-to-day tasks. What aspects of the work did you particularly enjoy?" }, { "speaker": "Thelma", "text": "Although I learned a lot about the Center doing studies and writing memos, what I enjoyed most was talking to the technicians about their work, which ultimately led me to enjoy supervision." }, { "speaker": "Caroline", "text": "Great. Just kind of on the note of working and the time that you were doing your work, I am kind of curious about working in military records specifically, and did changes in politics or the Presidential administration change the nature of your work at all? Did you feel like there was an effect with what was going on in terms of current events and political circumstances? Or did you feel like you were sort of insulated from that?" }, { "speaker": "Thelma", "text": "I think I was insulated during most of my career until I became an Assistant Director at CPR." }, { "speaker": "Caroline", "text": "Okay, great. Do you want to say anything more about that?" }, { "speaker": "Thelma", "text": "There were two instances where politics or current events may have played a role in the decision-making process concerning two projects at CPR, but I can’t be certain because even at the GS-14 level I wasn’t always privy to discussions between the Center Director and the Central Office leadership team. Also, keep in mind these projects pertained to civilian records, not military, so my response may not be pertinent to your question. But, here goes. The first instance involved us trying to get the necessary funding to create and deploy a digitizing operation at CPR which would have converted the paper OPF into an electronic record that could be accessed using a personal computer. The Office of Personnel Management [the legal custodian of most records of former federal employees] became our first client. OPM signed a contract with CPR and funded us $100,000 to get our “new” business started. However, based on our cost projections, we needed another $60,000 for equipment. Leadership at the time wouldn’t approve it. At a center director’s conference that the Archivist attended, all directors and assistant directors from the records centers system were given an opportunity to talk about what was going on at their centers. When it was my turn, I explained the cost savings benefits of having a digitizing operation at CPR and added that I couldn’t get $60,000 to buy the necessary equipment to get it started. I truly was in “hot water” for bringing that up at the conference, but it did result in the money being approved shortly after the conference. In the second instance, I became aware of the possibility of CPR’s records and operations being relocated to a different records center that would have shut down CPR in St. Louis and resulted in many employees losing their jobs if they couldn’t or wouldn’t relocate to a different city/state. I wasn’t told whose idea this was or the motivation behind it since CPR was, at the time, meeting or exceeding all performance goals and for the first time in several years was operating at a profit rather than a deficit. The only reason I could think of that made any sense for finding a “new” home for CPR was that the building was at 95% capacity for its records holdings. Knowing that NPRC, years before, had been checking out a cave in Valmeyer, Illinois, as a potential future site for NPRC’s records but not knowing the status or if the idea had been dropped, the Director approved my staff and certain MPR staff to evaluate the cave as a new home for CPR. When it proved doable, my staff and I prepared a position paper that included a cost analysis prepared by an MPR analyst proposing that CPR relocate to the cave in Valmeyer and keep its operations in the experienced and skilled hands of the St. Louis employees. Our proposal was approved. CPR relocated to the cave in Valmeyer, Illinois. Moving to the cave solved the building capacity problem for our records holdings but also ensured there would be enough office space to expand our “new” business of converting the paper Official Personnel Folder to electronic not only for the Office of Personnel Management but other agencies who were interested, such as the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). We were close to getting a contract with USPS when I retired. I don’t know the status of that initiative. I worked on most aspects of the move and even worked on the fun part of helping to design the office spaces, select paint colors and order furniture. But, I retired before the physical move." }, { "speaker": "Caroline", "text": "Well what a great way to cap your career. You’ve given me a lot of really great details so far, so we’ll just go a little bit longer. We’re kind of turning gears here, going back to the very beginning of your career. I know we spoke about this briefly on the phone, but just wanted to get it on the record as well if you could tell me a little about where you were during the fire and what you remember about it." }, { "speaker": "Thelma", "text": "At the time, I was reporting for work as a management assistant, and I saw smoke coming from the building. And I could see that there were a lot of people and firemen on the complex. I called my supervisor, who told me to go home and call again the next day for further instructions. So I did, and I was told to report to the Civilian Personnel Records facility, CPR. I got a crash course on how to respond to GS-5 level correspondence requests. In processing those cases I learned about some of the records at CPR that would eventually become an alternate source for information necessary to reconstruct military records that were involved or destroyed in the 1973 fire. When I was finally able to return to MPR, one of my earlier assignments on staff was to find and document alternate sources for military information. A few of us were on the telephone daily, calling local, state, and county offices to find out if any of them had military records information that could be used to reconstruct records. We documented all the alternate sources we could determine to include sources at MPR [e.g., organizational type records such as morning reports, sick reports, etc.] and CPR [GAO pay vouchers, Entrance and Separation X-rays, etc.]. We compiled the information and wrote the first procedure on how to respond to requests that were involved in the 1973 fire. We also created pattern paragraphs that explained which records were involved in the fire and developed appropriate forms which facilitated responding to the fire-related requests. Since then studies have been done to find other sources of information, the procedures and various forms have been refined. Using the Case Management Reporting System, requests can be answered electronically. [Archives.gov](https://Archives.gov) documents fully the progress that has been made regarding the fire-related records procedures. I was on that site today, and it was gratifying to see that some of the initial statements that were written in 1973/74 by the staff haven’t changed." }, { "speaker": "Caroline", "text": "Totally, I appreciate it. My follow-up question anyways was just going to be how did some of these procedures change and evolve in the years following the fire. But I think you answered that perfectly unless there’s anything else you wanted to add about your day to day work, what changes you saw." }, { "speaker": "Thelma", "text": "The biggest change was when NPRC started the Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) in the early 2000s. We were moving away from being a paper-based operation to electronic. Technicians did their work on PCs utilizing procedures that could be accessed electronically. The procedures were modified to no longer be branch specific. In other words, a GS-5 correspondence technician who used to process just Army records requests could now use the same instruction to process Navy and Air Force records requests. The fire-related requests required specialized knowledge and training, but even those cases could be processed more timely and efficiently using the CMRS." }, { "speaker": "Caroline", "text": "Yeah, that makes sense. So we will wrap it up. But I wanted to just ask kind of one final open-ended question. Would love to hear overall, how do you view your time working at the National Archives, and is there anything else you want to add in general?" }, { "speaker": "Thelma", "text": "It was a very interesting and rewarding experience starting out as a GS-4 archives technician working in the stack areas to leading CPR as the Assistant Director. I had the privilege of working with some of the best and most capable people at both MPR and CPR throughout my career. Equally important were the friends I made along the way. I met them shortly after the fire, and we are still friends today." }, { "speaker": "Caroline", "text": "Great. It’s awesome to hear that. And you know, as someone who’s working here right now, I love to hear about your experiences. I study history myself, so I’ve done quite a bit of archival research and talking with the techs who pull my materials and help me find the materials I’m looking for. I’m always very grateful for the staff who do that." }, { "speaker": "Thelma", "text": "The National Archives impacts a lot of people throughout the world. What we do is important." }, { "speaker": "Caroline", "text": "Totally. So that concludes our interview. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today." }, { "speaker": "Thelma", "text": "Okay. Thank you." }, { "speaker": "Caroline", "text": "Yeah, thanks. Have a good one. Bye bye." } ]

[ { "speaker": "in 2004. I was hired to do two basic things", "text": "to build the replacement facilities and get everybody and everything moved into those facilities, and then as well to stand up the then very small, fledgling Archival Program. We had 20,000 cubic feet of accessioned Official Military Personnel Files. Those were from Marine Corps and Navy personnel that served in the World War I period, roughly up through 1939. I accomplished both of those things. Before I knew it, it was time for me to retire." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. That's a lot in a nutshell, right?" }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Yes, that's it. Thanks for playing!" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, I guess that's all today, so thank you! Wow! Well, you've got a lot of education under your belt. That's amazing. That's really impressive." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Thank you." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "You have a minor, you said, in history. Is that what kind of led you to the National Archives or what drew you to the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Yeah, it was kind of a combination of two things. At the time, I was working for the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, and I was based out of Indianapolis, but my job was about 90 percent travel. So I was either at one of the big centers that DFAS operated or at the headquarters, or working out of my house here in the St. Louis area. And when you live in a suitcase long enough, it gets really old. I got to a point where all the hotel people knew me by name. I didn't have to make a reservation. It was just like, \"Oh, hey, Bryan. You're back! Thanks!\" Or when you walk out of the building at the end of the day, you can't remember what the rental car was this week so you have to use the key fob to find it. That kind of thing. That's when I kind of knew it was time to find something else. The perfect job came along, and it was a combination of military history and building and project management stuff, which I had been involved in in the military as well as in the private sector. I was a developer and a contractor for a while. So, I was like, \"This is a great job!\" And I went through and, of course, experienced the hiring process that we all are very familiar with, which goes on for months. You think, \"Oh, they forgot about me. I didn't make it.\" Then one day I got a phone call from the then center director, Ron Hindman, and we did an interview over the phone for a few minutes. Then they brought me in and interviewed me. I thought the interview went not too well, all in all. I just kind of left and went back to Indianapolis, where I was working at the time, and said, \"Oh, that was nice.\" Then about two months went by, and then I got a phone call. He's like, \"Okay, when can you start?\" It was a position that was really kind of scary at first because NARA had done a lot of construction and moves, but they had not done anything of the magnitude like this. When they built Archives II back in the early '90s, obviously, there was a massive construction aspect to it, but there were a lot of staff involved in that from NARA's side. It was one that they kind of gradually moved records into the building. It took many years to fill up AII. So, there was nothing quite like this project that we were undertaking. I realized early on that we had to be innovative and work hard. There were largely three of us that worked on this project in St. Louis. There was a small team in College Park working in the facilities area and within, then, the Office of Regional Records Services. But, there were probably about 10 people hardcore working on this project. It was a massive undertaking because we had to figure out what we wanted to do as far as configuration, because in St. Louis there were two large buildings: the old Civilian Personnel Records Center—and that one housed all the OPFs (Official Personnel Folders), the civil servants—and then the Military Personnel Records Center, which had all the military records. They were both national in scope, and we had about 4.6 million cubic feet of records. They were the most requested records in the nation. Historically, NPRC is about 90-some percent of the reference activity for the entire agency because of the tie to the records with benefits and entitlements. So, I had a lot of different things kind of levied on me. One was that we've got to do this quickly, and we can't have records tied up on trucks or on pallets. So you got to move fast and, oh yeah, we need to do this really fast because we're going to be making double rent payments. At one point, we had four rent payments that we were making: the two old buildings that we were moving out of and the two new ones that we ultimately ended up taking occupancy of. So, the first building we did was in Valmeyer, Illinois, in Monroe County, across the river from St. Louis. That one was an underground facility, and it was very cost effective. It was also quite large. It was going to house about half the collection, 2.3 million cubic feet, and 11 storage bays. It had up to 100 people at one point working there. We built that in eight months because the developer was really innovative, and underground storage is much easier to build. It cost about $30 million or so. We started moving in October of 2008 and finished in early 2010. Concurrently, we were planning for the other facility, which ended up being Archives Drive that everyone knows today. We had to work around some various sensitive political aspects with that one. So we ended up in North St. Louis County, and we ended up with an above-ground facility that was our public facing facility. So, the research room and meeting space and things like that are all in that building. We had to move, like I said, all these records very quickly, so we took phased occupancy, which means we didn't start paying rent on the whole building. We took a certain amount of square footage and then with each month or so, we would take on more. And so at one point we were moving records out of two buildings into two other buildings as we began working through some of the logistics of it. We were able to get everything done, and we were able to achieve things that, quite frankly, I didn't think were going to be successful. I had a few sleepless nights planning for this because I had a lot of people offering to help give me ideas and suggestions, most of which were well-intended, but they were absolute lunacy. They would never work from a logistical or a safety or whatever perspective. So I had to wade through all of that at the same time, working with people in the industry, within the Archives itself. I had several people in the Archives that had been involved in other moves with other facilities, whether it was AII, Atlanta, any of the buildings in California that were constructed in the last umpteen years and so forth. And everyone said, \"Can't be done. You cannot move that fast.\" Because we would have to move at a rate of about 6,000 cubic feet a day. Or, if you think of it another way, that's six semi truckloads of records every day. And bearing in mind, as you know, Stephanie, the logistics of our facilities are not such that they're intended to be high volume, quick turn. You typically move the boxes in and they stay there for a very, very long period of time, and then you take them out in dribs and drabs for those that are disposed of and then the others, you keep forever and you rebox them and things like that. So, there were all these constraints on everything. Everyone was saying, \"You can't move that fast. You can only move maybe 3,000 feet a day,\" which would be three trucks, roughly. I talked to other people in other industries at universities, at libraries, at other state archives or private archives, just anyone that stored stuff I kind of talked to. Everyone kept telling me, \"Can't do it.\" And then one day, it was a Saturday, I was sitting at home with my young son at the time and we were watching a race on TV. I don't remember if it was NASCAR, Formula 1, or what racing series, but it was a race and we were watching it. He was asking me questions like, \"How come the guys are always in a hurry in the pits?\" And I told him, \"Time is money. Time is the race because you have to go so many laps and the one that completes that quickest wins the race.\" And I said, \"The pit stop is the most critical part of the race because, in there, you win or lose valuable time–seconds.\" In describing some of the things to him, a light began to come on. And I said, \"You know what, I'm looking at this all wrong.\" I'm looking at it through the lens of, \"This is how we've always moved records. So how do we move records differently?\" Then I went and I looked at aircraft servicing and, being an Air Force veteran, I remembered how fast we had to turn aircraft. Whether it's flying a mission or whether it's Southwest Airlines or a cargo company, they don't make money sitting on the ground. They have to turn that plane quickly. Get it fueled, get it serviced, everything, and then load it, and “get it out of Dodge.” So I looked through those two lenses and came up with a process. We did a bunch of analysis at our buildings, at Page Avenue, at Winnebago, the old buildings and the new buildings that we were moving into, to figure out what's the cycle time. It was something that Frederick Taylor and all the 20th-century industrial engineers would have been very proud of. I had to measure the cycle time of elevators, and how many steps it took for this, and so forth. Then we figured out the most efficient way to do it, and that was to use carts that were narrow, that would go down the aisles, that would allow us to stack the boxes on there, similar to the streamliners that are used today in many of our facilities. But in other moves, they would do that and then they would take those out and then they would palletize them because everyone knows that when you ship stuff on a semi truck, it has to be on pallets because if you open the back of any semi truck, it's pallets of stuff wrapped up, shrink wrapped, and so forth. And that was just a complete waste of time and money. So we designed a cart that would fit five across to fill up the width of a trailer and be snug and not have to have any additional securing. They would bump up against each other in rows all the way back. Then you would lock them in place with the rods that they use in that industry. And, boom, we could roll those right off at the new place. When we pulled the records at the point of origin, they were tagged, marked what records, what row, and so forth so we knew exactly how to unload them. Then everything was color coded. Red meant one thing one day, blue another day, that kind of a thing. That told us what records, where they were going, so we knew exactly where to put them once they got to the new facility. And we would have multiple teams. We had to have three or four teams working concurrently in different areas within the buildings. So we were pulling a lot more records than just from one area. There were other logistical issues we had to get around, but that was kind of the genesis of it. Then we trained everybody. I told the staff as we were planning for it, I said, \"I need X amount of volunteers to help me test this out before we do this. I want to make sure this works.\" I said, \"It has to be ‘Boomer proof.’\" They said, \"What do you mean ‘Boomer proof?’\" I said, \"I want to get a bunch of Boomers together, us older folks, and if we can do this, then the people that are going to end up doing it—which are much younger, stronger, healthier, more vibrant physically, and … nothing against any of you, I'm in the same boat—but if we can do this at any rate, well, by golly, when we have the 18- or 19-year-old from the moving company, this won't be an issue at all.\" So, they played with me and they went along with it, and it actually worked quite well. But it was a tremendous undertaking because we had to move 4.6 million cubic feet across town, as far as 50 miles, in some cases, one way from one building to the other. We did it over 383 consecutive workdays working around weekends and holidays. And the staff were moved so that it didn't conflict with the day-to-day operations. Knowing that we have a high reference activity—4,000 or 5,000 requests every day would come into NPRC—we had to have the right balance. So, we would move staff on the weekends. Basically, the way we did it was we would show up and we would have labels for them to label their stuff—color coded again. It would go from your cubicle, where you are now to this one. We mapped it out where you're going to work in the new building. So when you left on Friday, you would have labeled all your stuff in your cubicle that was going to move. Any personal items—the coffee mugs, the photographs of the kids, stuff like that—we gave you a box or boxes, whatever you needed for that stuff, and you took that on your own because we didn't want to be responsible for putting that on the big truck. Just as you brought it in on your own, you took it out on your own. Then when you went to work on Monday, instead of going to the old building, you went to the new building and you were met there and we had teams to unload the stuff, kind of like moving into a dorm. If you had a few boxes of your own personal stuff and we had somebody take you up to your new space, get you settled in, your computer was there and working, your phone was hooked up and working, and all of your other stuff, all of your work in progress that you were working on, any reference material, all those things were there waiting for you. The way we worked it, normally, it was Friday afternoon you would start your close out on the old end, and then Monday morning, you would work to get everything reestablished. By Monday afternoon, most people were back to being productive, answering requests. We did that over seven different weekends, seven individual days, to move about 700 people. It was logistics big time in pulling all that off. We had, I think, seven or eight semi-truckloads of office stuff. I'll just say stuff. If you were at NPRC before—I assume it's still there—you can still find some cabinets and things here and there in the building, even though it's been over ten years since we did this. Every now and then, you would still see a sticker from the move on it like, \"Oh!\" I twitch a little bit or something if I saw it because it would bring back this memory. It was quite an excursion. I'm glad it went as well. Because of the way we did it, we saved—I think I said to you 6 million—we actually ended up saving 9 million dollars over the estimated cost, because the moving costs were estimated to be at around 3 dollars and 20-some cents a cubic foot. We ended up doing it for around a dollar and, all things considered, equalizing it out. A huge chunk of the work was dealing with the burned records from the fire. We had recovered 6.8 million individual records, or folks did, back in '73. Some of those were in very dire straits—heavily charred, a lot of ash, they were fused together in blocks. You really had to be careful handling them. We developed a special cart for those to give them more support, and we had a cover that we put over them and everything to keep them protected a little more, even though there was going to be some jostling, of course, just riding in the truck. We did those during the winter months, which was the most advantageous because heat and humidity is really horrible for burned records, and we didn't want to reactivate mold that may be on some of the records. So we did those over the winter months and moved 164,000, roughly, cubic feet of those fairly efficiently. It was quite an undertaking. I've rambled there. I apologize." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "No, that's great. It sounds like you were absolutely the perfect pick for that position." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Well, I don't know about that. There were times I wondered. I did have a couple of instances leading up to it where I had kind of a “Lucy and the Chocolate Factory”—from the old Lucille Ball show—dreams of the chocolates coming out faster than her and Ethel can get it boxed up. I had weird dreams like that and I'd wake up in a sweat, and then I would laugh because it was absurd, of course. But, there were times going into it that I was wondering what I had done. Would this be the end for me? But I'm glad it worked out." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, I mean, it just sounds like with your educational background and then your experience with the military and other private sector areas, you had the best background going in." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Yeah. And I have to say that when we finished everything in late 2012—again, we were still building the archive and accessioning material and everything—so when it became, \"Oh, you're just doing the archive stuff,\" individually for me, it was kind of a let down a little bit. Not that I didn't love my job. I loved history. I loved taking care of veterans and helping genealogists and everything. But having that higher ops [operations] tempo always there from 2004 through 2012, I got used to it for a while, and I realized that I'm the type of person that really thrives in that environment. That's why, I guess, the military was enjoyable for me as well, because I worked in combat support and I ended up oftentimes helping folks to build up air bases in remote locations, whether it was for drug interdiction missions or UN [United Nations] peacekeeping-type stuff. There was always that need to build up something, to do that work. You have long hours. You have lots of tasks to do, and you have to be creative in it. This job really called those kinds of skills out. Once we finished with it, I was like, \"Huh, okay, now I'm just going to be the archive guy.\" When you look at the scope of St. Louis—because it's now the second largest archive in the system and only College Park has more textual records—and the reference activity is insane, of course, it was very busy, and that's when I got to use more of my history experiences and knowledge. I learned a lot, too, from a lot of great people over the years working with them. It was a lot of fun." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "When you started in 2004, what did those original buildings look like?" }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "The original building was at 9700 Page Avenue, and it was built in 1956 at a cost of $12.5 million. It was largely just to store records. There was no expectation at that point that the records would ever be archived, and would be permanent. It was actually built by the Defense Department, because it was built through the Army Corps of Engineers. There's some old photographs out there of the construction and everything. Largely the building was six floors, and it was a combination of office space and records storage kind of co-mingled, if you can imagine. The original structure was kind of that period. It's what I call the old classic, elementary-school-type construction where you had cinder block walls and you had those big ugly windows that were the full length, typically, or a huge section of the wall and then they have the little casement part that opened. There were very few walls inside. I mean, there were rooms here and there, but nothing like we have today. There was no air conditioning either, because you didn't do that in the '50s. But you had desks and work areas, and then you could literally get up and just walk a few steps and you would be, boom, with the records. They were in cabinets. They were on shelves and things. When the fire occurred, it was catastrophic because there were no fire breaks. There were no— what we would call—fire barriers today, no fire doors, or anything of the sorts. And being a hot, humid, muggy, nasty, typical St. Louis night in July of '73, the windows were open. You didn't shut the windows, because it was hot. If you closed them up, with all the masonry, it was like an oven. So they would leave the windows open. Once the fire started, the wind took over, and you can imagine from there. It just absolutely destroyed the sixth floor. It was only through the miracles of the creativity of the firefighting community that they were able to save the building. The good news was the floors were concrete, and so the access points for the fire to jump would have been through the corridors, through the stairwells, and the elevator shafts, and they were able to contain those and keep them. But, I mean, it burned for many, many days before it was under control. It was a horrible building. It was never intended to be an archive. So when I come on board and they say, \"We're going to replace it,\" I was like, \"Yeah, this is nasty.\" The building always smelled of smoke from the fire. Even though it had been cleaned up decades before and repainted many times, there still was that inherent smoky smell to it. We had to move out of that into a very nice modern facility with all the basic amenities, as well as all the critical safety and preservation features built in." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. For your everyday duty, then … what did your everyday look like? So, this is back when you were the Assistant Director of Archival Programs, correct?" }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Right. Yeah, that was from the beginning of '04 through—I can't remember the year—I think around 2012 or so, after the transformation was completed. My typical day back in that period was largely focused heavily on the construction and the moves. We were doing all sorts of analysis and planning. I spent my days in meetings, on phone calls, and webinars a lot. But, as well, out and about. Once we actually started construction and the movement of records, I was kind of living out of my vehicle in some ways, and I ended up most days going to all four locations. Winnebago was in downtown St. Louis, not far from the Anheuser-Busch brewery and the riverfront. The Valmeyer facility was southeast of there in Monroe County, about 20 miles or so from Winnebago. The Page Avenue facility was kind of northwest St. Louis County. Then, of course, the new Archives Drive was in North County. So it was quite a drive to get from—for example, from Archives Drive to Valmeyer is 51 miles, I think, if I remember right, one way. I was driving a lot, and I usually ended up driving my personal vehicle because—while I could have used a government vehicle—I live in Imperial, which is south, and so I would have to drive up Page, my main building, and then get a vehicle, and then I may have to go to Winnebago. I could have spent 18 hours in a day, but—because it just didn't make sense to waste time—I would just take my own vehicle, and I'd go to Winnebago because that was the first stop usually. Or maybe I would go over to Valmeyer. So every day was different. At the same time, I'm still hiring people because when I joined, there were five of us in the Archival Program: myself; and then I had Bill Seibert, who was the Chief of Archival Operations; and then a couple of archivists; and a secretary. We had to grow that as we were growing the operation. So I'm doing that stuff concurrently, doing archival stuff, participating in archival meetings with then-Regional Records Services, and so forth, and then we would be recruiting. And so eventually, it got to a point where we were over 40 people in size. It was a long, long period—long days." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, I mean, that's a significant increase in staff from, you said, five to about 40." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Yeah. We went from 20,000 feet to just under a million. It was a lot of growth. I mean, we had records that were largely in place already, and they just became archived. With each passing day, more records would become eligible. But we also had some collections that NARA said, \"We're going to centralize these because St. Louis is really a personal data archive.” It's not just the military and civilian personnel records. We have a big chunk of Selective Service records, court marshals, the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs] deceased claim folders. There's a variety of things, and about 900 roughly different record series of personal data stuff. It's really convenient for the researcher, because it's one-stop shopping for those folks coming in wanting something on this person or that person. That would be very helpful. We also had some unit records, nothing like AII has, but we had the morning reports, and we had a lot of material that was transferred to St. Louis after the fire because it helped to be able to prove eligibility for benefits. So it showed that this person did serve in the military. We had pay vouchers and muster rolls, things of that nature, to help show that someone actually served because their personnel record was gone." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "When you were hiring these staff, did they have to have certain skills in terms of being able to work with records that had been burned? It's not just maybe an archival profession. You're also doing something very specific working with those records." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Yeah, it was a combination of things, Stephanie. For some positions, we wanted to have certain skill sets. We needed that, whether it was archive management. We would hire someone who doesn't necessarily have a background in military history, but we wanted them to have an appreciation of history. You could learn the records over time. So we did things through the Archival Development Program for a few years, where we brought folks in off the street that wanted to be archivists. We hired from time to time different management analysts to help us with the administration of programs. St. Louis always has had the ability to be self-supporting and not have to rely on another area for expertise. So I always had a team of management analysts so we could do the budgeting stuff and supplies and procurement, and all those kinds of things because there was such a demand in St. Louis for those things. Historically, College Park was always supportive of that because that took less burden from them because they were supporting the rest of the agency. So, it really was a combination of things. Obviously, as time evolved, we began hiring people that were more tech savvy. We needed folks that were wanting and willing to learn digital work to scan records, because a lot of the stuff we were doing in the last several years was tailored to scanning on-demand. We were the first in the agency to deliver our product exclusively in a digital format. So you would request a record, and we would scan it and send it to you digitally through Onehub. You would go through Pay.gov, and pay your archival fees. Once we had everything, we would digitize it and send you the electrons. As part of the NARA Transformation around 2010, the Archival Program in St. Louis separated organizationally from NPRC. The archives was a different operation. We report to Research Services, whereas NPRC proper is part of Agency Services. But we were the first within the archive area to offer digital delivery. As well, when you looked at NPRC, they would produce copies. That was the model. The reference model, historically, was: you request it, we pull it, we photocopy it, we do the redactions, we make a copy of the redaction, and then we send you that product. It was like a million pieces of paper a week that went out of that building, when you consider that they were producing somewhere between 20,000 to 25,000 responses each week. A typical military record is, I think, 76 pages just across the board on average. So there's a lot of material there that has to be provided to people. A lot of times folks would just want a separation document, which was the Holy Grail document to help you get benefits and entitlements. But when you get into the archival side, they want everything because they're interested in the history. They're interested in the whole experience. So our stuff was much more involved from a standpoint of the reference activity." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. During that time then, it sounds like maybe from 2004 to about 2012, when you were in that position as the Assistant Director of Archival Programs, what do you think was your most challenging activity or role between the construction of those two buildings, the moving of the records, and increasing staffing? Anything come to mind?" }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "I guess the biggest thing would be just the balancing of those competing priorities–because you had to balance things. There were times when I was earning a lot of credit time during that period. I'll say that, you know. And then you rapidly get to a point where you can't earn any more credit time. You can only earn and carry over 24 hours. So, “Thanks for playing,” you know. But that was probably the biggest thing—was just the balancing of the priorities. I remember one day I was dirty from being at the construction site and—in my car, I carried my suit with me—I got to the building and I changed clothes, did a quick refresh in the restroom and did an interview, then got done, did the change and went back out to the next building … because you don't wear a suit in those locations." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. Well, from just hearing your description, it sounds like each of those things could be a single job in itself and you were trying to do all of them at once. I can see the balancing act being difficult." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Yeah, and I want to be clear, too. I had some great people working for me, because there were a lot of people tending the store as I was out doing different things with the moves or with the construction and that. They always had my back. And then I had theirs when it was needed. It was a lot. But that's one of the reasons why it was important for us to have the staff we needed so that we could continue to do the things. I relied heavily on Bill Seibert at the time as the Chief of Archival Ops to kind of keep the archival operation running as needed. When I needed to intervene or something, I was there. It was a team effort." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Having the right amount of staff with the right skills is extremely important—kind of lessons learned, in a way." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Yes, definitely. Definitely. And thank goodness back in those days, the Human Resources Office was in the same building. They were based in St. Louis, and we could hire people very quickly, typically—nothing like what has been happening in the last 10 years or so. I'm not slamming NARA. That's kind of government wide. It's just an atrocious hiring process because you lose so many good people, potential candidates, because we can't get things done fast enough." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. Yeah. It's unfortunate how the government works." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "We're used to it." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Definitely." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Can you talk a little bit about your position as the Access Coordinator for St. Louis and, I think, also a few other locations?" }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Sure. After the transformation occurred and the big reorganization of NARA, my position went from being part of NPRC to falling under Research Services, the new business line in the Archives. They came up with new titles, and we were called Access Coordinators. I don't know of anyone that ever admitted to saying, \"I love that title,\" or \"I made that suggestion.\" It was always like, \"What is this?\" Basically, the way it was defined was we were there to coordinate access for all of our customers, whether it was the public or other agencies. That was the intention behind it. But, from the standpoint of the St. Louis operations, it remained basically the same in that I was responsible for overseeing all the archival growth, development, production, reference, support, preservation—all those different things. We worked closely with preservation programs to make sure that they provided us with advice, recommendations, and support here and there to take care of the records. Since the position was more than just St. Louis—the position was more national in scope, even though it was just St. Louis—the access coordinator was part of the management team of Research Services. I suddenly had direct access to my executive, and reported to the executive. I" }, { "speaker": "was one of several access coordinators. We tended to be more geographically situated", "text": "West had the West Coast installations; East had the East Coast; of course, DC and College Park; and then one in the Midwest. Over time—as things change, people retire—two of the access coordinators retired, and we were at a point where, with the budget, we could not replenish those positions. So we realigned. I became the access coordinator for St. Louis and the Midwest. I took on Chicago, Denver, Fort Worth, and Kansas City in addition to St. Louis. Michael Moore—he was the access coordinator for the East—took the West. So he was on a plane a lot going back and forth, working with the various archives. That was something that was interesting. I got to work with some great people. At that point, I think I had about 80 or so staff in St. Louis and in those other locations, and we had well over two million cubic feet collectively of accessioned holdings. There were a lot of meetings. That's kind of how it was done. I was kind of centrally located. Other than Denver or Fort Worth, I could jump in the government car and could go over to Kansas City or drive up to Chicago to see folks there, or to do something. That was convenient. But it was a lot of coordination, a lot of interaction with folks, which was good. I enjoyed that, and I got to see and learn some new operations. It was challenging, but it was fun." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Was this on top of your regular duties or this was the full-time position, the access coordinator?" }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Both of them were full-time positions and then they morphed them together and said, \"Oh, you guys can do it.\" We just had to make it work. I guess if you were to go talk to Lori Cox-Paul or some of the other folks … Doug Bicknese up in Chicago—I hope I did a great job supporting them. That was the feedback I got. But at the same time, there's only so many hours in a day. My management style was always one of ‘let people do their work and I'm there to help provide the guidance, the leadership, the intervention, the support.’ I would fall on my sword for them if I knew what was right and was the proper thing to do. I just didn't want to get in their way, because I cannot stand micromanagement. That is one of the worst aspects of leadership, unfortunately. I tried to really stay out of their way but, at the same time, make sure they got the support and assistance that they needed, the resources and things like that. But it was tough, because we were going through financial issues at the time with various lack of funding and hiring restrictions. Then, boom, COVID comes along. I stayed in that position until about '20—well I forget the exact date—but then I became the Director of the Personnel Records Division, because Research Services did a reorganization in 2020. It was around 2020 that I took on that new role, and I reverted back to St. Louis–again, national in scope because the records were national. Then we developed a field position, which Lori Cox-Paul was selected for. She took over all the field operations outside of DC and St. Louis. She was having to juggle all that stuff. When I became the Director of the Personnel Records Division–again, strongly focused on St. Louis–each year we accessioned more and more records. The reference demands were very high, and the pandemic posed a lot of challenges with everything." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "How did that position, the Director of the Personnel Records Division, how was that different? Can you describe how those responsibilities were different from the Access Coordinator?" }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "I guess in many ways they were very similar, because I was still part of the leadership team of Research Services. I guess in some ways it became more national in scope because we had more holdings that were personnel files, you know, personal data-related. I became more active in some of the policy aspects for NARA, dealing with those types of records. I was more active with folks from Records Management. When new record collections would come along, we would make sure, \"Oh, is there a personnel—?\" you know, because that's a different criteria under the FOIA exemptions, the [Exemption] (b)(6) for personal data. I worked quite a bit with general counsel, with the FOIA office, quite a bit on different matters of policy or issue and things like that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay, so it sounds like you're working with a more diverse group of staff within NARA when you became the director of the Personnel Records Division." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Yes. Yeah, I think that's an accurate conclusion to say." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Now, what do you think about the first reorganization when you became the access coordinator and then the reorganization again in 2020? Were there pros and cons to some of those actions? What did you think about those events?" }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "It was rather challenging. And I apologize, Stephanie, because I got a couple of notifications pop up and I didn't hear everything you asked me. Could you repeat that last part?" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Oh, sure. I just was curious about what you thought of those reorganizations. The one when you became the access coordinator and then the second one in 2020. What were some of the pros and cons? Are there any lessons learned that you can give us?" }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Sure. The transformation back in 2010 or so was, I think, very traumatic for a lot of people. One of the goals was to create more inclusion, more collaboration. But I think the way it turned out, it was actually more of a stovepipe because there were duties and responsibilities historically the archives had done that were taken away and put in a different business line. So when it came time for things that historically archivists would do, such as public programs, outreach, things of that nature, those were now in the Presidential business line. That was very traumatic for a lot of staff. It was very hard for the customer to understand the difference because they would come to you for one thing, and then they'd ask you a question and you'd say, \"Well, I need to turn you over to these folks.\" And they're like, \"Why? Why did that occur?\" It really created, I think, a lot of confusion and a lot of bureaucracy. Speaking in retrospect now, I don't see the transformation as being a very successful endeavor. It put a stamp on things. I've been around for a long time, and whether it was the military or civilian agencies or corporate world—I worked for Deutsche Bank for a while, one of the largest in the world—and anytime you have a change in leadership, that person has to put their stamp on things. Mostly those things are not very effective. They're unique and you can brand it a certain way, but I don't know that we did a really good job with the first effort because it was largely perceived as very traumatic and \"What came before us, those people were idiots.\" That's kind of how it was perceived. We had a tremendous amount of people leave the agency back in that time period that were great people. I know some of them. I worked with them in different capacities. They worked in different agencies or in the private sector, and they just didn't have a desire to stay at NARA or they were told it was time to move on. As far as the second one, I think it was successful because it really fixed some of the issues that we had internally within Research Services. There were pieces in the transformation that were never really defined well for Research Services. Working with Ann Cummings, the executive at the time, and Jay Bosanko, the chief operating officer, we were able to fix a lot of those inconsistencies to deliver a more unified product to our customers and have more clarity. It also brought together and helped us create a more unified approach to deliver our business model. So I thought it was pretty good in that regard. I mean, any kind of change can be painful, but I thought it was pretty successful." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. It sounds like the first one caused a lot of confusion for both staff and some of the stakeholders, including veterans. Then the second one kind of helped fix some of the issues." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Yeah, for Research Services. I mean, they still obviously don't have the outreach piece and that, and they've changed things and all that. But at the same time, it's something that we've learned to work with and to make do. And, Stephanie, I have another meeting at the top of the hour that I have to do." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "It popped up, and I apologize, it's having to do with the '73 fire. It was something that that was the only time." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "I'm open to continuing this if we need to in a separate conversation. I didn't want to cut you off or anything." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Sure, sure. Well, let me look to see from my notes what else I would like to cover and then I'll get back to you. How about that? And then if you want to set up another one, then we can." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Yeah, that'd be fine. I appreciate it and I apologize. You can blame Meg Philips. I'm kidding!" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's quite all right." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "I'd be happy with any other questions you have or anything. Just let me know. And Wednesdays work well in the mornings because I generally have some time." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Okay. All right. Well, hey, I'll let you go then so you can get ready for the next meeting. But I appreciate so much that you set aside time today to talk to me about all of this. It's really interesting." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Sure. Thanks, Stephanie. I'll look forward to hearing from you. Thanks." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Thank you." }, { "speaker": "Bryan", "text": "Bye, bye." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Bye. [STOP RECORDING]" } ]

[ { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "All right. Could you start out with talking about your career more broadly speaking? Do you mind giving an overview of your career at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Yes, I went to the center in 1964, and I was a file clerk at that time. And then I became the supervisor of a file unit in 1965. And from there I went to different things. I went to the Accession unit downstairs, where we accessioned records into the center. And from there I went to the mailroom. I was supervisor of the mailroom then. And then from there, I went to the chief of the Army correspondence section. And I retired from there." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Okay. It sounds like you wore a lot of different hats throughout your career." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Yes, I did." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "How many years in total did you work for the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "35 years." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "35. Okay. That's some dedication, I would say, to the agency. Can you talk about what your responsibilities were at your different jobs that you did for the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Okay. When I was a file clerk, when records were pulled to be sent to the correspondence units to answer correspondence, then they had to be returned to the files. My job was to put them back in the files where they came from, whether it was Army, Navy, or whatever files they came from. And when I was supervisor of that, then I was the supervisor of getting the records from the correspondence section, having people get them from the correspondence units, and putting them in order and getting back in file. Also we filed loose papers that needed to be inserted in the records. Maybe documents that were sent from the Department of the Army or Navy, and they needed to be put in the person's record. Then from there, I went to the accession downstairs where you accessioned the new records coming into the center. They had to be keypunched in and put into the computer system at that time. Then we had a registry file, and it didn't make any difference what service you were in, Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force, you were assigned a number and put in order in this file. That was the registry file. That's where I was at the time of the fire." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Okay. I think you mentioned in our earlier conversation that you were actually in the Navy prior to joining the National Archives. Is that correct?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "I was in the Navy, yes. From 1958 to '61 on active duty." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Great. Can you talk about what it was like transitioning from the Navy to working at the National Archives? Was there anything about being in the Navy that influenced your decision to work at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "It helped me. When I got out of the service, I started at the Post Office, really, when I got out of the service. I had nothing but day and night shifts, and I didn't particularly like that change. So there were openings at the center, and I applied for it. I thought that was interesting the more I got into it. It was very interesting and also enlightening as to all the stuff that goes on in the military that you don't even think about." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "What sorts of things? Do you remember? Do you recall what those things were?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Well, I mean, all the records that you get from all over, and they're the files of all the people that served in the service. And it just brings to light how great a country it really is." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Can you talk a little bit about your impressions when you first started working at the agency? I know you just said it kind of expanded how you thought about the military, the U.S. military, and their operations and the manpower that it takes to do all of that. Do you mind talking a little bit about some of your other impressions that you had of the National Archives, in particular?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Yes. The day that I was interviewed, it happened that the supervisor took me through there. We went to the Marine Corps and the Navy section, and he showed us the files. Here these files were nine shelves high in cabinets. And the records were filed by the person's service number. That was the Marine Corps. And I'm thinking, \"Wow!\" These records went back to, I mean, in the Marine Corps, went back into the 1800s and then came forward. I'm thinking, \"Wow!\" And then as you went along, you just found out that it went up to the present time. And then the Navy files were similar, only they were filed alphabetically by your name. I'm thinking, \"Oh, wow! Look at all these people.\" And you could tell at that time people were identified by their service numbers." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Yes, I'm sure the amount of records that they had even back then was pretty astounding to see." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "It was! For somebody that was not used to seeing such a thing, it really opened your eyes as to what it really, really takes to put things together as far as your military." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Right. And I'm sure you probably felt a little bit like you're part of a long line of people that have been in the military and have served in the military." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Yes!" }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Can you talk about the sort of training that the National Archives provided you when you first started?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Well, they taught me the record systems of how they were filed and how they got started. As you went along, you learned different things. My first ones were with the Marine Corps and in the Navy section where the medical records for the Navy, for example, they were separate from the personnel file. And so you had two files for a Navy person. The Marine Corps, their medical records were in that, too, because they were part of the Navy system. It was just interesting how that was put together. As you went along, you learned a little bit about each year and how they retired these records." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Got it. In terms of the actual work itself, I know you did quite a few different things. It sounds like you had a lot of different experiences at the National Archives. Can you talk about the parts of the work that you really enjoyed and your day-to-day going into the office?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "I really, really enjoyed the accessioning of the records because you got the records in and then you keypunched them into the computer and they were labeled, and then they would go on the shelves for service, and you felt you were actually putting records to make them available for people to respond for correspondence. I thought that was pretty good because you had to make sure they were keypunched in right and they were filed right. And you have some interesting things there." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "It sounds like it was very precise work. As in you had to be very, as you said, things were keypunched in correctly. Everything is dotting your I's and crossing your T's." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Right. Then the people had to label them up. And then the people that were putting them together had to be conscientious and get that done. I had a good group of people that did that and then had some young men that took the files up and put them in file order. They did a remarkable job of getting that done because you have to lift and put the boxes on the shelves in order. That was good." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "We'll get to more stuff about the fire in a minute. But just to round out your history of your career with the National Archives, can you talk briefly about what were some of the fire-related challenges that you faced in your career with the agency? Because I know you were there both before and after the fire occurred." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "I'm wondering exactly what you're asking about." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "That's okay. Were there any challenges related to the fire that impacted your career?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Other than the fact that you'd seen a whole lot of records that were burned, and you just wondered, a lot of their personal Army history was lost. There was not a whole lot that could be done and bring that back. That was awful sad." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Yes, I can imagine. Losing that many files, and there's really nothing you can do to replace them and bring them back is, I'm sure, really frustrating for someone whose life is about preserving these files and making sure that they continue into the future. Could you talk about any changes in Presidential administrations or administrations of the Archivist of the United States? Did that have any impact on your work at all, or do you recall any of those changes, specifically?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "I don't recall any changes like that. It seemed like whatever they needed to get things done, it seemed like they provided the funds to do whatever needed to be done. Where I was, I got almost anything that was practical and necessary to get the job done." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Okay. That's good to hear. Did you make any interesting discoveries through your work at the National Archives? I know, for instance, you said earlier that seeing all of those military records was really eye opening. Were there any other interesting discoveries that you feel like you made?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Oh, it was interesting. This is just funny. One of the things in the correspondence section, for example, when I worked, people used to write in and want copies of something from Elvis Presley's records. His records were at the center, but they were with the Department of the Army. But they could get certain documents from that. So you'd have to get his records and they would answer it and you'd send it back. And I'm thinking, \"Wow, all the people in the world and here's a person that you’d just seen in the thing...\" But there were others like that. I remember that, I didn't see it, but they had to pull records of anybody that made national news, like when Kennedy got shot. They pulled the records and sent them to Washington. But I wasn't in on any of those as far as pulling the records are concerned." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "That's funny, though, that a lot of people wanted Elvis Presley's records." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Right! Yes, it was interesting because I never even thought about things like that." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Right. Of course. Did you observe any major technological advancements during your career? How did you see those impacting the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Oh, I saw a lot! One of the things is that being computerized helped things an awful lot because you could search on a computer and find out if you had a record on file rather quickly and then you could go and get it. Otherwise, you had to get a name and walk out there and find it alphabetically or numerically and that took a little more time. Sometimes with records where, for example, if you had Navy, you had a medical and you had a personnel record. Sometimes if you needed them both, you had to go to two different files to get it. You would still have to do that, but on a computer search, they would both come up and tell you where they were." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Oh, wow. That's much more convenient." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "I'm sure that saved you a lot of time. Do you remember around what time things were computerized in the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "They started the registry file, I think, in 1964. It started off kind of slow. That was for people that were discharged after 1964." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Got it." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "That was the year that they started the registry system, and they were just getting started. And then they kept adding to that as we went along. The Air Force and the Navy and Marine Corps and Coast Guard made up the first part of that, and then eventually we started getting more Army records." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Okay. Do you remember if people and staff in general really embraced the computerization of the records? Or was it tough to adjust to changes like that?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "I think they really embraced it, except that it was new and most of us were not in the computer age and how this was working. That was interesting how that was going to work. But, I mean, you get a record in and you assign a number to it and you put it in the computer and it tells you to go out and look at record 11, and that's where that record would be. Then you had to just get familiar with that instead of going out and looking alphabetically or numerically for this file, because you needed to know the person's full name and maybe a service number. And at that time, a lot of people did not always know their service numbers." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Oh, I see. Okay. Got it. Can you talk about your relationship with other federal agencies? Did changes with those agencies impact your work? I'm thinking maybe the VA or the Army." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "I didn't really have a lot. I worked mainly with CPR, the civilian side, because they were in the computer system, too. So you could touch base with them and see if they knew things. But mainly the records were sent from the thing and received from the departments. I had no real contact with those people that retired the records there." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Got it." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "We just got them by shipments and worked them from there." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Okay. You were at the National Archives when it became independent of GSA in 1985, correct?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "I was." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Did you notice any differences or any changes when that happened? Did that impact your work at all?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "It didn't impact anything that I was doing other than that you knew all the supervisors and center director directly. And that was nice." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "I see. Okay. Well, I think now would be a good time to start talking about the fire. Because you were there both before the fire and after the fire. You were involved in the immediate aftermath of that. Can you talk about what you recall about the fire?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "The morning after the fire had been put out I received a call that my boss, he wanted me and another fella to come up to the center and that we would have permission to get on the lot, because it was all closed off. And I said, \"Well, we can do that.\" So we went up there and then he told us what the plans were, that and to basically go home and get some work clothes on and come in, and we're going to go inside and make a survey of what the building looked like on the inside because some of them had been inside, but not a lot of people had been inside at that time. So we went and did all of that, and we got back and we went inside of the building. You saw the water in the hallways. It was water from the sixth floor, which had drained all the way down to the second floor and through the stairwells and the escalators. You kind of walked around this. On our second floor, there were correspondence units and files, and we just surveyed a little bit of that floor. Then later on, we got to go down and look at our areas to see if water damage or anything was bad or got the records." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "And was it? Had the water damage been pretty bad during your survey?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "No, my section was on the first floor. It was down in the basement, sort of. And there was water on the floors in areas, but for the most part, no records were really damaged with water. But naturally, the musty smell was there. A little bit of water had to be cleaned up. But, fortunately, no records were damaged that was in that area." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Well, that's good. Can you describe what the building looked like when you arrived? You said that there was water all in the hallways, and obviously it did not smell very good." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Yes. When we got there, there was a lot of broken glass on the sixth floor. There was a lot of glass at the National Archives on Page Avenue there, and a lot of the windows were broken because the firemen were trying to put out the fire and broken windows just from probably the heat of the building. It just looked like, “Wow, there's a lot more damage in there than you really know.” You couldn't see anything and the smell outside was still there." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "I'm sure. Did you mention that your boss had called you to tell you basically to come in with work clothes? Was it you and one other employee? Or how many were there?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Well, that morning he just called me and a fellow named Felix. Felix worked in the A and D section. He basically was organizational records. He helped access and dispose of our organizational records, such as hospital records." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "I see. Okay. And it's Felix, correct? You said Felix?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Yes. Yes." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "What did your boss have you and Felix doing that day in the immediate response to the fire?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "We were just looking for the water damage in some of the areas. Felix, he came to the center when it was originally put in the St. Louis area there. I'm not exactly sure of the exact year that they got there, but he came there and he knew all the organizational records pretty good." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "I see. Okay. Are there any other anecdotes about the impact of the fire in the National Archives that you can recall? How it impacted the operations of the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "At the beginning of it, it made it hard to respond to some of these people that wrote in to the center, because first of all, you had to find out if you had a record, number one. Number two, the files weren't complete, so it took you a long time to process all the burnt records and get all the burned files together. A lot of times you didn't have anything to go on to help verify their service or create things. So you weren't really able to help at times." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "I'm sure that was a frustrating experience." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "I think it was awful, that, because, at that time, a lot of the records in that burned area, they needed service numbers and different things, and a lot of people didn't know their service numbers. You had to get the right information to know whether you had a record or not, names and what have you. That wasn't always easy to get." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "I know that immediately after the fire, I think there was a really big tent operation essentially set up in the parking lot of the building. Can you talk about what that was like? What was your involvement in that? At the time, you were the supervisor of the accessions records unit, right?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Right. I didn't have a lot to do with what we called \"Tent City\" out there. They had tents out there where they helped shade them. Basically, they got the boxes from the records from the burn area, and they would go through them, and the records that had enough material to make it a record or any documents that made a record, they put it in a box to say, \"This is this is a record. We're going to accession this in.\" Over time, they would accumulate so many boxes of this stuff. How many boxes, I don't know. But, then they loaded them on a truck and they took them out to McDonnell Douglas or Boeing. They put them in their freeze-dried area, which helped get the moisture out of the files and made them easier to handle in Accessions because the more you handle them, sometimes the burn edges would get off." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "They would crumble a little bit." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Yes, right. It was kind of dirty, but then when they would come back and they were records, then they would come down to our area and then we would keypunch them in from that standpoint. Then we loaded them into the burnt file, that's what we called it, the burnt file. You keypunched whatever they sent, whatever we could keypunch in, we did. Sometimes it was a record, so we keypunched it in. We didn't know exactly what was there." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Right. I mean, what was it like handling those burned files? Were they still extremely fragile when you were keypunching them in and accessioning them in?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Yes. Every time, because you handled them, you had to turn them to do that and the burn edges were off. Most of the time, the keypunch operators, and other people also, they wore smocks or plastic smocks they could put on so the burnt ends wouldn't get on them and be as clean as possible to make sure that, if there was anything bad on it health-wise, that they were okay." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Right. Was there any concern about the health of the workers in your unit who were handling these?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "No, not really. It was just that you handled all of this burnt stuff on your hands. It's more stuff you haven't done in your life, maybe." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Right. It's kind of unpleasant to handle those types of things. Do you think that the fire impacted your work in the long term beyond just the immediate aftermath?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "I don't think it affected my thing. The center getting them accessioned in was an asset, I know. I do think that." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "How long did it take to get all the burned files all accessioned in again?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Oh, gosh, they were accessioning burned files for oh, months that it took them. But also they had some records that were sent from other places for the burned files to help. And we got those from other places." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "I'm sure it was a really big task. It wasn't done in just a couple of days." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "No, it wasn't. I don't know the time frame of some of that because it is probably continuing on in different ways now, even." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Do you think that there were any reorganization efforts that were done after the fire? Did you see any of that?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "I didn't see any of that, but I know that towards the end of my career that a lot of the services were going to microfilms and the records and computer things. So that makes a little difference." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Right. Just out of curiosity, were you working in the Records Reconstruction Branch after the fire at all?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "No, I didn't work in the Reconstruction Branch." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Okay, great. Well, you must have been there when the records moved from the 9700 page location to Spanish Lake?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "No, I was not. I was retired." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "That's right because that was later. But I'm sure you probably heard about the move that they made." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Yes, I did. Yes, I did." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Do you feel that that was a good move to move everything to the new location? Because you were familiar with the 9700 Page location." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Yes, I think it was probably good and probably good for the records. Give it a fresh start and all the new things that are coming along and all the computer ages that have come along with the records. I think it was probably a good thing." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Were there any procedures or policies that were put in place after the fire that were done because of the fire?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Not that I am aware of. The part that I was in, it was just changes, the normal changes, the fire didn't have anything to do with them. They were just normal things. Maybe to help make better copies. Just work related, not policy." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Got it. Okay. Were you familiar with the decision to make the official military personnel files permanent? Because that happened after the fire, I think." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Right. Were you involved in that decision? Do you think there were any benefits to that or did that bring up any new challenges for you?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "I wasn't involved in any of the decisions like that and it really didn't affect me at all." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Okay. Just, more generally, zooming out a little bit. Can you talk a little bit about the culture at NPRC, at the agency, and the work culture and specifically within your unit, the Accession unit, during the fire?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "I'm not sure what you're asking there, but we had data keypunch operators that punched stuff into the things, and they did their job. Then you had to take the punch cards and turn them in and get the labels for them. And then we had a group of people that we would assign to label up whatever records needed to be labeled up. They worked in teams, because sometimes you would have maybe 20 or 30 boxes of records that needed to be labeled. So they would get that done. Then the boys would know that they were ready to go to file, and then they had to make room for the next group of records that were coming on these conveyor belts." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Got it. Can you talk briefly about what do you think the impact was of the fire at the National Archives? Was there a larger impact that you felt there was on the agency in general?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "I'm not sure about that. I'm sure that it had an impact on the center because I can remember when I first started there that one of the things that some people said was that in the place on Page that there was no fire system in the building. I would think that the new place has the updated codes for whatever that is. I don't know why or why not they didn't have one at that time. But I did hear that conversation in the early days, and I never thought it was good, bad, indifferent because it was just conversation." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Right. What do you remember from what you first thought when you heard that there was a fire at the agency and that essentially your boss was calling you in to help survey the damage?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "When you heard that, I thought, \"Well, they'll probably have that put out before you know it.\" Then as time went along and they were still working on it, I'm thinking, \"Wow, this is...\" And then as the news got out—I was getting my information from the news, mostly because it was still an active fire up there and still putting water on it—I'm thinking, \"Oh, this is bigger than anyone thought.\" Then you're thinking, \"Okay, what impact is that going to have on jobs? When can you get in?\" Then when I did get the call and I walked there and I thought, \"Whoa, whoa,\" because there was no really electric. There were no escalators, there was nothing. I'm thinking \"By the time they check all of this out and make it work-worthy that, wow, this is not going to be overnight!\"" }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Right. I think you had mentioned in a previous conversation that you guys had squeegees and you were trying to just remove as much water as possible that first day." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Yes, that first day! First day, they had some squeegees about four feet, three, four feet wide. And several of us, we would push water down the hallway and out the front door and down the stairwells. Then down on the next floor they were doing the same thing. There was just a lot of water draining from all of the above. Standing there, you really realize that this was not going to be easy nor fun." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Right. Yes, certainly not fun." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "That's right." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "I think you had mentioned, too, that you showed up and started squeegeeing and there weren't necessarily hardhats on the job either." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "No, no, at that time there wasn't. But when we went in, when we got back, they gave us boots to walk around in the building with, with the water. But on the first day, we didn't have hardhats. But then it was required that you have a hardhat after that." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "I'm sure that walking around was probably pretty gross with all the burnt stuff. And I think you said there was broken glass as well." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Yes, it was from the windows that were broken up above. If you were standing on the outside, every once in a while a piece of glass would fall out that you had worked loose and come down on the ground and you're thinking, \"Wow, okay, don't stand too close to that.\" You could get hit by a piece of glass from above not even thinking of that." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Right. It's kind of miraculous then that you weren't injured at all during this." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Oh, no. I mean we were pretty cautious about it. It's just that you're just standing there, and all of the things going through your head just thinking, \"Wow, they have to fix all the glass and get this all back.\" I mean, all the pieces that you think about, seeing this building that you work in has to be put back together so you can come back to work." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Sure. I'm sure it was pretty astounding to see the level of damage that there was to the building itself. I'm sure it's very odd to see a building that you work in have so much fire damage to it." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Yes. And I did not go up to the sixth floor where the fire was. They were very cautious about that because I don't know if they didn't know if there was any structural damage from the heat or how safe it was. But they had a group of fellows that worked up there that actually helped process the records out of there. That was a good team of workers up there. I don't know all of them that worked up there, but I'm sure they had some exciting days with how to get this off of the shelf." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "I'm sure they definitely did. Well, just to close out the interview, do you mind talking about how you view your time at the National Archives, whether it's related to the fire. It sounds like you were pretty integral to being there in the immediate aftermath of the fire. But how do you view your time at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Oh, I thought it was a great career! I really enjoyed that, working from the files to accessing records. I learned an awful lot and I really, really appreciate all the veterans that served no matter when they served. I have an extra thing about all the things they did. And they absolutely were in the war and they did things, they were in the service. Every once in a while, I get choked up when it's a certain thing and they play the national anthem. It means a lot more." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "I'm sure it must be pretty breathtaking too. I mean, you witnessed firsthand taking care of their records, in a way, helping and taking care of veterans themselves." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Yes. From my standpoint personally, everybody at the center did an awesome job of trying to help veterans and help get things that they could help, maybe get their VA benefits and things that they were looking for and provide service to them. They were just a good group of people to work with." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "It sounds like you had a pretty long and dedicated career with the National Archives in St. Louis." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "I did. Like I say, I enjoyed every day that I went in, and I never really didn't like to go in." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Is there anything else that you'd like to add to the interview? Anything else that I missed asking about? Anything about the fire?" }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Not really. I just hope I kind of gave an overshot of the fire. Some of the stuff that I said is from my memory and what I went through, and I hope that people could understand that." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "I think you did a wonderful job. I think everything that you said is extremely helpful and really interesting as well. So I'm really glad you were able to do the interview." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "There's one thing that might be interesting that I just happened to think about. A lot of the states that had records on file for various reasons—a lot of states had DD 214s of people that served in the service—a lot of them had copies, and they sent them to the center so that we could create a record for a lot of veterans. And I'm sure that helped create some of the burned files. But it also put the documents in a place where they're made available for many people and for years to come." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Got it! Well, thank you so much for doing the interview. If there's nothing more that you'd like to add, I think we can close out the interview. So, thank you very, very much." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "You're welcome." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "All right, well, Mickey, have a great rest of your day and thanks again. And I will be in touch through email with Mary." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Okay. You do that and I'll try to respond." }, { "speaker": "Alyssa", "text": "Alright. Thank you so much. Have a great day." }, { "speaker": "Mickey", "text": "Thank you." } ]

[ { "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", "text": "Thank you for participating in the National Archives Oral History Project documenting the 1973 National Personnel Records Center Fire, its impact on the National Archives, and what it was like to work at NPRC. My name is Jessie Kratz, and I am the Historian of the National Archives. Today is May 16, 2023, and I’m speaking with Charlie Pellegrini. Thank you, Charlie, for joining me today." }, { "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I was hoping you could start by providing a brief overview of your career at the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Okay. I began at the National Archives at the Civilian Personnel Records Center in March of 1974. Well, April of ‘74, actually, which was like eight months after the fire at the other building. I was located in the civilian personnel records building. And in just a few months, in August of 1974, I accepted the position of management analyst. And most of my career of 30 years was either as a management analyst or a supervisory management analyst. I did have a couple of periods of time when I was a supervisory archives specialist, when I was the acting chief of the Navy Reference Branch and also chief of the General Reference Branch. The Navy Reference Branch was at 9700 Page Avenue and serviced requests for a variety of records relating to Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard personnel. The General Reference Branch was at 111 Winnebago Street and serviced a variety of non-personnel records such as IRS tax returns, USPS money orders, and records of depression-era agencies. So we had two locations in St. Louis, basically one that housed civilian records and then one that housed military records. But I spent most of my career at the one that housed military records. As I said, I was a management analyst, then eventually became the supervisory management analyst, and then the chief of the management system staff, where we had a staff of about 20 people that were management analysts, management assistants, a budget analyst, trainees, and also people that did the training for the center. So I retired in April of 2004, and during my 30 years I spent a lot of time on a lot of different projects with a lot of different people. But my main responsibilities always included coordinating the release of information from personnel and medical records, coordinating actions for problematic legal demands and complaints, and doing non-routine FOIA and Privacy Act requests. I was also the Information Security Manager and Top Secret Control Manager. I had a staff of about 13 to 15 people, management analysts, management assistants, and budget analysts. So in a nutshell, that’s my career." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Okay, great. What brought you to the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "I was discharged from the Air Force in 1969, and from ‘69 to ‘74, I attended college and also worked a number of part-time jobs. But I was looking for something more permanent. I had gotten married, we had a child, and I was looking for something where I could make a career. And I was familiar with the National Personnel Records Center. I’ve seen the building hundreds of times driving by, and I knew in general what kind of work they did there. So that led me to apply for a job. And as I said, I got the job and I started at the Civilian Personnel Records Center." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Okay. So you were already in the area in St. Louis—I know you weren’t working for the National Archives, but were you around when the fire happened?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "I was certainly aware of the fire. It was the biggest news going. So, I was certainly aware of the fire. And I don't know, maybe it even attracted my attention more as far as applying for a job there. But yes, I lived in the area, and I was certainly aware of the fire. Yes." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Okay. So you came to the Military Personnel Records Center about a year after the fire?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Well, about eight months. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Okay. Eight months after the fire. Can you talk about what it was like in the building?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Well, as I said, I started at the Civilian Personnel Records Center and we were more or less drying out records for the military center at that point. So you always had the odor of the records, the burnt records, and also some of the chemicals they put on the records. So that was ever-present. And then the other thing that was, I guess, something that I knew right away from working at the Civilian Personnel Records Center was we were anxiously looking through all of our holdings to see what might be available and useful to people who had lost their records. When I transferred out to the Military Personnel Records Center, it was still a building that was in, well, construction. I mean, there was still a lot of very visible damage, and there was the smell of the records, and the smell of the building. A lot of people who had done a lot of work right after the fire itself had many stories to tell about what they had to go through to move records and get records down to safety, more or less, after the fire. So, yeah, it was just something that was ever-present. I had a friend that did key punching of records, and she had to hold the records while she did that and said she would just go home and say, “I just want to get cleaned up, take a shower, get my clothes off. Just because it’s everywhere, all over me.”" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Wow. So before you moved to the military building, were you involved with the fire or recovery documents when you were at the Civilian Personnel Records Center?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Not the actual military records that were destroyed. Just a few months after I came on board I was involved in a project where we processed military pay records, basically final pay documents, pertaining to veterans that were getting discharged, and this is a record of their final pay. So just a few months after I came on board, I got involved in running a project where we would start screening those records. And since they had a name and service number on the pay records, they would be extremely useful as far as verifying a person had military service, in addition to the other information available on those pay records, like the date they were discharged, and if they had an honorable discharge or not. Or, how much mustering-out pay they were entitled to, which would indicate if they served overseas or not overseas, or how long they served. Also information about their home address, things like that. So anyway, I was involved in the initial setup of that project and the final pay vouchers got to be one of the biggest collections of records we had initially that we were able to use to verify military service." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah. Then you moved over to the building in Overland? Right?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Yes, that’s correct. Yes." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "What were your duties when you got there?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "My duties were a management analyst and I was still involved with the payroll project. That kind of moved with me or I moved with it. But this time I had somebody that was actually on the floor doing it. I didn’t do that every day, but I had somebody that was doing that, a guy named Eric Voelz, and he had a group of what we call summer hires. So mainly college students. And he had that project. He was running that, and I was actually in charge of that. But that was one of my major duties. And then my other duties were just what management analysts do or did at that time. We researched the procedures and then made sure we were processing the work in the most efficient way and then produced a written document that was a directive for our people to follow. Also, I did time and motion studies for standards when we were trying to set up standards for how many cases an individual employee should do every day. I was on a group of people who did the standards project. So, it was a lot of different management analyst type stuff, you know, mainly researching and then writing, but also running that payroll project until we finally got it not done, but pretty much automatic. It just ran by itself." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Great. When you mentioned the payroll project, what other sorts of records would you consult?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Well, as far as verifying military information, we had microfilmed morning reports. Morning reports were quite valuable. Morning reports for a unit show if something happened to a person. In other words, it wouldn’t show every person in a unit every day but if a person was wounded or killed in action or went on leave or was promoted or anything like that. When something happens to that person, that would usually go on the morning report. So they were extremely helpful to verify things. And then also we had X-rays when an individual went into the military. There was an X-ray taken, a chest X-ray, and when they were discharged, a chest X-ray was taken. So these X-rays were also in our holdings, and we used those to come up with some information where we could verify maybe a date of entrance or a date of separation, things like that. We also eventually came up with something called the SGO file, which was the Surgeon General’s Office file. And these records were statistics—there was no name, but there were service numbers for most of them. But statistics based on hospitalizations, injuries, things like that. So eventually we had one of the management analysts, a woman by the name of Diane Rademacher, work on a project where she took the data that was in this file and made it useful to us as far as searching. And it gave us the service number and then we could cross match the service number to a name and the Surgeon General’s office files were extremely useful for providing proof to veterans that they were actually wounded or injured, you know, things like that that would provide veterans benefits to them eventually. So things like that were extremely useful to the veteran, and to us for that matter. But we had oh, gee, there’s no shortage of things we came up with. We had cards that showed awards that individuals earned during their military service, so you could search these cards and come up with a name and then more or less verify something that the veteran was trying to prove. We got VA [Veterans Administration] records that were extremely useful, obviously, since the VA had many records for individuals who had military service and related records for individuals. And then we went to the state Adjutant General offices to see if some individuals registered with the state for some sort of benefit or just registered because they thought they should. So we could go to states and get information from them. So there’s a great many different types of records that we called “alternate records.” They weren't the actual military service records, but they were records that we came up with or that we found or that somebody told us, “Hey, we have this.” And eventually you can verify military service, you can verify injuries, wounds, things like that. You can verify training. So if somebody's record was destroyed, nobody ever thought, “well, there's no hope for you.” You know, there were a lot of options out there, I’ll put it that way." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Right. So can you talk about some of the challenges you faced with working with a particular set of records?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Well, the biggest challenge is, of course, how much information is somebody giving you in order to find the record you’re looking for or the records you’re looking for. So many times, especially when you’re dealing with next of kin or maybe some sort of agency that’s trying to work on behalf of the veteran, they may not know the information you need. I worked on a project maybe in the last 10 or so years of my career where we were dealing with people that were in a group called “War Babes.” They were children who were fathered by American servicemen, primarily in Great Britain during World War II. And they obviously realized that the aging population of World War II veterans was going away, and if possible they would try to contact them or just get verification of who their father was. But in many cases the information they had was something like, “Tom Smith who was in the Air Force,” which just was a challenge. You know, we’d need to know maybe the full name, a service number, maybe the place where the person came from. In other words, where they lived before they were in the military. So that’s one example where we tried to work with those people. But a lot of times even the veteran himself, if he was aged or infirmed or something, maybe the information provided to us just wasn’t enough to locate a record. So I think the biggest challenge was how much information you got from the requester so that you could satisfy the request." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Okay. So I know this is very hard to do but could you describe a typical day for you in the early years and then maybe towards the end of your career?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Well, yeah, I worked with a group of other management analysts in my early career, and we were all, I guess, about the same age, about the same education level. So in other words, it was an environment where you were working with people who had the same interest in it. If they needed help, you’d give it to them, of course. And vice-versa. So I thought maybe the biggest thing that I would say about the beginning of my career is I thought, well, this is the right place to work. This is the place where I could get something done and do something that’s valued and means something. And I think I always had the feeling that everybody thought pretty much the same—you’re there doing the job and you tried to do the job as well as you can. So as far as that working arrangement in the office, I thought that was a good one. And then when you went out and tried to get some information from the operations, the people that were actually searching for the records or writing responses, things like that, you tried to explain what you were doing and they understood that everybody was going to be helpful and trying to help you. So that was the feeling I had when I started up. And then when I got later in my career, and I truthfully have to say that it was pretty much the same way—I had a staff of management analysts and management assistants, and they were all trying to do the right thing as far as I was concerned. And you know, every time I gave somebody an assignment, I said, “if somebody comes back at you and says, no, we don’t want to do this, or you just can't move past an obstacle, let me know.” And I can’t remember very many times when anybody ever had to come back and go, “oh, no, I can't do this because somebody is saying this doesn’t need to be done or they won't give me what I need.” Things like that. So I think in general, at both the beginning and ending of my career where I thought I could get something done. And I thought the people I worked with wanted to get something done, too." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "That's great. I saw this nice photo of you and John Carver when you retired in the staff newsletter." }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Yes, that’s my partner in crime there. We’ve been together for a lot of years, and I still talk to him a lot during the week. And so anyway, so it was the same way with several other people that I work with, yes." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah. It sounds like you had good rapport with a lot of staff there." }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Yeah, and that makes for a happy day when you go to work. Yes." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Right. Well, because you are working in a unique building and circumstances as compared to the rest of the National Archives, did the Archives or GSA, I guess, at that time, provide any special training for staff?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "I don’t recall that. I do recall that GSA—we were then a part of GSA until about ‘85. Anyway, I do recall the GSA was just as dedicated, you might say, to get it done and to get things moved and to get things fixed. And so I think that as far as the National Archives, again, I don’t recall anything in specific because these records were still not part of the National Archives. They were still owned by the military services. So we had liaison officers for all the military services. So if we had questions or problems or stuff like that, many times we would go to the liaison office just because, as I said, those records didn’t belong to us." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Right. I’m glad you brought that up. So the records belonged to DoD, and we were basically taking care of them in the records center there. When did discussions begin about making these permanent records, and were you involved with that at all?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "You know, those discussions started well before I retired. So I’d say in the 1990s, that I recall, where we would have staff meetings with people that came from our central office and were talking about that. And I remember even being asked a question, “what do you think? How many years after somebody is discharged?” That type of thing. So I think that was a given because obviously the earlier military records were already in the National Archives and were accessible because they were in the National Archives. I think it was a natural thing to assume. And I remember conversations came up about it a few times. But anyway, at least in the 1990s, I remember those conversations and you knew it was going to go that way." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Right. Did you notice any changes on how the NPRC was managed after the National Archives got independence from GSA in 1985?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "That’s a hard one. I think we always had a lot of contact with our central office and I always had a lot of contact with the General Counsel’s office, things like that. But people that actually worked in the Archives in Washington, some of the people on our staff certainly had contact with them, discussing specific records. So we did have a fair amount of contact before and after. I think it was just a continuation, or at least what I recall was just a continuation of that. We always had pretty good rapport with everybody in our central office. And as I said, I had pretty good rapport with people in the General Counsel’s office. And I know we had people on our staff that dealt with archivists quite a bit. So, I don’t think it was a huge change, but it was, I don't know, maybe we just felt a little bit more like we can call up people and ask them rather than have to worry about not calling them up or something." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "All right. So, what role did technology play over the course of your career with regard to the problems of these records?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Yeah. Right. Yeah. We didn’t have a lot of things available in the 1970s. But then as technology opened up, then all of a sudden you had a computer on your desk and you could query the registry system right where you were sitting. The registry system, which held record location information for our records, would show if we had something for a certain individual. So if you’re talking on the phone and you’re asked if a record was available, you could look it up immediately and see what type of record or records we held. It could be an actual record or maybe it was a payroll record or some other kind of record. So the technology certainly made it a lot easier for people to locate information and then answer questions. At least it certainly did for me, that’s for sure. But for everyone else, too. But then we just got more of the records that we used to have to search manually, and if we could get them into a computer system we could just put in a name or service number or whatever and come up with an answer right there. So yeah, technology made a difference, especially through the 2000s or the ‘70s through the ‘90s. Yes, it made a huge difference in everybody’s job." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Great. So you mentioned that you had to work with other federal agencies quite a bit. So when there were changes within those agencies when there was change in the Presidential administration? Did that have any impact or was it pretty much seamless?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "You know. I mean, obviously we dealt with the Veterans Administration and they had a vested interest in us coming up with answers. And as administrations changed and as people in charge in the central office, every once in a while you would say, “Oh, well, we used to deal with somebody and now we have somebody else that’s not as helpful.” But overall, the federal agencies that we dealt with, no matter when we were talking about during these 30 years I worked, they understood that you were trying to help somebody. It was a veteran. And they tried to come up with what you needed. So I found that in state agencies and I found that in federal agencies. So I know things change. And as I said, sometimes it wasn’t as easy to get an answer as it used to be. But again, that’s just normal, I think." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yes. So what policies and procedures were put in place after the fire? And then how did those change over the years and evolve?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Yeah. You know, after the fire, we came up with a lot of procedures that were for an emergency—this is how we’re going to do this right now. And as time went by and things smoothed out, those procedures changed. It wasn’t an emergency type of situation anymore. So yeah, there were quite a few things that changed as far as how we handled records. How much work we had to do on a particular case until we just couldn’t find anything at all. How people actually went to work every day and in their office, their surroundings. I don’t know how clean they were, how efficient they were, things like that. So things change, but again that fire was a huge disaster at any time, but we couldn’t leave that building. Everything that we had and dealt with was in that building. So the procedures that we had at first as far as personnel and as far as procedures, things like that, may have accommodated the emergency situation. But as time went on, everything kind of smoothed out and I don’t know how long you would say that would take. I mean, at least maybe 10 years longer until everything was running pretty smoothly, and we knew what we’re doing. The place was cleaned up. The building was the way it was supposed to be. So it may have taken that long." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So I would like to give a visual on the building since it was very large and you lost the whole top floor of it. Can you describe the building where the fire occurred, and where your offices were, and then maybe some of the other organizations that were also in the building?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Well, the building is huge. I can’t remember, it’s 720 or 730 feet long or something. And it is a big imposing building. And really it’s a kind of a box. That’s the way it was built, as far as I know. Was built like a box. And it’s just glass windows and aluminum and there’s a portico or entrance, things like that. But basically it’s just a huge box. It’s not exactly square, but a huge, tall box. And when that top floor burned and eventually had to be torn down it’s still a large box, there’s no doubt about it. And for staff offices we had people ranging throughout the building searching for records, but most of the office space was on one side of the building. Most of the offices or at least the management offices and also the different branches were in one area of the building there. And then there was a separate, attached building where a cafeteria was. And some of the liaison officers also had their offices in the other area. I mean, it was attached; it wasn't detached. By the way, we also had an officers’ club in the other separate part of the building, which was always amazing. So, anyway, after the fire and after—I don’t remember how long it took to take down the entire sixth floor, but after that, the building was still just a big building. And we had escalators going up to different floors and elevators going up to different floors for people hauling records up and down and obviously stairways, too. But anyway, it was quite an imposing building. There’s no doubt about that. Eventually the Army Reserve Personnel Center was co-located with us, and they eventually built a new building right next to the original building, which again, was a pretty imposing building too. But that building is, I think, now used by the Department of Agriculture, I’m not sure. But anyway when the Army Reserve Personnel Center moved into their own building, we got more room for staff and for other things. So that was welcome, to say the least." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "You might not know this, but do you have a sense of how many staff members we had working in the building when you started?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Oh, I think there’s a couple thousand." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And those were not just National Archives or GSA, but other agencies as well, or just GSA and the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Yeah, it probably was the other people included, too, I think. Liaison officers and some of the people from the Army Reserve Personnel Center. But I think I think, yeah, it was at least a couple thousand people working there." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And what was the culture like working there?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Well, there was, you know, it was a military culture, I think, because in the 1970s, many individuals who worked there had been in the military, and then you were co-located there with the Army Reserve. So I think it was that kind of situation. I know we went to military retirement ceremonies and when we had some kind of event, maybe our people would have a fashion show for something, and the military officers would come in their dress uniforms. So to me, it seemed that way. It seemed more military. And of course, it was the Military Personnel Records Center, but it seemed more military than civilian. And officers and enlisted men were in uniform. And you dealt with those people most days and you saw them in the parking lot and you saw them in the cafeteria. So, yeah, I think that’s what I would say." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Okay. Can you talk a little bit about the aspects of your work that you enjoyed the most?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Yeah, I think the aspect I enjoyed the most was being able to get something done to help somebody out. I think a lot of times you go through with jobs and you just you go, well, I’m toiling away here, but I don’t know what good it does. But I think almost every day when I went to work, even if some attorney was yelling at me on the phone or somebody was irate about our procedures or our results and, you know, things like that, the bottom line was, every day I kind of thought, well, I could help somebody out. I could straighten this out for him or somebody on our staff wrote a letter that took care of that situation. So, I think that’s basically what I felt. I always thought if you're a federal employee and you’re in a job where your job is to help people, then you should help people." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Sure. My favorite part of the job is also helping people. Good. Good. Hopefully all of us feel that way." }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Yeah, no, it’s an important thing. And truthfully, when you talk to other people and certainly not everybody feels that way. You know, it’s just I think it’s a good feeling. Yes." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So, do you have any experiences that were particularly memorable during your time?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Oh, gee. You know, as I told you I had worked on this project trying to help people locate their fathers. That War Babe thing. And by the way, the War Babes sued the National Archives and they said we weren’t giving the information that we should under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And in many cases we weren’t giving the FOIA information that we should have. So eventually the attorney who was handling the case came and talked to me and the director and a couple of other people, and I was given the job of coordinating and getting it done. And because of that responsibility, I was subsequently invited to attend conferences in the Netherlands. So I made a couple trips to the Netherlands and helped people out with their searches, anything that you could do under the Freedom of Information Act, anyway. I made a couple trips there, and then I also went on a couple trips to Germany and Italy because one of my staff was a retired sergeant major and he had gone on a trip to Italy and Germany for a Retiree Appreciation Day for many of the veterans that were living overseas. And he sort of said, “well, why don’t you go next year?” So I did. But that was on 9/11. So, talk about a memorable experience. So I was in Vicenza, Italy, and I tried to get into the airborne infantry base there in Vicenza, Italy. And they had us open our bags and unpack our bags there on the ground more or less, to show them we weren’t carrying anything. After eventually getting onto the base, there were no flights going back to the United States, no aircraft flying. So we ended up spending over a week there. But the people were very good and treated us well. And it was a memorable experience. But as I said, planning a trip and then 9/11 occurs wasn’t the best plan. So that didn’t turn out too good. But yeah, through the years, many people thank my staff, thank the Center, thank me personally for things that we had helped them with. And I think that just more or less solidifies in your mind that, well, I did the best I could and people were helped and that’s what we're supposed to do." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So you mentioned that the War Babes sued the National Archives. How was that resolved?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Well, it was resolved, basically, when their attorney who was the lead in the case, came here to the Center and spoke to us and basically said you’re supposed to be providing at least information under the Freedom of Information Act. And there wasn’t anything I could argue about on that. And that’s when I was more or less put in charge of receiving all of those requests and then making sure that when we send back an answer, we either had a legitimate reason for not finding a record or we provided everything that we could provide." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So you mentioned working with some FOIA requests. Did people or organizations make FOIA requests for information about the fire itself?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "You know, I don’t recall those, to tell you the truth. You know, they certainly sent us Freedom of Information Act requests about individual veterans. Those are the kind we get. But as far as a fire, not that I recall. I mean, it was covered extensively in newspapers. And I guess if there would have been an internet, then there would have been—I know there were theories about how it started and who started it, things like that. But I guess if there would have been an internet, there would have been a lot more of that type of traffic, you know? Yeah. But anyway, none that I recall answering. I’m not saying somebody didn’t get that type of request, but not the type of thing that I remembered answering or getting involved with." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Sure. Yeah. I’m very interested in the kinds of FOIA requests that the National Archives get because we get lots, and they are varied." }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Yes, right. But most of ours obviously relate to military personnel, sometimes just to try to locate them. Other times to try to find out if the story they’re telling is actually the true story. You know, things like that. So, yeah, we get a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests. Obviously we had a list of things that we could give out of a record, and that’s what we stuck with: name, serial number, date of birth, dates of service, rank, when they got discharged, assignments, education, place of separation, and place of entry. So it was standard information that we had a listing and if it was available, we had to give it. If it wasn’t available because the record was destroyed, we would just say, “no, not available.”" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And at this time, were you dealing mostly with letter requests through the mail or phone requests or both?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Yes, mainly letter requests, yeah. Right. If somebody called us up, the first thing we would say was, did you send in a request? So, yes, we certainly depended on the mail and the mail coming in and the response going out was in the mail. Sometimes people would come personally and want to search their own record possibly, or a record of somebody who had given them permission. But then we had what we called a research room, and the research room attendant would handle that. But yeah, I’d say 90 percent would be mailed-in requests, certainly." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And there was a research room in the same building?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Yes, there was. And basically it related to people who were either given, in other words, they ran a business or else somebody had given them permission to review their record. And there were people who wanted to come in themselves and review their record. So it wasn’t like immediate service. In other words, it might take some time to locate a record. So many of them would phone in and go, “how do I do this or that type of thing?” And then we’d have a research room where they could come when the record was actually available for them." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "What do you think is the most important impact that this fire had on the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "I think one of the most important impacts is first you had to have sprinklers in the record center. That’d be a biggie. But secondly, I think, the records that were destroyed—and there’s been other destruction of records throughout the history of the United States and also other places in the world—but I think the lesson learned was you don’t just throw up your hands and walk away and say, well, that’s all gone. In this case, we had many, many, many options and everybody immediately thought of the options and located those options, and it was a success. So I think the lesson would be when you have a disaster then what next? Well, what next is what really counts because you have to go find out what happened. How do we prevent it? How do we take care of the people who were affected? So I think the National Archives and GSA and other federal agencies did a good job with that." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Great. So looking back at the totality of your career, though, how do you view your time at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "I had an enjoyable 30 years in the federal government, and I think I did more good than harm." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Do you remember your last day at the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Yes, I do. Yes, I do." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "How did you feel?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Oh, it was just, you know, a real change in life because, as I said, I had lots of friends there and we were always close. And one of my closest friends, John Carver and I, we were both retiring on the same day. And we had a big blowout party. But anyway, I remember I cleaned out my desk and they had a bag and a few things that people had given me, little souvenirs and stuff. And every time I left work, I always told one of the secretaries there by the door where I left, I always said, “I’m off.” And every time she just laughed and went, “yeah,” or something like that. So this time I said that and I think she may have started crying. So, she wasn’t laughing that time." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Have you been to the new building?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Oh, yes, I’ve been there for retirement parties, things like that. And I’ve also been over to the cave where they moved civilian records over in Illinois. So yeah, I’ve been to both locations. Scott Levins at the military building and Kim Gentile at the cave location were always kind enough to invite me and other retired people to go to ceremonies and things like that, you know, the official opening of the building, and as I said, retirements. So yes, I’ve certainly been to both new locations." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "What do you think about the caves?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "You know, it’s a fascinating place, really. Tell you the truth, I know it’s a proven technology if you want to use the word technology. But I just think it’s amazing. And every time I go over there, I’m amazed." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Very impressive." }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Both buildings are, both locations now are impressive as far as where the old places used to be. The Civilian Personnel Records Center is now sort of like a warehouse transfer point for trucks. And it’s still there. And for the Military Personnel Records Center, I don’t if that building is even occupied by many people. There was talk about taking it down and things like that. But I don’t know what the plan is." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah, I think that there was a reporter trying to ask some questions, and I know GSA still owns it, so they wanted to take the elevator that goes to nowhere, I guess." }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "I don’t think it goes that far anymore. But yes, that’s interesting. Yeah, I think there were some problems with asbestos in that building. So I don’t know what’s going to end up there eventually. Taking that huge building down will be problematic. I’ll put it that way." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Is there anything about the fire that we didn’t cover that you wanted to share? Or the aftermath?" }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "No, not really. As I said, I came on board about eight months after the fire. So people who worked there before, during, and after, especially right there at 9700 Page might obviously have different memories, different feelings about things. You know, when I finally got out there after the fire, things were just different. And I talked to people, guys who were there during and after. And yeah, my experiences weren’t exactly the same." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Right. We’re trying to interview a wide range of people who worked there after the fire in various positions. So, we’re talking to some of your former colleagues." }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Yeah, hopefully that list I gave you would give you some people to talk to." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "It’s very helpful. We’ve reached out to many of them and almost everyone is going to participate." }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "That’s good. And as I said, they'll have different experiences than I did." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah. But it was an important event, a big event. And lots of people at the National Archives have played quite a major role in helping these veterans. So it’s an important story to tell. And we have been telling it, but now it’s the 50th anniversary." }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "My worry was there was so much done about the fire itself and it was my feeling that, yes, that was obviously a disaster and a significant disaster in the history of the United States. But I think it’s also very significant what happened afterwards and how things went so that we could verify military service. Now, I know that World War II veterans are few and far between anymore and the same way is going with Korea. So I don’t know how many requests they receive for those types of records anymore, but that’s a dwindling number, I’m sure. But still, it’s still there. The history is still there. Those people’s stories are still there. I think that’s all important." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Right. I really appreciate our staff’s commitment to the veterans. You’re right. We could have just washed our hands of it. But we’ve made this commitment to make sure the veterans are getting their records, and we’re still being impacted by the fire today, which is amazing." }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "Certainly. Yes." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Great. Well, are there any other stories or anecdotes you want to share? It doesn't have to be fire related; it can be about your time at the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Charlie", "text": "None that I could tell where somebody would record it, though. [laughter]" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Well, I’ll stop the recording now." } ]

[ { "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", "text": "All right. Okay. Let's go ahead and get started. First, I just want to thank you both for participating in this National Archives Oral History project. We are trying to document the 1973 National Personnel Records Center (or NPRC) fire that occurred in the St. Louis area and the impact that the fire had on the National Archives. My name is Stephanie Reynolds. I'm based out of the Denver, Colorado, National Archives office, and I'm assisting the National Archives Historian, Jessie Kratz, on this oral history project. And Jessie is also on the call today. Jessie, did you want to say hi?" }, { "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", "text": "Yes, hi. And thanks, Mike and Cindy, for doing this really important oral history for us." }, { "speaker": "Michael Pierce", "text": "Glad to be here." }, { "speaker": "Cindy Pierce", "text": "You're welcome. We're glad to do it." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Today is Wednesday, May 17, 2023. And I'm speaking here today with Michael and Cindy Pierce. Would one of you like to go ahead and start and just maybe tell us a little bit about your background, maybe where you're from, your hometown, your education, how you came to start at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "Go ahead, Cindy." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "All right. I'll go first. I'm Cindy Pierce. I've been at the National Archives here in St. Louis for just over 20 years now. I started as an intern. I went to school at Southeast Missouri State University and got my bachelor's there in Historic Preservation. And I had to have an internship to graduate. And I luckily had someone who came from the Kansas City office to present to one of my archives classes, and he got me in touch with Marta O'Neill, who just retired about a year ago, but was working in the Preservation Lab in St. Louis, and she was willing to take me on as an intern. And I started as a student hire. I was actually paid, which was wonderful at the time. That was one of my big requirements. But I started then, and I never left. I really enjoyed the work, and I got to start off working with records that were affected by the fire right off the bat with a project as an intern. And so I've been involved with working with these records for the last 20 years. I'm originally from Lodi, California, and I came out here to go to school." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "I'm Michael Pierce. I was born here in St. Louis, in the Carondelet neighborhood of South St. Louis. I've always had a strong love of history and genealogy. And I was one of those late bloomers. I went back to school around 1998 and got my bachelor's in American Studies from Webster University here in St. Louis. Once I finished that, I started looking for a job. There were two places in St. Louis that I really would have liked to have worked, and NPRC was one of them. And I found out about the opening there in the Preservation Lab on the last day that it was posted. And I was working at a company just down the street. So I took all my application materials into NPRC that day. And a couple of months later I heard from them, got the interview, got the job. And I was there from 2002 until 2018, when I had to stop working due to disability. I always loved what I did. Still do. Still consider it a major highlight of my life because I was working to help people. You know, all those documents that we worked on, behind each one of them was a person. And that was my big thing as far as working there." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wonderful. Thank you for that. Did either of you receive training from the National Archives when you were working there or currently working there?" }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Yeah, it's really an on-the-job training kind of situation we have, because there's very few places in the world really that work with fire-damaged records in the way that we do. And even though I had a background in historic preservation and working with documents that I got in school, I had a little bit of a hands-on cleaning experience. You really learn how to handle the burn documents on the job, and training on the job is a really specific part of what we do and establishing and developing different practices that are good for handling burned records and the effects that the records, the damage the records have from the fire, come in different forms. So dealing with the distortion, the mold and the soot and ash all take different skill sets." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "Yeah, my undergrad and my graduate degrees were both in American Studies. It involves a lot of research. So I have known for 50 years or longer now the importance of documents doing this kind of thing. And yeah, like Cindy said, our training at NPRC was definitely on the job. The people that worked or that still work in that lab were the experts in the field. When it comes to treating fire-damaged records, people have the same sort of situation. They would come to us for information and advice." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Maybe let's start with you, Cindy, and we'll kind of go from you to Michael since we started this way. Can you tell us maybe what a typical day looks like in the Preservation Department?" }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Well, over the years, we've kind of developed a way of handling things. And we found that because of the work we do with mold, we split our day up into four-hour shifts. We don't want to have exposure to the mold and soot for longer than that. And it's tedious, and it's detailed work. And so changing your task halfway through the day helps your mind to not go completely numb. And we found that it's just more enjoyable and we can still get the same amount done. So we do four hours of one task and then four hours of another task, and half of that time is usually spent working directly with burned, damaged documents. The other half is working on the digital part of restoration that we do in our lab. Over the last 20 years, we've kind of gone from being very hands-on to being a lot more computer-oriented in our approach to providing access to these records. And that's something that, you know, has evolved over time, especially during the pandemic. We made a lot of changes to our processes because we were forced to. But it's also become a really good thing. What they say about necessity promotes change and is the catalyst to making things better sometimes. And we really found that some of the changes we made, because we had to, were really good in making us better and faster at servicing our veterans. So we do a lot of re-scanning of old microfilm that provides access to the information that was lost during the fire. That's part of what we do, as well as the physical handling of the burn documents themselves. And so I might spend four hours cleaning and scanning “B-file” documents—that's all the records from the fire. And then I'll spend four hours working on the computer scanning clean documents, but documents that are supplemental to the information that was lost—because that's a big part of what the record center does is provide the information or else find the information elsewhere that would have been in those burned files." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "What do the burned records look like, that you're working with?" }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "A lot of them have a portion that's usually stable. It's usually the outside edges. If you think about a record sitting in a file like this, the bottom will usually be okay. And then the top and maybe the sides will be burned in like an arc. It depends on where the record was in the box. It can have ash, mold, soot. Usually you don't have mold on the same page that you have really a lot of burned, blackened material because I'm assuming, this is just me, because I don't have fire forensic experience, I'm assuming the conditions that caused the fire dried the records out to the point that they didn't have mold that grew in that same area. They put so much water on that building for so many days. It was weeks that they sprayed water into the building. It was literally running out the dock bays at the bottom. We have pictures of people with squeegees pushing the water out off the floors. There was mold damage on all six floors, and so a large portion of what we do is to remove the mold from records and then to flatten and humidify records so that they're flat and they can go into a flat file. We did a lot of that before the pandemic, and now we do a little bit less of that. We just take a quick scan and flatten it with a piece of plexi to get a good scan, if we can, and then move on to the next one. But we've developed several different procedures over the years that work really well for flattening records that were left distorted. We have some really good images on our website, and I think we have one record we call the football. It was literally a wadded pile. And we showed the steps of how you take each piece apart, and we have a dome that we use to humidify in with a little humidifier, kind of like the one you use in your house, which has a tube that goes into it and it kind of looks like a large incubator that you might see in a NICU unit [neonatal intensive care unit]. And we lay the sheets out, and they are flattened in about 15 minutes. There's enough moisture in there that it relaxes the paper fibers. We then stack the paper in between layers of blotter and put it in a book press overnight. And as the papers dry, they then relax and they're flat, and you would never know it had been distorted before. It's amazing and it's really effective. It just takes a lot of time. So we do that on things that are really, really badly distorted and it's amazing. It's fun to look at the befores and afters, and there are great images—and we can give you some of those if you'd like to use them. But it's time consuming. And so we have to kind of balance access and speed, you know, and what we can do to help the record and what we're doing to help the most veterans. And it's always kind of a challenge that we have in our department is how to do the most with the least amount of time and effort so that we can do more for more people, if that makes sense." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Are you doing this for all of the records or just as they're being requested?" }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "That's a really good question, and we've always done it as requested. There's just too much. We continually have at least a month's worth of a backlog, sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less. At times, it was a couple of years when we were working on more detailed—trying to do more detailed stuff to more records. So we have enough just doing the requested records and we're trying really hard to keep up with what's being requested. And we're down to about a month, a month-and-a-half backlog. We also are doing just the records that are requested from people outside of NPRC. So the VA [U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs], those law enforcement agencies that need information, any other government agency that needs the information, we will treat the record as needed or scan it and send them a copy. The records that are worked within the record center itself are just pulled and worked by the technicians and returned to file. We do triage them to make sure that they're safe to handle. And there's a small team that works with really badly damaged stuff that can't be handled by a regular correspondence technician. And we've done that all along, and that allows them to be able to continue to work their processes and eventually we'll probably handle most of the records because they'll be requested either by the research room or by somebody from the outside that needs it for something—a researcher. We do try and treat the stuff for the research room or have that provided in a copy format if it's too damaged." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. That's a lot of information there. We're going to circle back to you. This is great! This is what we're looking for. So I want to go back to Michael now and see what a typical day like was for him. And then we can talk about some of those themes that you brought up. Okay?" }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "The typical day was really as Cindy described it. There's not a whole lot I could add to that. There are so many myths and misconceptions about that 1973 fire. I would get questions– ”How badly are they burned?” Some of them had very little burn on them at all. Some of the paper would be about as pristine as you could expect and might have a little bit of mold, a little bit of soot, a little bit of ash on it, and you clean that off. And it was ready to forward on. And then there were others, like what Cindy described as the football. I would sometimes describe it to people as paper kimchi, if you can imagine. Take a bundle of paper, set them on fire, throw in—not just with that ash and that soot—but throw some in from your barbecue grill, wet it down real good, wad it all up, and bury it in the ground for three days and then take it out and do the best that you can, trying to straighten that paper out and clean it. We really accomplished a lot as far as documents like that, because you would sometimes receive these things and you're just going, oh my gosh, especially when I first started there. This isn't going to end well. And then you look at the end product after you went through all the processes to clean it up, straighten it out, get it ready for photocopying. And I would just think, wow. You know, it's amazing. You can make out the words on this. And then when we started using the process several years ago where you could take a sheet of paper that was essentially burned black. You couldn't read anything on it, but you could use a process where you take a picture of that, run it through software—and ink and pencil lead work at different temperatures in a fire than what paper does. You can run that through a process. And in the end you're looking at a recreation of a perfect document. You can read everything that's on it. After it's gone through the software you can look at this on your computer. Some of the technological stuff, I don't understand how it works, but it just always amazes me. And so still for me, it was the realization that there were people behind these documents. There were veterans or their family members that were waiting to get home loan benefits, health care benefits, end-of-life health care benefits, being okay to go into a veterans home benefits. And for me, the ultimate thing is the feeling that I got knowing that I was doing something that would hopefully make the lives of these vets a little bit better." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yes. It sounds like you feel a personal connection to helping those people that are requesting the records. So, very much a “feel-good job.”" }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "Yeah, it was. My family's fought in every war since the founding of the Republic. And one of my grandfathers tried to enlist in the Navy during World War II, and he ended up after his physical being discharged due to a stomach ulcer. And it was really exciting because it took a long time—but one day because during the refiling process after the fire, records were misfiled—and I would occasionally submit to get a copy of his Navy record knowing there wasn't much to it. But I still would like to have seen it. And finally, one day, it had been refiled in its proper spot. The Navy records were filed alphabetically. And so it popped up. And in there was a copy of the photograph for his Navy ID. Well, and I'm looking at that. He was 27 years old and I'm thinking he has lived half his life. I have an enlarged copy of that hanging on the basement or on one of the basement walls with pictures of other family members. But I look at him, and I think he's still got that determined look. And the only thing that was different was the high and tight buzz cut, because he wore his hair a little bit longer—about like I'm wearing mine right now. So yeah, that was a personal moment." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, that's wonderful. When you both first started at the building, can you describe maybe what the building looked like? Did you still smell smoke from the fire? What was that like when you first got there?" }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Okay. I think it was an interesting building. It definitely had issues because of the fire. None of the systems worked properly. It seemed like there was always something that went wrong because you imagine that it was a lot of—they removed the sixth floor, but the rest of it, they retrofitted and left. The B-files definitely smelled of smoke. And they had created a space in the basement where the B-files were housed. There were no windows, but it leaked and we would get water leaks on the floor. And Mike is shaking his head because he remembers, and we used to have these long snake-like things. That's what they called them, snakes. And they were filled with sawdust and water absorbing material that would hopefully catch the water before it would go underneath the records because they were on metal shelves raised from the ground a few inches. We used to have to go around every time there was a rainstorm and check all the leaks throughout the files and also up on the fifth floor because what was the roof was not built as a roof. It was a floor. It was originally the sixth floor—sixth floor floor. Sorry, I'm getting my F's mixed up there. And it leaked constantly. And one of the jobs I had at one point was monitoring and keeping track of those leaks. And we would put up plastic and tarps and buckets and we had a real fancy one that had a funnel with a hose on it that went down into a trashcan at one time that the GSA staff had put up. And I remember trying to send them information about, okay, this one's leaking more. We got a gallon of water out of it this time. We need to check that leak. One spring we had over 20 leaks in like three or four months. And they gave us a spot award because of all the time we spent upstairs checking on leaks. I think we had over 20 incidents where we had to remove boxes from the shelves because the records had gotten wet and we had to lay them out and dry them and make sure they didn't get moldy and nasty and gross. It definitely affected the building from the outside. You can to this day—because the building is still standing—see the elevator shafts because they left them at the six-floor-tall height. Actually, I think it's above what would have been the six-foot floor because they went up so that you could get off onto the roof. And so you can see them from the street level, but you don't have any access to them. I don't know. I don't think they actually went up that high. But you can still see those sticking up from the roof line. What was your take on the building, Mike?" }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "That entire building leaked like a sieve. The theoretical roof leaked all the time. It leaked around the windows. It leaked through the walls in the B-files—the burn-file bays in the basement. It would sometimes come up through the floor in those bays and you kind of became nose blind to it after a while. But, early on, when I started going into the burn-file bays, every time you walked in the door, you could smell that smoke, smell that ash smell. It's hard to get people to understand it and believe it unless you've actually experienced it. And then a few years ago, we started working to preserve records that were salvaged from the USS _Arizona_ when she was sunk in Pearl Harbor. And you would open those records and you could still smell the smell of diesel fuel and fire. And there was sand in them. Sometimes there were little shards of metal in them, which led to a whole other conversation which I won't get into right now. But yet the smells from those damaged records was an experience." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "The B-files were the only part of the stacks that was air conditioned. And so you would get a lot of smells because of that. There was a vinegar smell from the fourth floor because they had nitrates. They weren't nitrate; I guess they just had film up there that was in the heat and the cold, and it got exposed to all the elements because of not having any air conditioning. I think there was heat in the winter, but there was no air conditioning and because of that people would open the windows and they thought it would be even better if they took the screens off, and that let the birds in. And the pigeons came in and we had issues with birds. And so there was a big project to clean that all up. That took a couple of years to get that squared away before we actually moved into the new building. I remember I was one of the last ones to leave the building after we moved into the new building as the records were moved over, and they took all the records out of the B-files and the smell actually got worse. And I don't know if it was because they turned the air off, but it was so bad that if they opened that door when they were moving the shelving, it would smell. The entire basement would smell. Our lab was in the basement, only maybe 50 yards from the B-files, Mike? Yeah, about that much. It stunk so bad that you could tell when they were opening the doors in our lab because I never smelled it so much. I think it was because it was air conditioned before. And you could immediately tell that when it wasn't, because the overwhelming smell of mold and fire would just become extremely bad. One of the things we noticed, too, when we were cleaning up the bird issues and some of the other things before we moved, was the records that had been stored in the regular stacks exposed to the heat in the summertime were in sometimes worse shape than the records in the B-files that had been in an air-conditioned-controlled environment minus the burned parts. But the part of the record that was stable was actually in better shape than the records that were in the heat and left and—there was little protection from the windows, they didn't have any curtains or any film on them that I'm aware of—and so they had a lot of sun damage too in that building. Luckily, we have a nice new building that doesn't have those issues. We love it. The one thing they promised us was no roof leaks. And the first time I got in the building there was a leak, but they quickly fixed it. It was a seam in one of the—because they put it up in sections—one of the seams had a leak. And that was my first day in the new building, to deal with another leak. But I felt at home, so it was okay." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. Yes, it sounds like lots of problems that you walked into on your first day. Were either of you involved in the move? The actual moving of the records to the new building?" }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Well, we both were in some way. They had a company that did the physical moving of the records. But we tracked and monitored. And a big project that the Preservation Lab had was cleaning and removing the bird poop, because we didn't want to move it into the new building. And we sent out 13 diesel truckloads of records to a contractor to have them radiated to clean off the bird guano. And I was involved in that from the beginning—tracking and monitoring those records, making sure that the right records were pulled from the shelves, identified, placed on the shelves, and that we knew which records were out. We have so much volume going in and out of our records that we had hundreds of records that were out at the time the boxes were gone that needed to be refiled or pulled. And so I would keep track of that information and make sure that happened. And it took about four years to complete that process. I know, Mike, you were a move coordinator too, weren't you?" }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "Yeah, for a while. I forget how many weeks I was actually subbing for someone who took off at the time because their wife had a baby. So six weeks, eight weeks, something like that. And that was basically just a checklist of what they were loading onto the trucks and just making sure that they had gotten all the boxes that they were supposed to be getting." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "When the boxes were loaded–so these were ones that still needed some treatment done on them?" }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Well, I think Mike's talking about the general records from the stacks. So that was the general move. The one I was talking about were ones that we identified that we sent to a contractor. So those were a little different. It was kind of happening in a parallel time." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "In terms of Cindy, I know you mentioned the auxiliary records. Can either of you or both of you talk about maybe that process? And what are you looking for? What types of records are helpful? Anything about those types of records and how you're piecing together the official record." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "That's really done by the correspondence technicians, especially the reconstruction correspondence technicians. We don't have anything to do with that. Mike probably has more knowledge of that than I do." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "Yeah, in a perfect world, when a service member completes their service, they're supposed to take one of the certified copies of their DD-214, their discharge document, to their local courthouse and make sure it's filed away there. Not all of them do it. And you know, with people, once they're out of the service, they sometimes have to deal with their own issues. As far as their documents, they might get lost in a move or a fire at their house and it's lost. And so I tell every veteran I know to get at least three or four certified copies of your discharge papers and then make, if you have to, dozens of photocopies of those. Put one of those certified copies or two and a handful of those copies, if you can do it, like in a safe deposit box at your bank. Take everything else that you have and distribute it to your circle, your family, your close friends, so that all these people have copies of those things. In that worst-case scenario, if you are in a position where you can't speak for yourself, somebody's got a copy of that. If you wait until the last minute, I don't know what the turnaround time is now from NPRC to get copies of stuff, but, even before, it could be weeks unless you are looking at burial benefits and then they can turn those around overnight. But, make sure you've got a plethora of copies of those documents, and get them out there to friends, family, your pastor where you go to church so that somebody has them available for you just in case." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "I know they use morning reports. I know there's unit histories that they can use. I know we've microfilmed morning reports. That was a big project that we did for years, when I first started—and then we've been working on for years. Right now we're doing DD-214s, a series of DD-214s, which is the primary separation document. Recently we were working on records that were from World War I that were the widows’ records, from the widows that were in the 30s, sent to Europe to visit the grave sites of the veterans, of their sons usually, widows and wives— it's mainly widows. And that was really interesting, because they had pictures of the mothers in their files, and it's just another piece of information that can fill out that story that's missing. And the correspondence technicians are really good at knowing where to go to find all kinds of information. They're very knowledgeable and skilled. And the ones that have been doing it for a long time have such a plethora of knowledge in their heads of where to find what I know. Right after the fire, there was a big push to not destroy any information that may be out there that would supplement what was lost, that all of the bases and service locations were told to not destroy anything. And that information from those places has been gathered and used for the last 50 years to try and fill in the gaps of that information that was lost. And, you know, we have 6 million records that were saved that are in our burn file base, but there were probably three or four times that that were destroyed that we have nothing of. So that's something that we are aware of and that we work every day to try and mitigate. We do have what we call R-files, which are reconstructed files. And they're usually very small and they have just the amount, just what they found in the past, working a case to try and get that veteran their benefits. And it's never going to be a full record again, but at least to show he served. Sometimes it's to get Agent Orange help. Sometimes it's, you know, all these issues that come up later in life that veterans need information about. Sometimes it's to get erroneous errors in their service, like their discharge, corrected maybe. Sometimes decisions weren't always based fairly. We have a lot of history in our country of not always being fair based on race. And you can see that in some of the records. And there's been work done to try and resolve some of those issues. And so the reconstruction work is really important for the veterans, for their families, and, you know, to try and do that. And the basis is to try and get a date in and a date out and figure out like what rank. I know, Mike, you can help me with what information they're looking for. He's the historian. I'm the objects person, if you haven't figured that out yet." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "Most of the time it is benefits, but sometimes it's just getting a record corrected where they go through the board for the correction of military records, usually that would involve changing the character of discharge or ending of service. Sometimes it has to do with medals, decorations, that they weren't awarded. Quite often, like Cindy was mentioning before, that was a race-based issue back in the day. Trying to think of what else there could be." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "There's also work done—and Mike, you have experience with this, you followed this shortly before you left I know—we were doing quite a few records for the repro—losing my words for finding POWs—and getting the remains identified. And we haven't done as much of that since the pandemic. But that was a big push before, not before the fire, before the pandemic was to work on a lot of that stuff. And those were a lot of the records that were in our lab. And I remember you saying one time, maybe a year or so after he had worked on a record, he saw where they found the information, and were able to get it to the family." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "Yeah. I can't remember if it was either a Vietnam soldier or maybe someone who had served in World War II. And then, nowadays you've got this, you know, it's not just the documents that we have anymore as far as those remains-recovery folks that work out in Hawaii. It's the miracle of DNA. And it makes it so much easier to locate them. I forget over the years how many people that they've identified as unknown from World War II that were buried usually at Punchbowl National Cemetery there in Hawaii. And they're able to identify these soldiers, these sailors, airmen, whatever, and get them home. And so the family then at least has a real sense of closure. Sometimes it would involve maybe a plane crash that happened in the jungle that, you know, they've just discovered 60 or 70 years later, and there's still some identifiable human remains in there and they can reunite those with the family. So, yeah, it's just really cool the stuff that we can do with that now. You know, again, I don't understand how it all works, but it's just amazing." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "How was that whole experience working with those records? Has it changed how you view records and the importance that they contain, that they have?" }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Yes, and probably in ways you wouldn't think. I've realized that we have a lot of wasted space and margins that we don't use. You know, when you're working with burn records, you realize if the edge is burned, I haven't lost any information, so I've still got all the information there. I can give them everything they need here and feel satisfied. Once I've stabilized that paper, once I've got it clean—and it made me realize, too, in doing recovery, when we have water leaks and issues like that, that if we address it right away, you don't know that it ever happened. If we can get to those records, get them laid out and dried and flattened, you will never know it got wet. In all the years and all of the hundreds of boxes, probably thousands of boxes that we laid out, I don't think there was anything that had any lasting damage in it, from the records that were wet over the years in that building after the fire. Now, the things that we didn't get to right away, like if there was a slow leak that we didn't know about and it sat, the mold would get in that box and it would destroy the paper. It would eat the paper fibers and loosen it. And that damage, you could tell, had been there. And we weren't always able to—we couldn't put back what was lost. But if it's there, we can salvage it. And the amazing thing that Mike was talking about with the infrared photography that we're doing now, where we separate the paper and the ink and it's not as perfect—it's not a perfect piece of paper, but you can read it. You can glean the information. And a lot of times in archives and in museums, we value the objects so much. But in this case, yes, the objects are important. And Mike always said, what are we going to do when we get down to the last record? Are we going to treat that or are we going to keep it as a burned record to document the fire? You know, yeah. As you know, he's brought that up to me sometimes, you know, do we leave something to show that there was a fire here, or do we make everything pristine again? And I think that we look at it primarily as the information is the most important thing. The paper is just the medium to carry that information. And, yes, the documents have a story themselves that they're giving, and at different times, I think different ways about it. You know, there's that constant juxtaposition between ‘save the document’ and ‘provide the information.’ We could lock these away and never let anyone have access to them. But what would be the point of that? And we constantly have to work on doing the best we can to protect the document so that everybody has access to it in the future. If we pull it and take the information, the paper is all ashy and we lose pieces of it and we stuff it back in its folder, and we don't do anything to protect it. We provide access to it one time, but then the next time they go to get that folder, the information is no longer there because it fell off on the cart, then we've not served our veterans very well. We—Go ahead, Mike." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "I was just going to say we're talking all the serious stuff here, but you do occasionally with some of the records that we dealt with, you have some humorous situations you would see, and it was primarily on medical records. You know, people doodling in the margins. They're writing, or they're drawing pictures of dogs or cats or birds or just, you know, like general doodles and stuff like that. And I remember, too, one record I worked on. It was a guy who was a surgeon in the Navy, and he had done a surgery on a second lieutenant—they said it was emergency hemorrhoid surgery. And the surgeon had kept like a little diary from the time this lieutenant came in until the time he was finally discharged. And some of the stuff that's in there, that he writes about—this guy was just absolutely hilarious. At one time, I remember seeing one line in there, you know, this second lieutenant is a literal pain in the ass and complaining about everything and, you know, stuff like that. And then a situation we had back in, I think it was the early 2000s—and Cindy will remember this—we had a record that we opened up. There were a lot of documents that were stuck together, and it had like a maple smell. And the powers that be in the office, you know—we needed to somehow get this analyzed to determine what the substance is and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they send it off, I think, to the lab in Washington, DC, for analysis. And it came back and results of the analysis were that all the stuff that showed up were all the primary ingredients in Coca Cola. And, yeah so, you know, that was funny. And then just every once in a while you'd come across and I'd see stuff that was in the record." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "The watermelon story. Were you there for the watermelon story, Mike? The buckshot and the watermelon. The guys that tried to steal the watermelons got shot with buckshot. You know, just things like that." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "Uh, the real reason that Jimi Hendrix got discharged from the Army. He always told people that he had broken his leg during a practice parachute jump, and that was not the case at all for his discharge. And then I remembered the reason was much more colorful. And then I remember in his record, too, one of his evaluation reports. His commanding officer says, \"I don't think he's going to make it as a soldier. He kind of fancies himself as a guitar player.\" You know, just stuff like that every once in a while would make you laugh. You'd be reading through a record and, sometimes, yeah, they were really, really serious what was going on. But other times in, you know, whether it was evaluation reports or sometimes the medical records, I would just sit there and laugh and shake my head and it's like, you know, the occasional \"Hey, y'all listen to this\" or whatever. For me, it brought out the humanity of it all." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do either of you feel that there is something that comes to mind that you think is your greatest accomplishment or something that just really sticks out in your career at the Archives, something maybe you came across like some of the things you mentioned, Michael, or anything that you feel like you've really accomplished something?" }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "A couple of things. The major point is doing stuff to help these veterans and their families. You know, ultimately, that's what it's all about. My personal pride is back in the day when Twitter was first becoming a thing, and they were just letting regular employees take over the Twitter page for a week. And so I volunteered to do that for a week. And at least up until that time, the NARA Twitter page got more hits than it had ever gotten. And, I'm kind of just putting up stuff that we do in the lab and then things that like I was just talking about, things that you brought up or that would come up that, you know, you would just kind of find humorous, other things, you know. Somewhere in the collection is a small record for Ernie Pyle, the World War II combat reporter who started out in Europe, and then when the war there ended, he went to the South Pacific. And he was killed by a Japanese sniper. And there was a photo in there, and it was his, I guess you'd call it, postmortem photo. It was taken from a little bit of a distance and his body had been recovered and, you know, just laid like, I think, on a rock wherever they were at. There's nothing else in the photo apart from the natural stuff but him, and it was just kind of a—looking at that, for me at least, it was just kind of a lonely feeling. And then I started to imagine how many other people during that war—it was the same thing for them in the end. And then occasionally you'd—there was a picture one time of a World War I soldier, I think somewhere here in the States, who had actually died of influenza. And they prepared the body and put him in his coffin. And it was one of those, you know, shaped like that [drawing a triangular-top-shaped coffin] and stood him up to be photographed. And the dude didn't have—they didn't have a stitch of clothing on him. And I just kind of looked at that and thought, you know, what a way to be remembered, naked in your own casket. And just stuff like that. You know, for me at least, I really started to realize that things are a lot different during war and on the battlefield, and that would occasionally really hit home." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "I just got an email about a week ago saying we're supposed to identify those, if there's remains photographs and make sure that they're put in a place where they're not accessed so they have their dignity back. It was just something that came up in the last week or two in our office. It was interesting that you brought that up. Sorry if I cut you off, Mike." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "No." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "For me, to answer that question would be the process I helped develop and start in the lab for humidifying records that are really distorted. We went from it taking 12 to 24 hours to process a batch of records to 15 minutes. And for me, that was probably the biggest accomplishment. The intern that we had at the time, Emily—do you remember Emily's last name, Mike? I want to say it was Thompson, but I don't know if that's correct. I can't remember. It's been about seven or eight years now. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "Thompson." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Thompson, yeah. Her and I worked on it for a while, establishing the process and procedure for using our humidifier and the chamber rather than using trays. And it really made a difference. We started with a small project with some JAG [Judge Advocate General's Corps] records that were mimeographed using an ink that was completely water soluble, but they needed to be flattened. And so we developed a process for them, and then we expanded it and promoted the use of it throughout all the work we did with B-files. And it speeded up the process substantially and helped us to serve more veterans. And for me, overall in my career, that's probably one of the things I'm the most proud of and feel the most accomplishment for, because I think it's made a difference overall for many years, you know, and moving forward. There's a lot that we have to do that we can influence and make differences for. And when we, in our department, for years it was ‘go and do the job, get it done, go home, do it again the next day,’ and as technicians, we weren't really given a lot of opportunities to provide new ideas, to promote things that we thought were important. And so when those opportunities came and when I was able to work on that, it really made a difference and helped, I think, myself and other people to realize that there's a lot we can do if we think outside the box. And like I said at the beginning, the pandemic really forced us as a lab—and we have some great management there now that are really working towards improving things and taking ideas and suggestions and moving forward. We're working on digital delivery of the records that we scan. We're hoping to be able to implement that soon with the VA especially, and that'll just improve our processes and make things better, and I love the idea that we can continue to improve. We can do more. We can do better, and we can provide better access to these records. Mike is probably better at answering this, but he, a few years ago, figured out how many records we had treated and made into safe files, and at the rate we were going, we would have enough work to keep us busy for about 500 years. And we'd been working on this for almost 20 years at that point. And so it made us realize overall that we needed to change the way we were doing things. And during the pandemic, we completely rethought our processes. We went from treating and stabilizing and flattening and cleaning every record that went through our lab to bringing it in, analyzing it, removing what mold we had to, making a clean scan of it, scanning the record, and putting it back. We provide access through the scans now, and we're hoping that that will be something that allows us to treat more records, to serve more veterans and still maintain the integrity of the records. It's a balancing act constantly. There are pros and cons of both approaches, but when you're talking about records burned in a fire or distorted or moldy from a fire, there's a lot of work involved, especially a collection as large as this one. The majority of archives out there probably don't have half or a quarter of the amount of just our B-file collection. And so we're looking at millions of records that we are trying to provide access to, and you're constantly trying to find new ways and safe ways of being able to do that. And that's our primary focus as a preservation department, is to provide access to the information while safeguarding the record. Because if we provide access today, but we lose information that isn't there for the next request, then have we really accomplished our mission?" }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "Yeah. And what Cindy brought up, it was some—I won't mention any names because they still work there, but I would call them an upper middle management person who brought up, as far as the burn files, \"Why don't we just start with number one and work our way all the way through to the end to number roughly 7 million?\" And so I did some calculations just based on, you know, nothing nearly scientific but ballpark, the average amount of time that it took us to work on a record; the average number of documents that were in the average burn record, which was 88 sheets; the average amount of time it took us to work on a record that size. And I think it actually came out to like—if we started there and ended with this one and going through, I think it was something like 698 years. So I was telling all my friends, if you're looking for a good racket to get into, get into this. Get your grandkids, your great grandkids, great, great grandkids and expand exponentially out through what would probably be well after the end of humanity, and they're going to have a job. And needless to say, it didn't happen." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, that would be job security for sure. That sounds kind of like a mix of, like, with the upgrades and technology, you know, over time, and then especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, that and then also just having staff think outside the box has really moved us, you know, ahead further and much quicker than what it would have been before." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Yeah, it really has. When I think about the fire, there was the initial response right after the fire. There was the “stabilize the building, get the records out,” you know, the “tent city in the parking lot, sorting the records, getting them cleaned.” They created a registry. You know, there's a first time we went from the alphabet to, you know, numbering each record and having an identifier for each one. And then trying to piece things back together. And they did that. That was the first 20 years after the fire. And then when the Preservation Lab was established at the beginning of the 2000s or right before the 2000s, I think it had been here maybe two years before we started. That was the beginning of really treating the records and not just using them as a tool to get information, but realizing that we needed to stabilize them, that we needed to make sure that information was there for the next request. And so we worked on that for about 20 years, up until the pandemic, and then we had to all of a sudden get these records out now, and we had to stop saying we want to treat it, we want to clean it. We want to make it pretty before you can touch it. You know, we had to just rethink things. And one of the other things we realized is there's new information coming out about the way you clean mold and how much mold is left in the paper. And that's really kind of informed us that even though you can't see the mold after we've brushed it off or sponged it off, it's still in the paper fibers. And we were putting the cleaned records back into our regular stack areas. We had a designated area, but it was in the regular stack areas that are housed with air conditioning. That's like office space air conditioning. And the B-files are housed in cool storage, though they're in the 50-degree range rather than 70, you know. And we realized that maybe that wasn't a good idea. And so the rethink was if we just scan them and put them back where they were, maybe we're actually doing better for the records than we are putting them in the regular storage. Even though it looks clean, it may not be as clean. And so some of that knowledge has really informed us. And moving forward, we're working on technology and how we can better utilize technology. And I think the next 20 years or so is going to show us, like you said, how we can be inventive. How can we rethink the processes and make our approach to the access of this information even better? And as we, as an agency, deal with the shortage of space, you know, as an agency, we have to think about it. We're always concerned that all of a sudden they're going to come and go, \"Well, let's just get rid of the B- files. They're not necessary anymore,\" you know. And that's always kind of been a fear of ours because they're our baby. They are our purpose for existing—is to work with those files. And so we kind of are connected to them in a way that maybe sometimes we have to take a step back, you know, at times and realize. But we're working on trying to balance that out. And you're right. Technology is a huge part of that and staff innovation and bringing in new staff, thinking about things in a different way. You know, just last week got a new head to our department and we're excited to have Vicki on board. She's wonderful and is one of the people that's really helped us through the pandemic to change some things. And I think moving forward, I'm really excited to be a part of what we're doing now because I think we have a really good balanced approach to when we need to do more detailed treatment on something and when we need to just capture the information and send it to the requester so that they can get that information. We can move on to the next request because there are a lot of people that need this information, that need to have access to these records. It's the most actively used collection in all of NARA." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you know about how many requests come in? I don't know, say, per week or so?" }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Overall, I should know that—I know for the B-files, because those are the records that we handle, we get probably, oh, it can be anywhere between 500 to 1,000 records a week that are requested just for the files and center-wide. It's a lot. It's a lot. It's in the thousands. Okay. I mean, it's astronomical. And some of the archives technicians can probably—archival staff probably have a better idea of, overall, how many come into the building. I know NPRC puts out stats where they were for a while during the pandemic trying to keep us on track. I know our backlog was quite large. We were looking at over a 100,000 records backlog kind of thing, you know, so we're talking about a lot. We have over 600 people that work at NPRC here, and it's a large staff, and most of them are correspondence technicians that work cases every day. So it's getting a handle on that. If you're not in here, it's kind of eye opening, I think, to a lot of people to realize just the amount of work that is done. You know, this affects this collection of records, these personnel records for the military service from, mainly from the last century, affects, like Mike said, just about every family. And just about every generation has somebody who served in the military. And until they went digital, everything was here. And even with the digital, there's still some stuff that we have to do to certify stuff that the correspondence technicians work with. So it's a lot of responsibility and a lot of pressure that's put on people and they feel it. And there's a lot of tension in this building. If you talk to people and you walk down the halls, everybody's trying to get more done with less time and less resources." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, both of you, when you're talking about your jobs—it just seems very, very meaningful what you do and how you relate to your responsibilities. Michael, I know that you are retired. Do you remember what your last day was like? What was it like to leave the agency and what do you miss the most?" }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "I really didn't want to leave, but, you know, circumstances prevailed. I guess the thing I miss most of all is most of my co-workers. And I had an opportunity just a couple of weeks or so ago—they had their spring picnic not too far away. And I made up my mind, I was going to go. And most everybody was there. There were maybe one or two that were missing that had other commitments that I would have liked to have seen, too. But yeah, most of the people that I worked with and, you know, that we work with had such a commitment to doing the job and doing it right. So, yeah, I think that, probably more than anything." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And Cindy, I know that you are still working there. Are you looking forward to retirement, and what would you miss the most if you were, say, to retire tomorrow? What would you miss the most?" }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Oh, well, that would be exciting. I’ve got 20 years left. Honestly, I love the work I do. I love trying to find new ways of doing things like to solve problems that keep it interesting. I really would miss my co-workers; they are great. And like we've said all along, I've always known that I couldn't do it; I couldn't be a car salesman. I can't swindle people for a living or just pawn off things, useless stuff on somebody in a shop somewhere. You know, I have to feel like I'm helping someone, that I'm serving society and that I'm giving something back. And I didn't have the opportunity—I didn't take the opportunity to serve in the military. So this is a chance for me to serve the people that did and to serve my country and to feel like I'm doing something of value and giving something to people that need it. And I think that would be something that I would find missing in my life. I like to do things outside of work, so I like to think that I would be just fine in retirement. But yeah, I would miss it too." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "There was a piece I wrote for. I think it was for the _Prologue_ , either website or Facebook page, maybe 10 years ago. And if you haven't seen it, it's pretty short and I just called it \"It's why I do what I do.\" And they still—it's like they recycle that one every couple of years and put it back up there and, you know, yeah, I get a little, you know, I did that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. We'll have to look that one up." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Mike's also done a lot, after he retired, with the interviews with the firefighters, that I think is really cool with talking to the rookies that were there because it's been 50 years, so they're pretty young—were pretty young when they fought it. But some of those stories are just fascinating that he got with Captain Dave." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "Yeah, the one I really miss not being able to interview—I had a good friend. His name was Bob Palmer. And he retired as chief of the Mehlville Fire Department up here and was down south St. Louis County and he—I forget exactly when he died, but it was while I was still working—and he had worked—he was a rookie. When he got called to work that fire—and I can't remember right now if it was one of the—if it was one of the first he worked or if it was the first that he worked. I think it might have been one of the first. And he was the first person I met because I'd always had an interest in that fire, and the first person that I had met that I was able to really get some details from. He talked about how at that time so much of the stuff was stored in filing cabinets. And as things cooled down and they were able to actually go into the areas that had been burning, he said we'd open up a filing cabinet and it would reignite. And he said—so it got to the point where you had one man there with a hose and another guy to open the top drawer on the cabinet. And as soon as they pulled that drawer open, the other guy hit it with the hose and flooded it. And, you know, stuff like that that you just realize, you know, it was just little things and quick thinking on the part of a firefighter that, in the end, saved a lot of records. And then, I think, Captain Dave found me while I was still working at the center, and we started communicating. And then we got the idea to do the—or he got the idea, actually—to do the firefighter interviews. And I think we ended up interviewing 12 or 13 of them. And probably the most important one was a guy named Andy Klein, and he was the first firefighter in the building. And I think I sent you the link to the [YouTube page](https://www.youtube.com/@nprcfirefighterinterviews9082/videos) . Okay. And these guys, you know, when we were talking to him a few years ago, after all these years, that was still like the highlight of their careers. The thing that they remembered most—and once you kind of grease the gears with them a little bit—you know, stuff that would come back. And there was one in particular. I think it might have been the first guy we actually interviewed and I can't remember his name right now. But, you know, when we first sat down with him before we turned on the GoPro and he was like, \"Well, you know, you're probably not going to get too much from me. There's not a whole lot I can remember.\" But, you know, you get into it then and then you get the leading questions and then other questions, you know, based on stuff that they said. And then it ended up that the interview went longer than either Dave or I had expected. And, you know, it was just such a real joy and an experience to be able to sit down and talk with these guys and ask these questions. And then, you know, when you told them that you were going to put it up on a YouTube page, so all your friends, all your family, can see it then, \"Oh, really?\" And, \"Well, you're going to be a YouTube star.\" And you know that really piqued them. Yeah, so that was kind of fun to watch. But, you know, it was just great to at least have those sources that we could still get some information from. [](https://www.youtube.com/@nprcfirefighterinterviews9082/videos)" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. It's those things that you don't read about in the newspaper about the fire. You have to hear it from them. You know, those little tidbits like the filing cabinet that you just mentioned and the fire hose. So, yeah, very important information." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "And the—every one of them, if they didn't do it on camera, they did it like while we were setting up or while we were breaking down, talked about their face masks getting so hot that they melted. That's how hot that fire was. And I think it might have been Andy Klein, and, you know, the first responders were there in like four minutes. He said going up and when they got to those six floor entrances, he said you could already—the doors were closed up—but the closer you got to the door that they ultimately went into that, you know, you're 20 feet away from it or whatever, and you can already feel the heat. And then when you do go in, it's so smoky that you're having to go in either crouched really low or down, crawling on the floor just so you can see where you were going. And there's—I know at least a few of the photographs that Captain Dave has and if you've seen those, you can tell that they're taken while things were still going on because up kind of close to the ceiling, you can see the layer of smoke. I think the best ones that were taken were—and there weren't that many of them and Dave's got them—were the ones that Bob Palmer that I mentioned earlier took because he was like, you know, \"I was a kid. I was a rookie. I took a camera with me everywhere.\" You know, he took some, not just inside the files, but the shots of some of the guys outside while they were working this fire. Some of the photographs are amazing. There's a real short blip of video. I think you can find it on YouTube if you just type in ‘NPRC Fire.’ And it's somebody that lived in that area, their home movies. And it's just a few seconds right at the start of this one. From a distance, you can see, you know, they're filming the building burning. And I've tried over the years to get video from the various news stations here in town. You know, sometimes you never hear back or sometimes, \"Oh, yeah, we probably got it. But you know, it's going to take forever to find it.\" And so, that's another source that maybe you could wield a little bit of leverage because they've all got their video archives. So it's out there somewhere." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, we're coming up on the end of the hour and a half that we set aside for the interview. Is there anything that either of you want to add that we haven't already discussed?" }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "A couple of things real quick as far as the fire. Uh, the director at NPRC has a copy of the official FBI report. If you haven't seen that yet, all I will say is I encourage you, and it's huge to get it and read it." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "They've been scanning it, like it's out there." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "And also—I was looking for it before the meeting started, but I couldn't find the link— there was a guy a few years ago who wrote an article about how the fire started, and a certain individual that was working at the center at that time, and how things ultimately played out. Have either of you found that online? Okay. I'm going to go in and look for it. And when I find it, I'll send you the link. It's very interesting. And I will say that his theory and conclusion jive with what I saw in the FBI report. That's all I got." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Yeah, that'd be great. Thank you. And Cindy, did you have anything else you want to add as well?" }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Oh, I just can't think of anything right off the bat. I know you probably got the stories about the firefighters shooting the water guns through the windows and shooting things down the aisles. But because they were rookies and they were playing with new equipment that they hadn't used before, I know Creve Coeur had a brand new water gun that they used on that fire. I think it was the first time it had been deployed, and I think some people had some fun with it. These were 20-something-year-old guys for the most part, and they were working extra shifts, you know, for weeks, pouring water on that fire. So just the thought of it just blows me away. I know all my coworkers yesterday, we were going through pictures, getting ready for stuff for our congressional visit that is in a couple of weeks. We were putting together, you know, some photographs for that. And one of them goes, \"I would have left that day and never come back.\" You know, the thought of what those people had to do to recover all that information and the effort that was put forward by our predecessors to bring us to the point we are now. We look at some of the stuff they did and we think, oh, we would never do it that way today. But they managed to save 6 million records from that fire. And the—actually all of the records that are in that center, 6 million were burned and damaged by the fire. But all of those records—we have 15 bays full of records now because those firefighters and those people fought so hard to keep that information safe and to make sure it's accessible to us today. Those are true heroes on both sides of that fire. And I just am so grateful for the heritage that we stand on for the people's shoulders that we are able to work. I have a job today because they saved those records, and I remember that every day." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "And stuff with the firefighters, too. Just little things. Like every once in a while, yeah, they blast each other with their hoses and—but then things, too, like all the fast food joints that were around there at the time. When they got wind of what was happening, you know, they were bringing in free food and free drinks and stuff to the guys that were fighting the fires. And, you know, just little stuff like that. It's the little stories sometimes that can be the most meaningful or the most humorous or the most, you know, just regular. You know that some of the guys told us, you know, \"We just looked at it,\" you know, \"we were doing our jobs and nobody got hurt or killed.\" You know, there was, I think, one—throughout the whole time that they were dealing with that, I think—there was one minor injury to a firefighter. And that was it out of—Dave's got the list of all the guys that worked that fire. You know, just hundreds of them. And to just have one guy with a minor injury— that was just a miracle, considering the situation." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, it's amazing that more people didn't get hurt and that it could have been so much worse. You know, people getting hurt or, you know, all of the records could be gone. Right? So it's amazing. Yeah, it's amazing." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "And the fact that it was the Navy that didn't want to put sprinklers in that building. They were afraid they would leak." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Some irony there." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, I think that is all I have. Jessie, did you have anything else that you wanted to follow up on?" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "No, I think you both did such a good job anticipating all the questions that I kept jotting down and you answered them. So I guess—." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "I saw your cat was helping you, too." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I know. It's lunch time. But I just want to thank you guys for providing this really important service to our veterans and sharing your stories with us. And it's obvious that you both really enjoy the work that you do. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Thanks for giving us a chance to share. It's important. We're glad somebody's remembering this fire. Mike's been asking me for months: \"What are they doing about the fire? What are they doing about the fire?\" So thank you for letting us participate. We appreciate it." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "And if you come up with anything else, you know where to find me." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Yes. I'll reach out to you once the meeting is over. If either of you have any photos that you want to share, you know, the fire or just of yourselves that we can post along with your interview, that would be great, also." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Okay. I think you have access to all the photos I have. Mike might have some that the center doesn't have. I know you do." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "Okay. I turned all that stuff over to Dave, which reminds me, he's probably already told you, but he had cassettes of the calls for the whole period, the fire calls. And a few years ago we had a friend who was an audio engineer. And we transferred them to CD. And so Dave's got that, and I'm sure some of it can be really hard to hear. But I'm sure technology has improved enough now that, you know, if you can get him to burn you copies of those CDs and send them to you, you've got something you can run them through and improve them. Improve them just that much more." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, you have given us so much information today and just, you know, for things to follow up on. This is extremely helpful. We really appreciate both of you taking time out today to talk to us." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Thank you. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "Dave Dubowski is your man." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "He's a good one." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "Yeah, he's a good guy." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "Yeah. And he's the one that comes and checks our building. He's the closest to us, too, which is interesting that he's the one that keeps us safe. So, yeah." }, { "speaker": "Cindy", "text": "All right. Thank you, guys." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, thank you so much. And, yes, I'll reach out to you here shortly. All right. Thank you. Bye." }, { "speaker": "Michael", "text": "Bye." } ]

[ { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Okay. So before we talk about your career in more depth. So you're from St. Louis. Were you there when the fire happened?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Yes, I can remember. It was before I started working at the records center. But I can remember on the news seeing the coverage of this big fire, which really wasn't close to where I live. It’s probably 15 miles away and thinking, oh, my, you know, that's a pretty big disaster, never realizing that in eight months I would be working at that facility." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So when you first started at the National Archives, can you talk a little bit about your impressions of the agency? And you were early on, were they still very much impacted by the fire then?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "I always say that I probably got my job because of the fire, because they just needed a lot of people. I didn't really work with burnt records early in my career. But later on that seemed to involve, I guess, a little bit of what everybody did. But in my early years, I actually was what they called a Work-in-File clerk, a WiF clerk. And our job was to go out in the file with a ladder and find the records to answer the requests right out in the file area. And I wasn't really too thrilled with that job, but it did give me an exposure to military records and an understanding about the contents of the records. And I guess that was really good firsthand experience and connection with the people that wrote in for information, individuals as well as agencies, especially the Veterans Administration. And then, like I said, I think in the first year I had three or four different positions, kept getting transferred to other different types of work. And so I got some experience in different areas at the NPRC before I was promoted to the management staff." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And can you talk about some of the kinds of projects you worked on as a management analyst, especially with regards to the records related to the fire and the auxiliary records?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Well, in 1985, the National Research Council's Medical Follow-up Agency (NRC-MFUA) was doing some studies and they were using some hospital admission records that were created by the U.S. Army during World War II and in the Korean timeframe. And in looking at them and knowing that a lot of records obviously were lost in 1973 at the fire, some of the officials of the National Research Council Medical Follow-up Agency contacted the archivists at NPRC and said, you know, here's all these medical records. This is something that could supplement what you lost. And so the archivists said, yeah, you know, that that probably would work but they're all in a coded form. And it was an 80-column code from the old punch cards that were used early in data processing. And the punch card data had been put in digital form, and it was, I think, on 82 big magnetic tapes. And so here you had this well, there were 10 million records altogether in 80-column coded form. And so, just off the bat, there was no way that you could decipher them because it was all in this alphanumeric code. And so doing some research, we found that there were code books at some different locations. Some were in Washington, DC. We got in touch with the Surgeon General's Office in Washington, DC, and then found out that at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, there were some of the code books down there in storage. And so the assistant director and I, we went down to Fort Sam Houston, and there were all these code books that were in like the cellar of what I think had been a Women's Army Corps barracks. And I mean, it was like putting them down in your old basement. And so we were able to, well, borrow them, and then subsequently they gave them to us. And then some code books that were in Washington, DC—we made some connections up there, and they sent the code books and oh, my goodness, I don't know how many volumes there were. And some of them had been updated. So going through the code books, it's like, well, the code meant this in this year, but then it was changed in the following year to something else. And so it was really kind of a challenge, hunting for the correct code interpretation for the 10 million codes that we had on these magnetic tapes. And so we had been introduced to desktop computing around 1985. We had some very early computers that were desktop. There was one called an Osborne and a Kaypro, which were like little briefcases but with a computer that used the floppy disks, the 5 ¼-inch floppy disks. So this is very early in desktop computing. And so by 1988, I think there were IBM or Compaq desktop computers in use, and we were taking classes because I thought we really needed to know more about these database applications. So NPRC contracted with a gentleman to come in and give us a class on dBase. I think it was dBase IV, either III or IV. And that kind of coincided with when these computer tapes are found with all these coded records. And I just got to thinking, I wonder if we could set something up using this database software where we could type in this code and then have the program that would be created, decipher those codes, because you could put all kinds of tables and lists and variables into this dBase software. That idea worked. And so we created the database processing program. But then, well, 10 million records times 80 characters. That was an awful lot of storage. And in those days a lot of storage just wasn't available. And so they put all the information, all those coded records, on microfiche and then indexed them by the service number on our computer system. If someone wrote in, we couldn't find that hospital admission record by their name because there were no names—the records had been created for statistical purposes and they only included the service number—which was the key identifier. But there was other demographic data on the record where you could pretty much match up if somebody wrote in and said that they were stationed here and they had this type of diagnosis and they were this old and this was their company in the U.S. Army, you could pretty much match up. We were able to index all these records on our mainframe computer system [by service number] and then identify them on the microfiche [by fiche page number, frame and line]. And then you could take that code from the microfiche and key it into this computer program that we created using database software. And it took about, oh, maybe, I don't know, a minute or two to type it in. And then within seconds, the system could decode it. And at first it's like, well, I need to verify that this decoding is accurate. So there were still some records that weren't burned, so I would probe our system and get hits on existing records and then compare the decodes with the existing records. And if they matched up, then, you know, I felt pretty certain that we had put in the proper codes for all these different years and that they were accurate. So, it wasn't just creating the dBase program, but then it was verifying the accuracy by checking against some of the still existing records. It was quite an ordeal but, I feel confident that the output and the deciphering of the codes was accurate. It was like figuring out a puzzle, but I think we put the pieces together." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So you mentioned you were a history major, but it sounds like you did a lot of electronic records and computer programming. Did you have experience in this or you mentioned some training? Did you get all your training at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Well, yeah, I was a history major. I was planning to be a teacher, and I always liked history. I guess if there was a job in government, then the National Archives was the place to be, and I didn't really have any computer training in college. I mean, computing was still kind of new in those days. I mean, people would take introduction to data processing. And I can remember going with a friend one time in college, and we put our name in on punch cards and ran the punch card through the interpreter and printed our names out on a piece of paper. And it's like, \"Well, this looks like a fad.\" If I would have had more foresight, I certainly would have gone into IT as it's called today. But, I got all my experience on the job and took some classes. I took a number of classes at a community college here in St. Louis just to get a basic understanding and then did take some programming classes, basic programming. But you kind of get the idea of the logic and the “if statements” and the tables and how coding works. And it's just something that I think I kind of have an ability to do. I kind of like trying to figure out, okay, I'm starting here and I want to get to here. How can this computer program do that for me? And, with the desktop software, I mean, it just made it easy for a non-computer systems major to figure that part out." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Well, that's great because I would not be able to do that. I was so impressed. So can you talk about, I don't know, it might be hard, but can you describe a typical day in your unit when you were working later as a management analyst?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Well, it just seemed like whatever came up, you know, I mean, things were always changing and new laws required then some sort of execution of the law in some way. I mean, we did a lot of policy writing and procedure writing, and then when it came to the computer systems, the larger mainframe systems, they were at one point created in St. Louis with a data system staff. But then these operations were contracted out for cost saving purposes to the Veterans Administration. And then there were some other contractors, too, that worked on our systems. And so then we would have to write requirements and do a lot of testing and troubleshooting and working with contractors to make sure that the systems accurately processed requests that were coming in and accounted for them and accounted for the location of records. I also worked on a project where the military medical hospitals retired records, after the medical record was inactive for two or three years. And the old system was all paper-based, and hospitals would send in kind of like a packing list with the retired records, and it would show all the records that were in the boxes. Sometimes there was an enumerated alpha list with names, but then other times they would just send something in like, A to B is in box 1 and C to F is in box 2. And so we really never knew exactly what we had. It was always, well, if somebody said they were hospitalized, say, in 1985, well you would look up the 1985 listing for inpatient or whatever and then hope that you could find the record there. But sometimes people's records were pulled out or sometimes the person had another health issue and their records were pulled out. And so they weren't retired in 1985. Maybe they were retired in '87 or '89. Maybe the person took that record home with them. So we really never knew exactly what we had in this manual system. I guess that was in the 1990s, when computer systems were just becoming more widespread and easier to create and maintain. We had a project with the military services where they were the sender or, as one person said, they were the pitcher, and then at the National Archives, we were the catcher. And sending in their [inactive medical] records, they would send an electronic index and it would have the person's name, their service number, and then some basic data to identify what kind of record it was, an inpatient record and the location of the hospital and whatever. And then all of that could be put into a system, and then somebody would write in, we would be able to probe it [the system] and get a hit on a specific record. And then it also showed the specific record location in the center. So rather than just going to a box under the paper system and hoping to find something, here you had some specific hit on a record that was actually sent to NPRC. And I can remember one technician. I mean, she made me feel so good. She sent me an email and after this got all set up and she said, \"Oh, I just love this new system\" because they didn't have to hunt for something. They could just go out and get a requested record out of the box. So that was a pretty neat project. It took a while to get all that implemented because we were working with the military services, and they were funding it. And funding, of course, is always an issue. And then we were working with contractors. But it happened and it worked, and, and I think that it's still, still in production. I haven't been to the records center in a while, so I'm not sure exactly what all their procedures are. But I know that the system that was used for a long time, and I think, like I said, that it's still in use" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "We've kind of alluded to this, but can you talk a little bit more about the role that technological advancements have played in making veteran's records available to them, especially ones that were impacted by this fire?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Well, you know, with the SGO [Surgeon General’s Office] records, I mean, obviously people needed information for health benefits, hospitalization, disability, and it was incumbent upon the veteran to provide proof, which is kind of difficult when your record was burned up because you weren't really allowed to take that record home. And, in the World War II and Korean era, I mean, to even get a copy of your record, that was near impossible. Veterans were lucky if they kept a copy of their DD 214s, which wasn't medical, but that was their discharge certificates. And so I guess over the years, yeah, everything was manually done at the record center, even though we had from the time that I was there, a large database that showed the specific location of an official personnel file. When someone would write in, it wasn't a real time online system where you could just type in their name or service number and see where the record of the official personnel file was located. It was batch processing and had a keypunch area and they would key up this information (service Identifier or name). I think initially it was on cards, punch cards, and then it moved on to where they could accumulate the inquiries, the keyed data on tape, and then they would run those overnight, and the next day they would get what they called a finding aid and there was an operation called “matching.” And you'd have to match the finding aid form to the request. And then that was used then to provide a way to find a record through a group called \"search.\" And so people would take these finding aid forms and go out in the file and find the official personnel folder. But now this is different than the inpatient hospital records that I had talked about because the inpatient record was usually not in the OPF. Sometimes it was, but there were lots of variables in how the military kept their records. But everything was done like batch. Nowadays it's all real time online. You key in someone's name or number and you get an immediate hit if there's a record in our system, in NPRC or not. So that's how technology advanced in that regard just with the records that [coded] data could be interpreted. I mean, in the olden days, if you wanted to interpret those codes, you would have had to look through all these code books and, my goodness, it would have taken who knows how long to interpret some codes, flipping through paper pages in a code book. And the code books were not, what should I say, efficiently organized. It was kind of a mish-mash of papers. And so the computer systems just add to, I guess, organization and accountability. In the past, people would be assigned a batch of work, but there was really no way to know if everything had been completed in an efficient way. So with the current system, well, at least when I was there, if someone was assigned a batch of work and in the operations where the people answered the daily request, there would be accountability if they were assigned 50 or 25 or whatever. Well, that was all on the computer system. So if there were some that weren't worked there would be a way to monitor that. And then I guess just keeping production data, the numbers, you know, all of that was manually done and they used to put these little coded cardboard tags on cases where they could tell how old they were. Well with computer systems now, I mean, you put something in the system and you can sort by date or whatever and see which ones are the oldest and which ones weren't answered. I believe they take images of all these things now. Requests can be submitted online. In the past, all paper requests had to be signed and now you submit your request electronically. So yeah, things have changed quite a bit." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "You were also here when the National Archives got their independence from GSA. Can you talk about the impact that that had on your work or work at the NPRC in general?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Yeah. I don't really think that it impacted my work. It was just independence from GSA. And I don't know if that resulted in, I guess maybe it gave us more clout or whatever. We were this independent agency. We weren't part of GSA, which people always kind of thought is like the agency that cleaned up the buildings. So instead of saying that we work for GSA, now we can say the National Archives, and it sounded more impressive. But impacting the work for me? No. Maybe for funding, but I wasn't really involved in budgeting and things like that." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Did when we got a new Archivist? Did that ever have any impacts on your work?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "No. We didn't see the Archivists all that much. We did have inspections where people from the agency came, and they would review operations and make suggestions for improvement." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So were you involved at all or do you know anything about the discussions to make the military personnel files permanent records?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "No, that was on the archival side of the agency, so I wasn't involved in that." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "And you spent your career at the civilian personnel building, correct?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Right. About two years. Accession and disposal." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "And then putting records into the system called NARS-5. I don't know if that still exists or not." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah, I don't think so. It is familiar though. The NARS-5. I've definitely seen that. Yeah. So can you talk about any interesting discoveries you've made during your work or any really your favorite aspects of your work?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Well, I guess it was always changing because as technology developed, we were always improving our systems. And I thought that was interesting. For me on the management staff, I mean, I did so many different things. I mean, I was an EEO counselor. On one project, I set up all the logical screens for a website to accept military records requests. I didn't do the HTML, and I thought that was interesting. I kind of liked, I guess, the aspects that related to automation because that just seemed to be figuring out a problem or having a problem and then figuring out how there could be an automated solution to it. I even worked on, they called it—I don't know what they call it in Washington – the Combined Federal Campaign. And I set up a program where you could track all the donations and people got different incentives. It kind of did everything, and I offered that to the people that were in charge of the Combined Federal Campaign here in St. Louis. I don't know if they ever adopted it, but it worked great at the records center. There were just many, many aspects to what I did. We, I mean, we evaluated suggestions, updated procedures and policy, worked with contractors, did training, did troubleshooting. One day was never the same as the other. There was no, \"here's a pile of work. Complete this and we'll give you another pile of work.\"" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah. So do you think that your work has changed the way that you view records or the importance of records?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "I guess I'm a person who likes to maintain my own personal records because you just never know when you're going to have to go back and take a look. So yeah, I think record keeping is important. And I guess with automation maybe there's sometimes a view that it's less important to keep the paper record. But I had my little motto of the National Archives, the printed or “the written word endures.” I can't think of the Latin, but I had the corollary that the “electronic word fades away.” And so I think it is important to have paper records because we just can't be sure sometimes that the electronic record is going to be there. Plus with any electronics, you have to have the hardware to interpret it and the software too. And I can remember someone saying that during the Kennedy administration, there were some paper tapes created and it was like holes punched in this paper tape. And they maintained that record, but they didn't have the equipment to interpret it anymore. And that related to punch cards, because we had a punch card reader from way back when. One of the gentlemen in the data systems center said that the only other punch card reader that he knew of was at the Smithsonian. So, yeah, recordkeeping is important, but then you have to have the proper means for automated record keeping to interpret it. And, you know, the written word endures. And in paper, it seems like it spans the ages." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Going back to the fire, what do you think is the most important impact that the fire had on the National Archives? And it can be the long view because we're really looking for how the Archives adapted after the fire and what policies we put in place and then policies that we've changed and adapted over the years." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Yeah. Well, I guess, one thing that it showed was that the construction of a building for records should have sprinkler systems and firewalls. You know, I'm sure that it impacted record storage requirements. I mean, the impact was on military veterans who were needing these records. I would think that as time goes on and well, the World War II and Korean veterans, as they pass on, that those records are going to be less important from a personal use. It'll be for genealogical use primarily or if there's any studies that are ever done. It always kind of bothered me that maybe the National Personnel Records Center could have received more funding because we had records that were affecting people's lives as opposed to archival records maybe from 100, 200 years ago that were nice to have, you know, maybe documented our history a bit, but they really didn't affect people's personal lives like the records at NPRC. So I thought that there should have been more emphasis on dollars for the records that were going to have an immediate impact rather than a scholarly impact." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I agree with that. I think it's still an issue. [laughter] So when you look at your entire career, how do you view your time at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Well, I had intended to be a teacher, but I thought that my career with the National Archives was a better fit. So God had a different plan for me. And that was good. And I enjoyed my job. You know, it was a great job until I was retirement eligible. And I said, well, there's more to me than just working at the National Archives. And so I've done lots of other things. And gosh, it’s been 16 years since I retired. But it was a wonderful job. I met wonderful people. In fact, last night I was with a group of retirees. And I think that we had good leadership. David Petree, who was our director, well, he was, in fact, at our retiree group last night, too. I think sometimes if you have good leadership, it makes a job more enjoyable. And I think it was a great working group. There wasn't politics involved. One of my former bosses was there last night, too. It was a good place to work. And I think that all of us who still gather together, we think that we did our jobs and hopefully made a difference in people's lives. I always thought that my job was worthwhile, that I was doing something to benefit veterans. I even had one veteran who would call me periodically because he knew about the SGO file and he served during a time frame when there weren't any SGO records identified because we had them up to 1954. And then I think there was a gap between '54 and I think '58. And he had served during that period, and he was hoping that something else would be identified. So I always said I had my personal veteran who would call me and \"anything new, Diane?” I don't know, it was a satisfying career." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I love how you get together with the former staff periodically. It really speaks to the culture of the NPRC. Were you really close to your colleagues? Did you do things outside of work when you worked there?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Oh, sure. Yeah. You know, every year one friend and I would use some of our annual leave and we'd find somewhere to go – vacation destinations. Yeah, we'd go places after work or on weekends, too. Yeah. It's a good group of people. And like I said last night, how many of us were there? I don't know, a dozen. There's probably about 20 people in all. They call it, well, the men started it when some of the men retired before the women did. They called it \"Boys Night Out.\" So now they call it \"Boys and Girls Night Out.\" And so once a month we meet at a particular location and have something to eat, something to drink, and share what's been going on in our lives. And yeah, it's like you said, it was a positive culture that existed at the records center especially. I have to attribute that to the former director, David Petree. I think he was a good guy and that just sort of trickled down. Yeah, it was a good group." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "That's great. Yeah. The genesis for this oral history project really came from Charlie. It was his idea and he really got it started. So I have to give him a big thank you for pushing us to do this project." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Yeah, well, Charlie was my boss for a while too. Yeah, he's a good one. Crazy, crazy, funny guy. But. Yeah. And David Petree. Yeah, he was my supervisor, too. And Deborah Hilton. I don't know if you talked to Deborah or not." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "No, but we're still looking for people. So if you have contact information for Deborah or we haven't talked to David Petree." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Oh, okay." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Well, I would love it if I could get, if you have their contact information, and we can do this offline, but that would be great because we're trying to talk to as many people as possible and get as many perspectives as possible." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think Deborah, she certainly would, and I'm sure Mr. Petree would. I still call him Mr. Petree. He says call me David. And it's like I can't. I'm sorry. You are my boss. [laughter] Yeah, maybe, I could send a note to Charlie. Or if you want to since he's kind of the point man here and just ask him if he wants to reach out to Deborah and to David Petree." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah, that'd be, that'd be great." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Did you talk to Marcia Haley?" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I haven't. No. Give me all these good names." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Yeah, because Marcia's been there forever, and she worked on lots of things. Well, she might tell you about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. One of the tasks that the records center had was to verify all the name spellings. And not that that seems like a super serious task, but it really is. I mean, you don't want to have your name on a monument and have it installed, you know, \"Rademacher,\" I don't want, you know, M-A-C-K-E-R on my monument. And so that was one of the things. And the people that were doing the monuments, they would call her all the time to verify these spellings. And, that's where the military records came in because they would have to look at the military record and see sometimes the record identifier is misspelled, but then you would look at a signature and see how somebody spelled their name or if they filled out a form, how did they spell it? So, just I mean, things like that you might not think are super significant, but they really are to the veteran or to the veteran's family. Well, I'll send a note to Charlie and tell him that Marcia and Deborah, and Mr. Petree and gosh, if I can think of other people. There were people that actually worked with the burnt records. I have another friend. She moved on to another agency, but she was there with a mask on before masks became popular the past few years, working with the burnt records. And they would have to separate the pages and underline a service number. And then that would get keyed into a system to identify just that piece of paper out of a burnt record so that if somebody contacted us for information that there might be individual pieces of paper that were recovered after the fire. Because the records were everywhere. They were retrieved from neighborhoods. They flew away. I don't know if you've seen or read about the aftermath of the fire, but people would find record pieces in their backyards and bring them to the record center. So I don't know if you're interested in talking to anybody who did that type of thing or not, but if so." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Okay. I'm going to actually see that person tonight who worked in the files with the mask on and everything, and they had to wear gloves and, you know." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah, we have some pictures of how they do it now with gloves. But back then, too, because the records were so, I mean, I hate to say gross, but it seemed like you did not want to touch them or breathe them in." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Right. Yeah. Well, you know, when I was doing the verification for the SGO, when I would find an existing record and run the codes to see if they matched, a lot of times they were partially burned and I'd have them on my desk and be looking for the hospital admission card. And, it would be charred and well, they were like mold spores. So, you'd have to kind of brush off your desk afterwards because there was all this residual stuff. But now I think most of those are controlled by the archives side. And I think that they were trying to do more preservation. In the days when I worked there, we would get the records and try our best to keep the parts together. But, you have little crusty pieces that would fall off and burnt edges that would fall off sometimes. And, you know." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "It was like you ate a piece of toast at your desk and you had to shovel off all the crumbs." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There was charred chunks." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Did they still have a smell to them, even decades later?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Oh, well, yeah. I mean, all the burned records were stored in one area called the B-file. The burnt file. And yeah, when you would go in there. Yeah. It did have kind of a—I mean it wasn't like really pungent, but yeah, it did smell a little bit. Yeah. Records smell, any old records smell. But yeah, they did have a little bit of a burnt smell." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah. Have you been to the new buildings?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "I have a couple of times for the open house and retirements. Yeah, but I don't know, It just had sort of a what would I say? A sterile feeling." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "How does it compare to where you worked?" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "As you know, at the record center on Page Avenue, it was a big place. And there were a lot of agencies, a lot of activity. And at the new building, I don't think, well, I guess there's a few other agencies out there, but it's like you don't really see anybody. And, it just seemed kind of a more, I don't know, controlled sterile environment. And maybe that's fine. You know, it wasn't what I was used to. And I've been down to the caves, went down there for the open house and just, I guess for maybe a retirement or two down there in Valmeyer, Illinois. Have you gone to Valmeyer?" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I haven't been to Valmeyer. But I do want to go. We originally wanted to come to St. Louis and do these oral histories all in person and then just we didn't we ran out of time. But my goal is to get there and tour the caves. I'm really, really interested actually in civilian personnel records because they're very helpful for my job. I do a lot of staff highlights. And if all those records were available to me for everyone who worked at NARA, my life would be so much easier." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Oh, yeah, right. Well, you know, for active employees, I mean, if that's what you're interested in, they'd put all those in the vault if they were in the military. Well, the civilian personnel file is kept in the personnel office or the human resources office. Um, yeah. I don't know how records are maintained now, though. I mean, if everything is done electronically. I mean, I was a paper record person." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I try not to bother them too much, or at least the military folks because they're so busy with their backlog right now." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like backlogs were always there. I don't think that there was ever a time when people got caught up." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Right, right. So is there anything else that you would like to talk about? Any anecdotes? It could be fire related. It could be related to the National Archives in any way." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Um hm. Well, I was just curious. Are you in Washington right now?" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I am." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Are you in Maryland or where? Where are you located?" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I live on Capitol Hill, so I'm in DC." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Okay. But. Oh, do you work from home?" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Mainly, yeah. So I work from the main building. So downtown in DC, and that's my home base. And my office is there, but we have really been teleworking a lot lately, so I only go in if I need to look up records. We've been doing a lot of records management, sending records to RG 64, Records of the National Archives, so I'll go in for that kind of stuff. But otherwise, I've been doing a lot from home." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah. I can remember when Charlie Pellegrini was my boss and working from home became a thing. I asked if I could work from home? The answer was “No,” but, you know, that was, well, probably, I don't know, around 2000 or something. So now it's kind of normal." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah, COVID really changed things for the National Archives, which wasn't in the forefront of telework before, but now a lot of staff are 100% telework. The people who don't work with records or the public who can work from home." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Yeah. And now you have all these auxiliary locations for records like down in Mar-A-Lago and a garage." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I should not laugh at that." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Yeah, that’s kind of concerning. Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I mean, it is. We've been in the news for the first time. I mean, we've never been in the news as much, I don't think. [laughter]" }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Yeah, not a good thing. [laughter] So the Archivist has new headaches. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my. Yeah. Well, let me think if there's anything else. I don't know. I guess, I did enjoy my career at NPRC. And, I think that sometimes people thought that the record center was not a good place to work. But, I didn't find it that way at all. I thought it was a good career. So keep up the image of the National Archives positive." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "It is a positive place to work. And your work with the veterans was immensely important work. And I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me today and especially also following up if we can have additional interviewees." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "That would be great." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah. Thank you so much." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Well, it was fun. Yeah. And, you know, kind of made me think back. I know I talked to Bill Seibert, I think you're going to talk with him. And he said, Diane, it's been so long. I got to see what I can remember. So anyway, yeah, but, I guess we'd like to remember the good things. And so those two projects, medical records registry with the military services and the SGO, I think those are my favorite projects." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I'm so impressed that you could remember things so clearly from 1985. I can barely remember last week. So you must have a great memory." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Well, I guess like you said, the things that you liked, you remember. If there were things that I didn't really like about work, I'd probably forgotten them. So." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Right. And I guess your project was so giant and cumbersome that it's going to stick with you for the rest of your life." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Well, these weren't just week-long projects, they were years. But that's how it works in government. You got the funding, you got lots of people involved and a lot of coordination. And that's just what it takes. So." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah. Well great, thanks for talking to me. I'll let you go, and then I will follow up, like I said, with email, with the transcript. I appreciate you talking to me. And we'll talk more via email." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Okay. Well, it was nice to chat with you, Jessie, and enjoy your career with the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Thank you. Take care." }, { "speaker": "Diane", "text": "Okay. Thank you. Bye." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Bye. **ADDENDUM** **The** **SGO** **File** By Diane Rademacher Management Analyst at the National Personnel Records Center from 1977- 2007 The disastrous fire at the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in 1973 presented a challenge for many Army and Army Air Corps veterans who were seeking medical and disability benefits—or the award of combat or Purple Heart medals—from diseases and wounds incurred during their military service in WWII and Korea. Military veterans bear the responsibility of providing documentation to support their service-connected claims. NPRC continuously sought auxiliary records to supplement what was lost in the fire to assist veterans with needed records. In late 1985 during a health study, officials at the National Research Council’s Medical Follow-up Agency (NRC-MFUA) uncovered 82 reels of computer system magnetic tapes containing coded records from the Army Surgeon General’s Office (SGO) enumerating hospital admissions during WWII (1941–1945) and Korea (1950–1954). The collection was subsequently dubbed “SGO.” The coded SGO records were originally collected for statistical purposes and contained no names, but 60% of the 10 million records did contain service numbers and other identifying information, and most importantly, codes for diagnosis, treatment, hospital, dates, and outcomes. Upon request and using these identifiers, the SGO records could be matched to a veteran to verify medical treatment. Archivists at NPRC reviewed the find and determined that the records would be of great value if they could be interpreted. Manually deciphering the records using code books was an insurmountable task because of the many variables involved. There were thousands of codes, which changed from year to year, differed by location where they were tabulated, and some required additional subset codes for proper interpretation. A more efficient and expeditious method was needed to avoid poring over volumes of code books. My job was to take the 80-column SGO code that was initially collected on computer punch cards—and subsequently stored on the 82 reels of computer tape—and interpret the codes back into English. In the mid-1980s, desktop computers and database software products were coming into widespread usage. Our NPRC staff had just participated in a class using a database management system called dBase IV. It seemed to me that dBase IV offered an excellent method to decode these records with speed and accuracy. After searching for and obtaining a collection of tattered code books from the military, I created a computer program with large tables with the code interpretations for the 20 or so data fields in the 80 column records. The decoding program included all the exceptions, variables and complexities that were noted in the old code books. Over six million SGO records were eligible for interpretation and use via the dBase decoding program. However, there was no capability for storing such a large volume of records electronically—the cloud was nonexistent in those days. The 80-column coded records themselves were copied onto microfiche (from the tapes) and indexed on NPRC’s mainframe computer by service number. When a veteran submitted a request to NPRC, the mainframe computer was probed, and if there was an SGO record matching the veteran’s service number, the microfiche page, frame and row of the record entry would be indicated. A technician would then locate the service number on the microfiche and type the related coded record entry (or entries) into the screen interface of the dBase SGO program, a process that took a minute or two. Then, within a few seconds, a printout of the decoded record was available. The printout replicated the vital elements of hospital admission record, showing both the SGO codes and interpretations that detailed the disease or injury. The SGO printout was sent to the veteran as an official document from NPRC to use in support of his/her medical, disability, combat medal or Purple Heart claim. The procedure to make the first portion of the records available to veterans took about 10 months. Upon completion, the entire collection included Army hospital admission records for 1942–1945, 1950–1954, and later a set of 1958–1959 records. Storage systems and the database program have been upgraded over the years to add new efficiencies. The SGO records became the premier collection for providing medical record information to Army and Army Air Corps veterans whose records were lost in the 1973 fire. The SGO records provided the documentation that allowed approval for thousands of medical and disability claims from veterans as well as for the award of combat and Purple Heart medals to those who valiantly served." } ]

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[ { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. Yes, what is that, 39 years?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Yeah. Yeah. With military service, it was actually, I think, almost 43 years. So, yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow! Yeah, a long, long time." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Long time. It was an interesting career. I have to say that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yes. So going back to the very beginning of your NARA service, you said that NARA contacted you. How did that work?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Well, at that time, when you took the PACE exam, I think you put down what sort of work you would like to do. It was so long ago. But I indicated that I was interested in working in archives. And I guess if you score high enough, you know, your name is referred to different agencies. And I think I also indicated that I was interested in staying in St. Louis. And so that also, I guess, narrowed it down. At that time, NPRC was participating pretty aggressively in the CIDS program, bringing on people. And with that, you came in as a GS-5 and, if you were successful in the training program, in two years, you were advanced through to a GS-9. And I was an archives specialist at that time. There was not an opening for an archivist at that time. Those positions were filled, but there was a need for archives specialists. And so that was the position I was offered, and I did accept it." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. And where did this training take place? Was this at 9700 Page Avenue?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "At that time, NPRC had two facilities. I guess they have two now as well. But yes, there was the military building at 9700 Page, and then there was also the civilian record center, which was at 111 Winnebago Street near downtown St. Louis. And in training, you had a complete training overview of the operations of both centers, both buildings. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. Okay. And what did they have you doing during the training?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Well, you pretty much shadowed supervisors of the various units both at Page and at Winnebago. I spent time in the civilian reference branch and in the search and retrieval section there, and also in the operations branch, all three branches down there—and then the same at Page Avenue. You rotated through, spending time in each of the branches of the organization." }, { "speaker": "There were three military reference branches", "text": "Army, Navy, Air Force. There was the Reconstruction Branch. There also was the Operations Branch that, you know, supported all of the operations in the building. And there was the Management & Technical Staff that were basically the management analysts that were in charge of reviewing, designing, and producing operational manuals and directives, basically the regulations that the place operated under. And you spent time there with the management analysts as well. So …" }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So kind of a comprehensive view of …" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Absolutely. That was the idea. Yeah, and then they were able to place you wherever there was an opening, where they had a need when you finished your two years, if you were successful. And, I think, every quarter your assignments were, if I remember correctly, they were quarterly, every three months or so, you rotated into a different operation. And so at the end of that time, you were—it was a rather rigorous program. You were brought before a group of senior managers there, and you had to basically present a paper that described everything you had learned. And then you would be grilled on all of that. And so that went on for two years, basically. And then at the end, they found a place for you where they needed you. And for me, it was in the Reconstruction Branch. And I had spent probably six weeks or a couple of months in that branch, maybe a quarter in that branch, as part of the training. So I was familiar with it. And that's where there was an opening as a GS-9, and that's where I ended up for a number of years. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So for the training aspect of it, the CIDS, what did you think of that program, that training?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Like I said, it was pretty rigorous. And I mean, by the time you got through it, you understood how all the various operational units in NPRC functioned and, you know, you were sort of in a position to begin. Of course, the other aspect of it was the whole idea of supervision. I mean, that was a challenge working in a—it always is, working with people, having a requirement to evaluate people's performance and make sure that the production requirements of the unit were being met. And of course, as you know, NPRC gets thousands and thousands of reference requests weekly, and there is a huge emphasis on getting those turned around as quickly as possible. But a lot of us were also concerned about thoroughness and accuracy as much as timeliness of response. And in reconstruction, of course, that was a major concern to try to get as much information as you could in the time allotted for responding to a request. Yeah, anyway, I think all of us that worked there at that time, and probably even today, well, there is no separate Reconstruction Branch now—records reconstruction is folded into, as I understand it, all of the reference operations. But, I mean, when we were specifically working with the recovered records and the records that had to be reconstructed, we really felt an obligation to do as thorough and accurate a job for the veterans, and their next of kin who were writing in. And I was always fascinated by, and later on, of course, it became a major concern, the research. People were coming in wanting to know about specific incidents, about people that were involved in particular operations during, especially during wartime, in the First World War and the Second World War, and Korea. So anyway, it was really interesting." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yes, it sounds like it. So you started in 1978 with the CIDS program and then you moved over to the Records Reconstruction Branch about..." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Yeah, that would have been in 1980, I think, about two years later. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "And so this would have been just a few years after the 1973 fire. What did that building look like and smell like when you were in there?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "The fire took place on the sixth floor of the building. The building was a six-story building. And it was determined—I mean, this is what one learned—that the building was compromised to the extent that they were not going to rebuild that floor. I'm trying to remember. I think it was reckoned that there were 22 million individual service records stored on the sixth floor, and what was recovered, oh boy, you know, it was something like maybe not even 20 percent of the records. So they didn't necessarily need that space to store records anymore, because so many had been destroyed. But so, you know, the building’s roof was rebuilt over the fifth floor. The fire did not really descend below the sixth floor, but water certainly did. And there were a lot of records on the fifth floor that were water damaged and had to be treated for that. But in the ground floor of the building, there was an area in the basement, basically, that was turned over to storage of the recovered records, the records that had been salvaged, having suffered fire and water damage. And it was the one area—the stacks at that time were not air conditioned—but this area, we called it the B-File for burned records, was air conditioned and all of the various preservation requirements that we knew at that time were put in place, and it was a temperature-controlled stack area. And then the other thing that happened—and of course I was involved in it over the years—was that a call went out throughout the federal government and the state and local governments to halt any destruction of records in the custody of those organizations that could help document military service … of course, the Veterans Administration, the Selective Service System, etc. All sorts of different, what we called alternate or auxiliary records, series that could help put together the individual service history of those...[SOUND CUTS OUT]." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Are you still there? Oh. You dropped out for a second there." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "I'm back. I'm back. This darn phone. So as I was saying, the service histories of those persons whose records were lost in the fire or were compromised, where only portions of the record, say, were salvaged. So at any rate, that was a huge effort and a really wonderful one. In later years when I headed up the archival unit here, a lot of my efforts were in getting those auxiliary series of records appraised as permanent holdings of the National Archives. Of course, the service records themselves were in a contingent—you may or may not know that they were in a contingent status. Nobody was foolish enough to suggest that they be destroyed. But on the other hand, they had not been appraised as a permanent series. So that was something that I was also very much involved in as an appraisal archivist. And hold on a second. I’ve got to get rid of this." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "[ANSWERS ANOTHER PHONE CALL.] Sorry about that. It was a call that I've been expecting for a couple of days. Anyhow, what I was saying is, I think probably the most important part of my work for the National Archives was working on a multiyear effort to get the military service records and the civil service records reappraised as a permanent series of the National Archives and bring them into National Archives’ legal custody. But we had done this work at the National Personnel Records Center in the wake of the fire and brought all of these different series together. Many of them were brought into the building. Others stayed in the custody of the agencies that held them. But there was an agreement that they would not dispose of these records because they were critically needed in reconstructing the service data that had been destroyed in the fire. One of the actions that we always talked about in recon [reconstruction] was this idea of procuring. We would procure copies of records from other agencies in order to assemble a reconstructed file, and one of the issues we had to deal with was the delays involved in that. I mean, where other reference operations were working with complete records, their turnaround time could be much faster. We would have to explain very often to our customers that we were attempting to assemble additional documentation that would hopefully result in us being able to provide a reconstructed service record to them, but that some of this would take time. We were dependent on other agencies to get us the information that was needed. And so that was always something that was a challenge because, very often, some of these requests were time-sensitive. You know, the veterans or their next of kin might be having medical issues and they needed treatment by the Veterans Administration and, in order to get that, they had to produce documentation that they had honorable service in the military. So anyway, those were some of the challenges from day to day that we would deal with. But when I was working there, in the years that I was in Recon, there were quite a number, I would say almost a majority [of the staff], were men who had served in the Army or the Air Force. They knew the records intimately because they were veterans. And then a lot of the women that worked there had also had government jobs during the war and were familiar with military records. And these people, boy, you just learned a tremendous amount from them. Of course, all of them have long since retired and most of them have passed on. But when I was working there, you know, in the early '80s, they were there. And it was really a privilege to work with them and to learn from them about how records were kept and where one could go to obtain information from other record sources. One of the tremendous collections we had there were the personnel accounting records of the Army and the Air Force organizations, the “morning reports,” which were compiled daily. These reports documented who was in a given unit from day to day, and also the unit rosters, which were useful. And those were all in microfilm format. The Army had microfilmed them, and we had a unit within Recon of people that were sitting at microfilm readers, and they would follow an individual through his or her unit assignments day by day—we called those a “follow-through search.” Hopefully, the person writing in could give us some indication of a unit and a time frame in which the service member was serving at a given period. And we could start the search in the unit records at that point to attempt to find them and follow them through from entry to discharge, which again was often a very time consuming effort. But again, the people that I worked with, that were in my section, were just tremendously skilled at that. And, I mean, it was amazing what we were able to do and what people are still able to do in terms of putting record information back together." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. So when you were working with these records, were they all like discolored? Were they brittle, moldy? I mean, what did they look like?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Well, in the Recon Branch, we were on the ground floor of the building. There was no carpeting on the floor. It was linoleum tile. And at the end of every workday, the custodial crew would come through with dry mops and sweep up ashes from the floor. I mean, it was a real challenge. And I would say most of the people that I worked with were very careful and scrupulous about not losing any record information. The records were brittle in many cases. They were singed with ash. Some of them were just not legible at that time. Now, I don't know. Did it turn out that you were able to see Meg Phillips’s round table on the fire? They were recording that session from a couple of weeks ago—I guess it was last week—that I told you about. And part of what the presentation there was, the head of the preservation unit in St. Louis described some of the fantastic technological advances that allow information to be recovered, which we could not do in the 1980s, from documents that were totally charred. Using infrared technology, they can recover information. So anyway, it was a major concern that we were careful with these records as they came in to us from the B-File. Of course, there was dry mold on them and that was an issue. Some people were sensitive to that. And as time went on, it became clearer about the health considerations of exposure to dormant mold. You did the best you could. You wiped it off. But it was there at the end of every day. Ashes were swept up off the floor. I mean, yeah, the records recovered from the fire were in various stages of distress, I guess you could say. So a lot of—." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So did you have to—[CROSS-TALKING]." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Go ahead." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Go ahead. Oh. Did you have to use special equipment then or, you know, you talked about some of the safety concerns, health concerns." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Yeah. Well, not a lot of attention was given to that at that time. Since then, there's been a tremendous amount. But back then, I mean, everybody had brushes on their desk and they would brush off the mold that could be removed. They would brush the ash off. And, you know, I mean, you just worked with it and tried to be as careful as possible. A lot of photocopying obviously was done, but it had to be very carefully done because, again, you were trying to avoid losing information off of the paper. So, yeah, it was a very, very interesting operation." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "When you were looking at some of the burn records, how much information had to be on that original record that you could make out before you had to go somewhere else for that information? Did you try to recreate everything that was on that original document?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "No, depending on what the request was. But, the vast majority of the requests, what was needed was verification of the total time spent in the military, when the individual went in, when they were discharged, and what the character of their service was. That was critical. Did they have honorable service? Was it something less than honorable? Yeah. I mean, you were basically, as we would say, you get them in and out and have a character of service. Now, sometimes there were, especially when part of what was wanted was documenting injury or wounds and so forth, then you were looking at medical records, if they survived. If they didn't, you would go to the Veterans Administration in the hope that the person had been seen at a veterans hospital prior to the date of the fire and that copies of their medical records were on file with the VA. And so if they had been, NARA had an agreement with the Veterans Administration that they would send us the medical records they had on file on a given individual, and we would incorporate them into the reconstructed file. Verifying medical conditions when a record had been lost in the fire was one of the most difficult things to do. And you could go to the organizational records, again, to the morning reports. And if someone was wounded or became ill on a given date, hopefully there was a remark on the morning report for that date or several days later when the person had been transferred to a medical unit for treatment, and you would be able to document the illness or injury. And very often, requesters were next-of-kin family members who were interested if the service member had been awarded the Purple Heart for having been wounded in action, and we were trying to verify awards and decorations as well. So at any rate, yeah, it just depended on what was being requested. And the other point being made, it always comes up when people learn about the fire and the tremendous loss that occurred. You know, one of the people at the program the other day was from one of the genealogical societies, and she said, \"Well, this is 50 years on. When do you think you'll finish reconstructing all the records that were lost?\" And we lost, I think, probably 16 million individual records. So the way reconstruction occurs is as the result of receiving a specific request for a given record. We are not systematically trying to reconstruct, and there's no way to do it because—that's the other thing I should mention is when the fire occurred, there was no index to these files. We had no idea. You know, you just went out to look to see if a record was there. They were filed alphabetically, and that's what the searching was. And after the fire, you didn't know. There was no sort of index of all of the people who had records on the sixth floor. So we could really only reconstruct based on requests by someone self-identifying, and then we would go to try to see if there was a recovered record and, if not, how we could go to alternate sources to try to verify that the person served and obtain the basic data surrounding his or her service. The good thing that happened in the wake of the fire is that the records that were recovered were put into a database. So, when someone came in, the first thing you would do was search that database and see if there was a recovered record. And also, many of the auxiliary files, the other series that were physically brought into the center, were put into a registry. So if you didn't get a hit on the record itself, having been salvaged in the wake of the fire, you might get a data hit on an auxiliary record. Something that we brought in from—well, was it the Treasury Department or the GAO [U.S. Government Accountability Office] by that time or still the Army or Air Force Finance Branches?—but we brought in millions of individual pay records. And as those records were processed, the individual pay document was put into a registry system. So you might get a hit on a pay record, and that pay voucher would be pulled. And hopefully it was what we referred to as the final voucher, the one where the person was paid as they were discharged from active service. It would be a tremendous bit of data. So yeah, I can tell you there were millions and millions of military pay vouchers that we were able to make accessible for reconstruction. The Air Force and the Army had both created card files, three-by-five cards, at the headquarters of the services, of awards that were made to individuals. Those came to us and we would—if it was a question of trying to verify an award, a Purple Heart or something like that. You would go to search those card files. There were records from service on the Mexican border leading up to the First World War in 1915. Anyway, just all sorts of different, as we said, auxiliary record sources that were searched in the effort to reconstruct a person's military service record if it was destroyed. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Did you help with putting any of this information in the database that you were talking about?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "I did not. At that time, no. It had been done and was going on. There was a unit that was doing that in those years as new groups of records were brought in, auxiliary files were brought in. But no, I did not do data entry. There was a data entry section that did that. And in the days and months after the fire, as they pulled records off of the sixth floor and brought them in and did the initial sort of drying and cleaning, those records would go to that unit and there was a computer entry made and the records were filed. They had originally been filed alphabetically when they were on the sixth floor, and there was no database for what was there. After the fire, when they entered the recovered records into a database, they were stored by that entry number. So, you know, presumably the first record that was entered was 0000001. And it went all the way up into the six millions for the recovered records. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Did that make it a lot easier then to locate the records that you were looking for, for these requests?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Absolutely, for the recovered records. Like I mentioned, that area in the basement which we called the B-file or the Burn File, and then also in that stack area, were various collections of the auxiliary records and, again, they had been put into a database. So you would put a person's name and service number in, and if you were lucky, you would get a recovered record, a B-file. If not, you would get a series of hits for auxiliary records. If you were in a correspondence section, which is where I was, and my employees, they would request those, send their requests to the search section and have them pulled and delivered to their desk, where they would go through them and attempt to add them to a—if there was additional information for a record that was partially recovered, they would add those documents to that file. And if there was no record, they would start, basically, what we called an R-file or a Reconstructed File, and those auxiliary documents that proved the person's military service, you know, when they got in, when they got out, what the character of their service was, if there was information about awards, if there was medical information—all of that would be compiled and put in that reconstructed file. And that record would then go to the data entry people, and it would be entered in as what we would call an R-file or a Reconstructed File. So, I don't know how many, but by the time I left, I think they had probably reconstructed from scratch, so to speak, over four or five million records. So, you know, a lot of work had gone on over those 45 years by the time I retired. So anyhow, yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So it sounds like there were multiple teams that were working on different aspects of, say, a records request that came in. I think you were a section chief of correspondence when you were there?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "I was a correspondence section chief. Yes. And so what my group did was they would get the request that was mailed into the Center. They would analyze it to see what was available, like probing the databases to see what was available, and then they would request whatever pertinent hits they got for the individual. They would ask either the search section, if there was a recovered record in the B-file stacks, or then there was also the organizational records unit in the Records Reconstruction Branch office—the people that went and searched the microfilm records. As I mentioned, we had the morning reports and the unit rosters. There were other groups of records that were on film, and that request would go to them to search and to make a photocopy. And those photocopies would then come to the correspondence technician who had the case, and they would assemble it all and then generate a response to the requester and provide copies of what they had obtained. There was a document that NARA designed, which stood in the place of the separation document. And so the technician would fill in the data on that form. It was issued with the NARA seal on it, and it would give the person's name, their service number, the date they went in, the date they got out, the character of their service. And that would be in the place of the separation document. Maybe you've heard the term “Department of Defense 214” [DD 214], which is what they call it now. But back in the Second and First World Wars, it was a different document. If that document survived, we would make a copy of that and send it. But if it didn't and we had to pull the information about the person's service history together from alternate sources, that basic data would be put on that NARA-designed form-NA Form 13038. And I'm sorry to say, but I'm blanking on the name of the form. But it was a very formal document that stood in the place of the separation document issued by the service department, by the Army or the Air Corps or the Air Force. So, yeah, that would be the product that the correspondence technician came up with, and we would furnish to the requesting party. And again, the other issue that was a big one for us all was that the records were in the legal custody of the military services—the NPRC was simply holding them for the agency that still had legal custody—that those records were subject to the Privacy Act. So part of our requirement was to analyze who the requester was. We had to make it clear to them that by signing their letter of request, that if they were falsifying who they were, they were subject to prosecution under the Privacy Act. We had to make sure that who we were responding to with information was, in fact, the subject of the record or, if they had died, their next of kin. And beyond that, you couldn't legitimately furnish information to the individual. Now, the records that have come into the legal custody of the National Archives, those are public records. So, it was determined as part of the agreement—again, I was involved with this...it was painful, I mean, the negotiation went on for four or five years at least—between the service departments and NARA, as to when a record would become public. And the determination was made that 62 years after separation from service is when the record would be legally transferred from ownership of the creating agency to the National Archives and then become a public record, and anyone could have the information. So." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "How was that determined?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Well, you know, it sort of became critical to find out the separation date. When you reconstructed “when did this person get out?” Of course, now we're how many years past, certainly the Second World War, 70 years or more—so all of those records are now public records. But at the time when I was working in the Recon Branch, they were not. Even the oldest records from the Mexican border and the First World War were still in the legal custody of the Army, and they were subject to Privacy Act rules. And so it was critical for the correspondence technicians to understand the provisions of the Privacy Act and apply them and not release information that legally could not be released to the person they were corresponding with. So that was a challenge." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. Yeah. You talked a little bit about when you were reappraising the OMPFs [Official Military Personnel File] as permanent. Did you use some of this experience from the Records Reconstruction Branch to help in this work? Or how did you go about this process?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Well, if you have worked with NARA for a long time, you may be aware that for a long time NARA archivists did not view personal data records as permanent records. They felt the only records that were really legitimately archival were the records of the government organizations and that the records that pertained to people were not. And that was one of our big challenges. Of course, the history community and the genealogical community were our allies in pointing out that that was totally fallacious. You learn a lot about how the government operated from looking at the records of the individuals who were responsible for running the government, whether they were civil servants or whether they were military people during wartime or even during peacetime, and realize that this information was hugely important. That was one of the things we had to demonstrate, and we did so. But it took a lot of persuasion. You can understand the history of an organization very often through the records of individuals that worked for that organization, especially in the earlier years when there was a lot of correspondence in the records that documented how a particular operation functioned. I've been retired for five years now, so some of this has become a bit hazy. Some of the issues that we talked about, you know, there were four or five basic criteria that you applied when appraising government records for archival value and deciding whether they should be kept permanently. We had to apply those criteria to the individual service records, and we were successful in doing it. I think, eventually the Archives was fine with that. I mean, we convinced them … and the public certainly was on board from the beginning. But then the issue became this issue of privacy. And that's what took a lot of negotiation with the various service departments, the Department of Defense and the Civil Service Commission to say, when can we safely say these records can be open to the public—when is the government not required to protect personal privacy on all of this? So that was a huge issue. But the other things were really important. You really had to show using established archival criteria that these series were, in fact, legitimately permanent records of the United States." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you think that there were any takeaways or lessons learned from that process?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Well, yeah. I mean, I think speaking as a historian, it's the whole top-down view that the only records that really meant anything were the records created by the central offices of various departments that, you know, those were the ones that were kept and not necessarily [other] records. But as the government grew in the 20th century, and the federal government had more of a presence throughout the country in various regions, archivists had to look beyond just the records created at headquarters in DC and see what was going on in the regions. Well, then the other thing is, how about what happened to and what was done by ordinary people, not just the Secretary of Defense or the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But, you know that whole notion of social history, of what ordinary people were doing and how their service affected the history of the United States and its government—you know, all of that has changed in the last 30 or 40 years. Yeah. How archivists are looking at that sort of thing also changed." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's so interesting that you say that. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "So these personal data records — I mean, obviously genealogists are most concerned, but also people doing pure historical research are using these records. Especially, well, the older military service records and the records of the civil service contain fascinating documentation. Anymore, it's all pretty much standard forms. Now it's not so interesting. But in the older records and what I'm saying is, you know, World War Two and earlier, you would find fascinating things in the individual service records that describe historical events that were taking place and the actions of those individuals who were involved. It's all there, and it can be really fascinating. So." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Mhm. I also heard that you were instrumental in coordinating with College Park to secure funding for the Preservation Program. Can you talk a little bit about that?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Yeah. Preservation was the first archival function established at NPRC after the military personnel records were reappraised as permanent, and that happened in 1999, I believe, when John Carlin signed the transfer documentation for the military personnel records. It then became critical for NARA to decide how these records that were now in their legal custody would be preserved. And so the first archival unit at St. Louis was the Preservation Branch. And I did apply for the position to head that unit and was selected because the idea was—the NPRC director at that time, David Petree, it was his view that in order for that effort to get off the ground, the person in charge had to understand the records, how they were arranged and stored, their contents, their physical form and current condition, etc. And so that is the basis on which I was selected because I had no personal training in paper preservation or anything, but I was able to hire two just remarkably experienced conservators—we really went for the best, and we hired two conservators to work with me and to begin to design the program first for preserving the recovered records, the burned records. How would they be handled? And we instituted all sorts of handling protocols for NPRC staff. There was a lot of pushback because before that, people were just used to treating those records just like the records that were perfectly intact, that had never been exposed to fire and water damage. And it became clear that it was totally irresponsible to continue handling the burned records that way, or you would destroy the information in these records. So, it slowed things down. And there was an awful lot of pushback from the record center side and, frankly, their fixation on being able to show a very fast turnaround time from when requesters wrote in to when they got their answer. And the protocols that we, in preservation, felt were absolutely necessary to put in place slowed some of that down. I mean, basically, every time a record from the B-file was requested, its physical condition would be reviewed and assessed by a preservation technician, and it would be decided what could be sent on to the Reference Branch safely. And if it couldn't be sent forth without the danger of record information being destroyed in the handling, then we took steps. We made copies of the original and sent the copies, but all that slowed things down. And so it was a constant give and take on what would happen. For instance, generally speaking, before the Preservation Unit was established, searchers would go in, searchers—GS-3s—would go in and pull records from the B-file and they would be stacked in carts and rolled up to the technicians in the correspondence section who were to answer the cases. When the Preservation Unit came into existence, random searchers were no longer allowed in the B-files. Those allowed access to the stack area first had to be trained by preservation specialists in how to handle the records safely, and only those who were trained in those procedures were able to access the records. So that was a change. You know, before that, anybody could go in there, and they did. After that, there were restrictions put on access to the records. It was just necessary. Before the records were appraised as permanent, NARA could basically say, \"Well, they're not our records. It's the service departments, the Departments of the Army and the Air Force, that have to decide how these things are going to be done.\" And they didn't care. I think you understand that agencies really, until there's a legal problem, they could give a rat's ass about non-current records. They're only interested in the records they're dealing with today. Very shortsighted. And that was certainly true of the military services, the Army and the Air Force. They were concerned about the people currently serving. They were not really concerned about former service members. I mean they figured that's the VA's problem. Well, not really if you own the records. The records of former military members document eligibility to have services from the VA. The owner of the records has a responsibility. Yeah. And so, again, there was no question about preservation requirements after the records came into NARA's legal custody. So yeah, that was very interesting. We did cleaning in the lab. I can't remember all the details. I was down there as the archivist in charge of the preservation unit from 2000, I think, to about 2004 or 2005. And that's when the other archival unit, the custodial unit that was tasked with caring for all of the accessioned records including the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard records that had nothing to do with the fire. The Navy and Marine Corps records are really the oldest records in St. Louis, and some of them go back to the Civil War. And one of the big projects we had there—one of the requirements that the Navy insisted upon if they were going to agree to convey ownership of the records over to the National Archives’ legal custody, was that a database be created for those records. And that was one of the projects that I was in charge of. I can't remember the numbers, but several million records from what we call the World War One period—which actually went from the beginning of the Second World War, basically 1939 back to the beginning, which was in some cases the mid-19th century—were entered into a database. Every record was entered into a computer database so that now, after that project—it was a multiyear project—we knew if we had a record for someone who served in the Navy in 1885 or whenever. And again, with preservation, there were protocols in how those records were handled because they are not records in flat files, but they are in tri-fold folders or pockets. And so every time those records are accessed, they have to be unfolded and then refolded. And that's a major preservation issue. So, yeah, we had to institute procedures in how those records were handled. And those procedures represented a major change from the way NPRC had been operating for the past 40 years or whatever. So a lot of challenges." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Was the preservation program in St. Louis set up or established specifically to deal with the burned records?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "That was the start. Yes, but it eventually encompassed all of the records that came into NARA's legal custody. So as I mentioned, those Navy records that went way back into the 19th century were subject to protocols established by the Preservation Unit in terms of handling. But the first step was to address the burned records, because they were considered most seriously at risk. And that's one of the things that I had to do as head of that unit, basically identify the level of risk involved for the various collections. The woman who was NARA’s head of preservation during those years was an absolutely wonderful person. I mean, hugely brilliant. She came to NARA from the Library of Congress. Her name was Doris Hamburg. I don't know if you ever had any interaction with her, but just a fantastic person to work with. And I learned a lot about preservation, both from Doris and from the two conservation specialists that we hired in St. Louis and who were the ones in charge of establishing the preservation rules and protocols for the handling of the records at NPRC. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "So, this was a new program there at St. Louis. Do you have any lessons learned from establishing a new program there?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Well, as I said, the main thing that it did and that was really resisted by the managers of the NPRC, was to slow down how access to records took place. You just couldn't handle them like disposable material, you know? I mean, if you were like, \"We need to answer this case. We are not really concerned about what happens to the record after we answer the case.\" Well, that's crazy in the first place, because questions about an individual's military service don't come in once and never again. You know, very often somebody wants to know more information. And there are other members of the family. And when the records become accessioned, members of the public are interested. So, you know, these records are going to be handled over and over again. They always were. And so you had to consider that what you were doing was, basically, destroying the physical record. So, it meant slowing things down. And that was a huge issue. I got into disagreements with a lot of people there because of that. And, we had to verify that what we were saying was in accordance with established preservation practice as mandated by the agency itself, by the National Archives. And so it took persuasion, and in some cases, it took someone mandating. But, the issue is it depends on where you were coming from in the agency. I mean, the people in the Office of the Chief of Operations, they're looking at St. Louis as a very sensitive place in terms of dealing with the veterans. And the VA, of course, was happy to say, well, their hands were tied because of bottlenecks at NARA and the National Personnel Records Center. And of course, with COVID and all, I mean, you heard about their backlogs. They were always dealing with backlogs of 10,000 … 15,000 cases at the end of a given week. And that ballooned up to, I think, as high as 600,000 or something. So, I mean, it was a lot of pressure. And I know, probably some of the things that we put in place were overruled because of that. I don't know. In a way, I'm glad I'm not there today in that regard." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. Yeah. We gained a lot of new permanent records when those OMPFs were reappraised as permanent. Is that why the National Archives at St. Louis was established?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "I think it almost doubled the holdings of the National Archives. Something like that. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. Very significant. Is that why the National Archives was established in St. Louis? Because of those records?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Yes. That's why there was an archival unit there. Exactly. When the records became permanent, they had to establish an archival unit there which had not existed before. Yeah, the only archival function in St. Louis prior to the reappraisal of the individual service records was the appraisal that I mentioned. The appraisal function that was directed at, not the personnel records, but at the military field command records that had landed in St. Louis mainly because there was room and that were unscheduled. And so that was the only archival work that happened in St. Louis up until 1999, when the individual military service records were reappraised as permanent. Then there had to be an archival unit established. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. And was that established at the new building, the One Archives Drive location? Or was that at the—?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "No, it began at 9700 Page Avenue still. Yes. We were at 9700 Page until 2011, and the Preservation Unit was established in 2000, and the Archival Unit was established in 2004. So we were there at 9700 Page from 2004 until 2011. What is that, seven years? And then we moved into the new building at One Archives Drive now." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "But at this time, you were the senior archivist?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Yes. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Did you help with the move?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. My staff, we did tremendous work to physically move the records. And of course, we had to plan. We had a wonderful unit within the archives. The archival—they change the name all the time—I forget. The National Archives in St. Louis is what we eventually were called. And we had a team of management analysts in the Archives at St. Louis who worked on the planning and designing of the new building, because it was to hold archival records. So I mean, yeah, that was a huge, huge effort. Did you say you interviewed Bryan McGraw? He was brought in as the head of the archives basically to develop that new building. I mean, he had had a lot of experience from working as an Air Force officer in logistics and so forth. Anyway, he hired—I think we had at least three management analysts working on the design of the new building. Yeah, it was quite an operation." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "In terms of the whole archives then moving to this new building, what were some of the challenges, you know, starting fresh in a new building?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Well, we had to figure out how much space we needed. We needed to understand what the series were that were accessioned at that point and identify what the volume of incoming accessions would be. With the OMPF, legal transfer to NARA occurred on a rolling date—62 years after separation from active service. So, you know, we had to make sure we had room for everything. The good thing was—and it was really what convinced Congress to fund the new building—is that the military services and the civil service had switched to electronic records, that we had an end point for paper records. You know, we could now say there was a definite volume of paper of individual military and civilian personnel [records] and related records series that NARA would be responsible for. And so that's what we had to plan for in the new building. One of the biggest challenges was when the civilian personnel records were reappraised as permanent. They were at that building, as I told you, in downtown St. Louis, 111 Winnebago Street, the civilian personnel records building. I had two of my archivists down there basically identifying and organizing those records. The older records were physically arranged by agency. And again, for the oldest records, there wasn't an inventory. So you had to go out to the stacks to figure out where they were, what the volume was, and how you would arrange them in the new building. I had those two archivists down there for the better part of two years figuring that out. And then, of course, came the challenge of moving the records. We hired commercial movers, obviously, to carry out the physical moving, but I had my staff onsite, you know, overseeing how the records were handled and in what order they were moved. We preliminarily had to develop an order in the old building and then make sure that that was maintained as they were moved into the new building so we could find them. You know, it was a very major effort. And we're talking about hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of paper records. It was an enormous undertaking. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Right. Just remarkable. Did you come out of that move thinking things should have been done differently or, you know, if you had another chance to do it again, would you do anything different?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "I think it was pretty successful. I think we really rose to the occasion. Yeah. And the oldest Navy records that I told you about, you know, the ones that went back well into the 19th century, had been moved after they were appraised. They were moved from 9700 Page to a building about half a mile away where, again, that's where my staff was that basically provided the records to the Navy Reference Branch to answer requests. But also at the same time, they were generating that database and putting every record into a database so we knew what we had down to the file level. That, again, took several years to accomplish. And it was one of our proudest undertakings. Those records, by the time we moved into the new building, were in great shape. I mean, we had a database for them. But again, we were really moving records from three different major facilities into the single new building at Archives Drive. It was wild." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I bet." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "And then we were bringing in records too, records that had been used—remember I told you that in records reconstruction, we would procure documentation from other agencies? Well, basically, those records were appraised as permanent at the same time as the OMPF that were in NPRC's physical custody—those records, held in various agencies—were also appraised as permanent. So basically, we had the job of negotiating with those agencies for the physical shipment of those records into our new building. And that was part of the planning to try to figure out what the volumes were, for instance, files that the VA held going way back, files created by their predecessor, the Pension Office, really old records, ones that were not in A1 and were still in the physical custody of the VA and not in NARA downtown in DC. Those records that were held by the VA at various places in their system, at various locations, we had to find out where they were and negotiate with the VA to get them sent to us in St. Louis. And that's one of the collections that is of tremendous interest to family historians and genealogists, those old pension files that are now in the custody of the National Archives in St. Louis. So, yeah, it was not just moving what we physically had at the time of moving into the new building, but we also had to be projecting what should be coming to us from other agencies, the related series of records that came in. That was a decision that we had to clear with our people in DC, what was appropriate to come to St. Louis rather than go to DC. Of course, there was no room in DC. They'd run out of room in College Park and in Suitland, so it made sense to bring them to us. But all of that had to be negotiated and, in planning the new building, we had to make sure we had the space for all of that. So it was interesting." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Wow. You kind of talked about some of the technological advancements. I mean, it sounds like everything was more of a manual process to start out with, and then things were being moved into a database for tracking purposes, and then digitization. Are there any other observations that you can think of in regards to any technological advancements over your career?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Well, yes. When they converted to an electronic OMPF, the technicians had to become proficient in accessing them, and there was negotiation with the service departments establishing the conditions under which they could have direct access to those records. And then the issue of where and how those records would be brought into NARA and how that—I mean, I was not directly involved in all of that—but it changed how the individual correspondence technicians at the NPRC would do their work because, you know, at that point they were looking at a record that was online. But also prior to that, there was a period when the military services were microfilming, not microfilming—what's the other term? Not microfilm, but micro...the little cards..." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Microfiche?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "They were microfiching records. And of course, copies of the fiche had to come to NPRC because the records didn't exist in paper. They were on fiche. So that process gradually became subject to using different technology: microfiche readers. And then eventually, the records were on a computer and they had to be able to access those and print out documents for the customers, the members of the public that were coming in to want their records or I should say the veteran or next of kin. Those records—obviously they're still subject to Privacy Act restrictions because they're the newer record—but they are a permanent series that will eventually come into NARA’s legal custody. They will transfer from the agency to NARA. So yeah, that was a major change." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Lots of changes. Let's see here. 2017. That's when you retired from the National Archives, right?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Do you remember your last day?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "I think my last day—I have by me here the copy they sent me of the oral history interview. And I think I did that, it says September 20, 2017. And I think my last day was the 30th of September. So like a week later. Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Did they do anything special for you when you retired?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "I didn't want anything special, but my employees did. We had dinner, which was great. They insisted that we all went out to dinner. It was a lot of fun. I didn't want a big retirement ceremony in the building. I just wasn't interested in that. But I did have a wonderful retirement dinner with my staff, and we enjoyed it. And I've been in touch with a lot of them over the years since then. We get together. A bunch of us are trivia enthusiasts, and so we have a team of about eight or ten of us that very often participates in trivia events around the St. Louis area. Yeah. And we do pretty well. Yeah, we do pretty well. Archivists, you know, are full of a lot of general information, so yeah. Yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "That's fun! That's great! Yeah. We're coming up on the end of our interview here. Was there anything that we didn't cover that you would like to add or any memories that you have? You know, anything that was interesting or unusual or anything that you might want to add?" }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Well, thinking back, especially working in the Records Reconstruction Branch in those early years, in the early '80s, it was just the privilege of working with people who were a generation ahead of me, people that lived through and worked through and served in the services during the Second World War, in the Korean War. They were just really a remarkable group of people. I mean, I was in my early 30s, I guess, and they were in their 50s and 60s. And you just learned a tremendous amount from them. And they were just terrific folks. So that was a real privilege. Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "I think sometimes the people you work with really make a job." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Oh, yeah. I mean, they knew so much. I mean, it was direct knowledge for how the military worked in those years. And as I say, the men, a lot of them, were veterans. And the women worked very often for the Army and the Army Air Corps or the Navy during the Second World War and the postwar years, the Korean War. And I mean, they just knew how records were and the reasons and the purposes for the records being created, and they had a tremendous amount of direct knowledge and that's what made, to me, the Reconstruction Branch so incredible in those years. And hopefully the people there now are benefiting from that. Well, there’s our various operating procedures. It was all documented, what you were supposed to do, where you were supposed to go for record information in order to reconstruct the stuff lost in the fire. And those procedures and those reference materials are still there. And hopefully the people working there today are using them. But when I was there, there were people with direct personal knowledge. That's when those processes were put in place, and they knew a heck of a lot. Yeah, it was great." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah. So when you get them written down, you can pass them on and everyone will know the steps." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Right. Hopefully so. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Yeah, hopefully. Right." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "Exactly. I guess that's about all I can think of." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. So, well, hey, I want to thank you again for agreeing to participate in this oral history project. You've just had such an amazing career. You've gone through different branches and had so many different experiences. It's just been really interesting hearing about all of this. So thank you. And I'll be in touch with you soon. And I don't suppose you would have maybe a photograph that we could post along with your transcript when we get that online? You can think about it if you want." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "I will. I'll see if there's something. I'll see what I can come up with. I think they did something at the facility there at one point, and somebody said that there's a photograph that's still up there. So, I don't know, maybe I can figure out where that is. But, anyhow, the other thing I definitely will do is see if I can come up with contact information for Wendy Hollingsworth. I think she would be a tremendous person to be in touch with, because she was there. I mean, she actively participated in the recovery after the fire. She was working there on July 12, and she was there for the next 30 years or so. Wendy would be a wonderful resource to include in this. So I'll try to find out and follow up on that." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Okay. I really appreciate that because, yeah, she was not on our list yet." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "All right." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Well, thank you so much. And I hope you have a nice rest of your week." }, { "speaker": "Bill", "text": "All right. Okay. You, too. All right. Bye-bye." }, { "speaker": "Stephanie", "text": "Bye." } ]

[ { "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", "text": "Thank you for participating in the National Archives Oral History Project documenting the 1973 National Personnel Records Center Fire, its impact on the National Archives, and what it was like working at the NPRC. My name is Jessie Kratz, and I'm the Historian of the National Archives. Today is May 25, 2023, and I'm speaking with Eric Voelz. Thank you, Eric, for joining me today. And actually, can you start by giving me some of your background, where you're from, and how you ended up at the National Archives and the NPRC?" }, { "speaker": "Eric Voelz", "text": "Sure. I was born and raised in St. Louis, and I went to university at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, and majored in history. So it's kind of a natural tie-in. At some point after I graduated, I took the—and they still did this back then—I took the federal test for a government job. And that test, I guess they use that to send scores to different agencies that were hiring. The first job offer I got or interview offer I got was for an ammunition plant in Texarkana, Texas. Not moving to Texarkana, Texas. I'm sorry. So I did not apply. And the next one was for the Career Intern Development System training program at NPRC. And that was a two-year program during which you went through different training assignments with different organizations within the NPRC, the National Personnel Records Center, and learn about the different things that the organization did. The aim being that eventually you would become an archives specialist. It was called the Archives Specialist Training Program, and as an archive specialist, you would be able to be a supervisor of various different level units throughout the organization as they were anticipating a whole lot of retirements from our World War II veteran employees. So during this two-year program, you advanced from a GS-5 to a GS-7 to a GS-9, which was a special deal because usually you can only go one grade at a time. So it seemed like a really good thing. And as a history major, I was certainly interested in working with these records. So it was a perfect fit. So many of the initial assignments I had were where you went to a search section and saw how they pulled records, or you went to a correspondence section and you saw how they answered reference requests, or you went to our incoming mail operation and saw how they processed requests. And then later on, you had more advanced assignments, and those started fairly quickly and included filling in for supervisors that were on maternity leave or where there was a vacancy and they wanted to have somebody there while they filled that position. But it would also be a training opportunity for me, the trainee. So during that time period, I had several opportunities to work with the reconstruction operation, which is what we called trying to come back from the fire. I was not employed at the time of the fire. I started in March of 1977, and that was around three and a half years after the fire. So the fire was still very much on everyone's mind. No matter how well they had rehabbed the building, and it really was a mess after the fire, no matter how well they rehabbed it, you could still smell the fire at that time. Later on, that went away in areas where they kept the records that were recovered from the sixth floor, which was the floor where the fire occurred. You could smell a combination of the fire and whatever chemicals they sprayed on these to try and preserve them from mold, which in St. Louis in the summer, the humidity is high. It's a perfect place for mold to grow. Just like Washington, DC, would be. So that's kind of the background of me as a trainee." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Okay. So what were your impressions of the agency when you began your career?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Oh, it was a lot of people that had a lot of knowledge and for the most part worked extremely hard to make sure that we answered the veterans requests with the records that we had. We were the central location for someone to write if they needed documents for the Veterans Administration, if they needed documents for a home loan, medical treatment, just various things. If they wanted to be buried at a cemetery, a national cemetery, they'd need to have a document. And it was sad because, in some ways, these veterans often got out of the service, and I don't know, they didn't maybe keep as good a track of their separation documents and other important things as they should. But, other than the burned records, we were able to replace those documents. And luckily, at that time, we were often working with the veterans themselves, except in the case of them being deceased and needing to be buried at a government cemetery. So they had intimate knowledge of what they did, where they were, the units they belonged to, and something as minor as their military service number. Because many of these things were very important. There were millions of different records in our holdings, and you can imagine, say for World War II, the Army had 8 or 10 million soldiers. How many similar or exactly the same names would occur? And you would need to have more information in order to determine which one of those records was the gentleman you were looking for." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Okay. Well, you worked in several different branches over your career, and I was hoping you could go through them and explain to us what the different branches were responsible for." }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Sure. First off, let me tell you how things are arranged at NPRC. We'll start with the military building. And there was also a civilian building. It's somewhat related to the fire experience, and I'll get into that. But at the military building, there was the headquarters with the director, and then each of the buildings had what was called an assistant director that was solely responsible for that building. Under them, there was a—they called it the management technical staff. And they did studies, wrote reference memos, instructions on how to handle different types of reference requests, and just handled all the day-to-day running of the organization. And they did that for both the buildings. And then at the military building—and it is not like that now—but at the military building, things were divided by branch of service. There was an Army Reference Branch that handled Army records, an Air Force Reference Branch that handled Air Force records after the Air Force became an independent branch of service. There was a Navy Reference Branch, which handled the records of the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Coast Guard—the various sea services. And then there was an Operations Branch that handled getting records in because we also stored different types of records and personnel records, medical records, and different things like that from hospitals. And this Operations Branch also took care of the incoming mail where they took their requests. There was a very old, what we call a computer registry system, and I'm talking with a mainframe and only certain people had access to it. This was long before PCs, and they would check that system based on what was in the request and see if there was a match for a record. Some of the older records were not in this registry system. There were old Navy and Marine Corps records that were either filed by name or the veteran's service number. And the records that were involved in the fire had been in name order. But after the fire, there was a big project to put them into this system. Now we're talking a mainframe that took up an entire room, but probably most people's PCs or laptops now have that amount of computing power or close to it. So the data that was entered into this registry was very sparse: name, service number, and then a two-letter code that indicated what branch of service or what type of record. And when I say type of record, it's because the Navy and Marine Corps separated their personnel files from their medical files, so there had to be a code for each one. And then they gave each record a unique registry number. And that was simply the order in which these records went into a box. So each of these groupings of records had started at \"1\" and they used a prefix \"A\" for Army, \"F\" for Air Force, and \"N\" for the various Navy ones. And then once we had the fire, they painstakingly went through these burned records and tried to separate them into this pile of, maybe singed records belongs to this guy and so on down the line. And then they entered those into the registry system because the records had been filed alphabetically. There were cases where a new record might contain documents from one or two people with the same name, which until somebody opened it to reference it, they may not realize, but it was a very rudimentary system because that's all the system could handle. So, this Reconstruction Branch was set up. They had people that had worked with these other records we had—because you have to understand that at one time all these records and the building belonged to the various services. And they made this joint DoD record center in St. Louis, a central location, and records from the different services came in and were handled and referenced by personnel from those different military branches, whether military or civilian. I think it started out more military. This was in the early 1950s and became more civilian as time went on. And in the 60s, early 60s, we took it over. At that time, I'm talking about the National Archives and Records Service under GSA because that's where we fell organizationally and took over these things. But each of the services had different what we called organizational records—things like pay vouchers, morning reports, medical treatment records. Some of it was paper. Some of it was microfilm on rolls. And it required a certain amount of knowledge to dig down and find what you were looking for. So that's kind of where we started after the fire." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "When you came and you were a trainee, did you get a particular assignment that you preferred or did they assign you at the end of your training?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Oh, they assigned me at the end of my training. They saw what was available. As a trainee, we had quarterly progress meetings. We had to prepare a report, which of course back then there were no PCs. You had to prepare it and then turn it over to someone to be typed because they wanted it typed. And then a review panel of four or five people from the organization—someone from our office and different people from different organizations, depending upon what you had worked on. You're in this review panel and you spent a couple of hours answering questions and explaining why you wrote what you did and that allowed you to progress. During my training period, the two assignments I had, and I wish I had a better list of what those were, but I do not. Because of the way this training program worked they weren't documented with a personnel action. And unfortunately, at some point in my past I decided I no longer needed these quarterly reports. So I got rid of those. But one of the first ones I did was filling in as a unit supervisor with probably 15 people working for me in the Reconstruction Branch for a woman that was on maternity leave. And they weren't going to reassign somebody. So they thought, well, this is a training opportunity. So this was probably sometime in 1977 or early 1978. I'm not sure. So I was not only learning my way around supervision—part of the training was to take supervision courses that the government offered—but also learning about the work that Reconstruction Branch did. At that time, it was very complicated to try and reconstruct somebody's service. Luckily, as I said before, many of our requesters were the veterans themselves and they had a lot of knowledge about what when they went in, when they got out, what units they were with. And so these different organizational records, we could go in to review or find different things for this person. They were looking to get awards, and of course, the first thing we did to see if something survived the fire. And there were times nothing survived the fire or what survived the fire was so damaged or illegible that it was not very useful. So there was a desire to try and figure out how to make these different records that were not by particular people, how to make them more accessible. So that leads to the next assignment that I know one of my colleagues has already mentioned, we call them GAO pay vouchers. They were copies of payroll pay vouchers that the Army created during the war years. And this was the set that had gone to the then-Government Accounting Office to be reviewed and I guess balanced against appropriations or to make sure the math was right. I'm not really sure what GAO did, but for some reason the building at Winnebago, our civilian reference building, had a huge stack area full of these things and finding those was very complicated, and you had to have a lot of information from the individual. Hopefully he remembered where he was when he was separated from the military, when he was actually discharged from the military because that's where his final pay voucher would be, which would have some detailed information. Not a lot of it, but it had dates—we needed entry dates, separation dates, character, units, and so that was a very convoluted process to search, which involved two different sets of cards in like a library card catalog file. One was by the place. And then you went through these cards and found out who the payment officer was for that place, and they had a listing of who it was by particular dates and then based on the date that the individual veteran gave you. You went and looked for another set of cards for that payroll officer and found out each month, apparently, they had one number that all the things they paid were filed under. And then you took that number and went to the stack area and found it. It was very crude. They were bundles of paper records between two pieces of heavy cardboard with that number on it and the date and the name of the, I guess it was the disbursing officer, not the payment officer. And you pulled all those bundles because there may have been half a dozen to a dozen different bundles, depending upon how big this place was and how many people and how many other things were paid that month. And then somebody went through untying these bundles that were tied up with kind of like clothesline. And you flip through looking for the voucher number and somehow you determine the ones that said \"final\" were ones where people were being discharged. And this was actually a project that one of the prior trainees to me came up with. Did all the research. Put together a standard operating procedure. Had pictures of the different documents. But these bundles would contain, of course, the final pay vouchers for people being discharged, but it would be everything else that this guy paid that month and year at the particular place. So if they bought coal, food, paid rent on a building, bought gas for a truck, and just paid the regular people that were working there. There was a voucher for all of that. So it was very time-consuming. And so this project that I was part of along with Mr. Charles Pellegrini. He was actually my supervisor in that. We put together a team of college students. It ended up being during the summer; we had a very good team of students, probably 15 to 20 to start with. I think some left because it wasn't what they wanted to do. This was for World War II, and that was the only era we were talking about. And it was a big era because the people that served in World War II were becoming older. They needed documents for things. They needed verification of their service. So it was a very busy time, and the system was so hard to use. It just was terrible. So we set up this project and started with the year 1945 and just went through and pulled each one, and this team went through all the bundles and found all the documents that said final. And this other trainee, her name was Deborah Haverman, had samples of what the documents looked like, Xeroxes in these SOPs. And they used that to determine just the ones to pull that would help us in reconstruction. Everything else was disposed of. These records had been disposable for some time, but after the fire, there was a freeze on any disposal of any records that might possibly have to do with military service. So these were not destroyed before that. They were not permanent records. So after all these things were pulled, we put them in folders. As a trainee, I was kind of like the unit supervisor. So I was in the back of the stack area—we had long tables set up and went through this conveyor belt with boxes and we filled folders with these documents. And many times these were a list—everybody from a particular unit or place that was separated and got their final payments from the military. And there were just list after list or page after page, I should say, of these documents that had basic information about the person, entrance date, separation date, where they separated. There were indications of overseas service based on a particular payment they received in addition to their final pay or as part of their final pay. And those in these folders were then sent to, as I said before, there's an Operations Branch with the civilian building. There was one also that did data entry into this large computer system, and they entered certain pieces of information off these documents, usually a service number, a name, and code. We knew all these were \"AR\" for Army, and that gave it a particular registry number. Actually, I believe the code for those was \"QM\" and the prefix was \"P\" for pay. I don't know who came up with that, but it worked fine. So after this project began, the people in our Reconstruction Branch would not only get hits on something we recovered from the fire, but they'd also get a hit on this pay voucher and then send a request to have that pulled. So that was kind of the model for what we did from then on. If there was a collection of records that we could put into a registry, it made it so much easier. As primitive as these registry systems were, it made it so much easier to find the things that pertain to a particular soldier. Does that make sense?" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "It does make sense. And I have more questions, actually. So how much coordination was there between the military building on Page [Boulevard] and the Winnebago [Street] building for the civilian records with regard to reconstructing these veterans records, in addition to these pay vouchers?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Well, there was a lot because some of these organizational records over time had been stored at that building just because of space issues at the building that had the fire—military building at 9700 Page Boulevard. So because they all work under one director, they really were all part of the same organization. And in fact after the fire the building at 9700 Page was not habitable for people doing requests, so they moved a lot of people down to the civilian building. There was one large stack—and this was no longer like that when I started because by then they had rehabbed the old building, the building that had the fire. But there were people, and they had set up offices, and they were doing their requests out of there. So they were very familiar with the military part of it. The other thing is, and I think it's a question on the form, it's a Standard Form 180, which was—and I don't know if that's still the form—but at the time, Form 180 was a request for military records. They asked if you were a federal employee. Well, the main thing they stored at the civilian building was civilian personnel records that were part of OPM, Office of Personnel Management or the prior agency. And so if we had information that. This person was in the military. They'd also look for a civilian personnel record. Some of them were in a registry, but ones older than about mid-to-early 60s were filed by the agency in usually name order. And people in the Reconstruction Branch learned to request those records and look for documents. They usually look for a person's application for employment because, as most people working for the U.S. Government are aware, being a veteran gives you an assist in how you're rated to be hired. I can't think of the term right now, but if you were wounded, you get so many points. And if you were just a veteran, you get half that. It's like five points or ten points. And so it was very important that these former veterans applying for a job with a government agency would indicate that they had been a veteran. I think it also maybe if you got a bad discharge, a dishonorable discharge, you wouldn't be hired by the federal government. So there was nothing that was going to help us with those people. So they worked very closely together. There were constant requests going from the military building to the civilian building, looking for documentation. And what would happen is the people at the civilian building would search for the individual's civilian personnel record and go through, and they'd pull it and make copies of these application forms and especially the page that had the information about former military service. So all these things kind of then came into the Reconstruction Branch. But it took several years—and a lot of this was done before I started—several years of people that were familiar with all these records collections and blocks of records to come up with a game plan on how we are going to get this information. When this record is burned, and you still see this from time to time on the news, somebody couldn't get this because their record burned in the fire in St. Louis. It's not as much a problem for the former veteran because unfortunately, many of those are deceased. But it becomes a problem for people trying to do genealogy and family history. Because after the veterans are no longer with us, unless they find some things in their belongings they don't have the information that the veteran could give us about where they served, when they went in, when they got out, where they got out. So they have to pretty much go in just by name and hopefully they have a service number, which they don't always, and try to find a record on this individual. So in the decades since the fire, all the things that could be put into this computerized system help the people doing reference requests, pull a proper record, and answer to the best of their abilities. The Reconstruction Branch also deals with the Veterans Administration because if somewhere between their service in World War II—and this is just an example because we've dealt with burnt records up through about 1960—but if at some point between the veteran's separation from the military and when the fire occurred if they had already filed for the VA, which many of them had—they wanted a home loan or educational benefits or medical treatment or something for something that possibly was service related—they would have provided a lot of documents to the VA. So we then contacted the VA to check their, I believe they called them claim files or claim folders, and look for documents for this person. So in a way, it could often end up being kind of a circle. We'd get a request, we'd go to the VA and get documents, we'd provide them to the veteran of the family, and they may take those back to the VA. But in many cases they'd already checked with the VA, and the VA said, “we don't have anything.” So it was incumbent upon us to do our best to try and get the basic information that you needed to prove you're a veteran. And that was the name, personal identifier—it started as a service number, later on, it was all switched over to the Social Security Number—branch of service, entrance date, separation date, and what was called character of service. Honorable, under honorable conditions, general, dishonorable—there were different levels of separations from the military and most of them would allow people to get benefits. The dishonorable discharge level, I don't believe there's any benefits for the veteran that had that sort of discharge, and that's usually for a serious issue that someone is discharged that way and they're not then entitled to veterans benefits. Does that make sense?" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "It does make sense. And this is out of order but I'm curious about this. I know that you worked through, I guess, 2014 is that when you retired?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "2014. Yes." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I know that some veterans were discharged dishonorably for reasons that later were decided were inaccurate or unfair. I'm thinking, you know, somebody who might have been discharged for being gay. Did you notice a change? And did people come back later and try to get their discharge changed? Have you experienced any of that? Can you talk a little bit about that?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Yes, we weren't really the agent of change for that. But once it was determined, and this mostly was in the 1950s and 1960s, individuals could be separated and usually didn't get a good discharge for being gay. So then they had that hanging over their head. They couldn't get federal employment. It often hurt them getting regular employment. So at some point, and I'm not really familiar with the time threshold of this, but at some point the laws were changed, and they were allowed to request an upgrade to their discharge, but those were not done by us. But many times the veterans would contact us to get documents because you can imagine if you had this bad discharge you weren't too interested in keeping the documents from when they pretty well kicked you out of the military. So they'd get documents from us, and then they would go to the review boards of the various military branches and they would then review them. And in many cases their separations were upgraded. And, you know, unfortunately, so many things dealing with the government, we live and learn in a world that has changed, and I think we're a better place for it. But it's not always easy." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Right. Sorry about that diversion. Because you worked in various different branches, could you talk about after you were done with your training program, some of the more memorable assignments that you had, especially ones that may have dealt with the military records that were affected by the fire?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Sure. Actually, my first assignment was in the Navy Reference Branch. As I said, each branch of service had its own reference branch and I worked as a chief of a correspondence section. And most of the time people only realize that Army and some Air Force records were damaged or destroyed in the fire. But there actually were some World War II Navy records that were damaged because they were stored on the floor below where the fire occurred. And there—and I don't know if it was one end of the building or what it was—there was a particular portion of the building that a lot of water leaked down into the stack areas below the fire because they fought that fire for, I want to say it was at least four days before they got it under control, and they pumped a lot of water into that sixth floor of the 9700 Page building, and the water ended up having to go somewhere. Well, the floor below, of course, you've got records on shelves, but I have been told or had been told that in some of these stack areas, the water was maybe a foot deep. Well, that would pretty well stoke the bottom box on the shelves. And these were paper records stored in cardboard boxes. So there were occasionally Navy records that were involved in being in what we call the \"B files,\" elegant name for \"burned.\" But that was part of the registry system. Even with these Navy ones, if you came up with a negative search manually by name, you checked the registry system, you said, \"oh, look, it's a B file.\" And those records were generally stored in alphabetical order, so it was kind of an alphabetical run, but it was only, you know, the bottom shelf out of ten, say, on a shelving unit. So it skips names quite a bit. But that was, again, another advantage of having this computerized system, even though it was very basic compared to what we could do today. Very rudimentary. It allowed a way to find that there was a record. So we worked with all those records, answering requests, and in that branch you had to not only know about Navy records, but Marine Corps records and Coast Guard records. So that was my first experience actually supervising anybody who was in a permanent position. I had done that in training positions, but it was kind of different. When you're a trainee, you know you're not going to do that for more than a month or two at a time; you're filling-in. But this was interesting. So then from there my next few positions are all at the civilian building at 111 Winnebago. And as many people do in the federal government, you see an opportunity to maybe be promoted and you apply for a job. Or they say, \"Gee, we think you should work here, so why don't you apply for this?\" Even if it wasn't a promotion. So those positions were not as involved in anything fire related. Even the one position where I was a supervisor archivist in what we called our Appraisal and Disposition section, which was similar to the position I was in several years earlier. But it was considered the Accession and Disposal system office. So things changed a little bit in our recognition of these records. But that was that last position in '86 to '87, where I was a supervisory archivist; where I was really able to be an archivist and use a little bit more of my history background." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Well, that's great. So I was wondering if you could talk about these branches, but then in around 2000, 2001, I think, there was a reorganization and they switched away from branches to using cores. Could you explain the cores and how they operate?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Sure. They operate very well, kind of similarly to the way things were with the branches. But the idea with this reorganization was to streamline the handling of requests so you didn't have to then divide them by the naval services, the Army, the Air Force. There was a particular core that was more involved in the reconstruction of records. So that was very specialized knowledge of where to go for other things and reconstruct the records. But the routine branches, the service branches—the Army, the Air Force, the Navy—those were then made cores. And I don't know where they came up with the name core, but the core was to learn all the services and how to work with all the records. They did not want people to specialize in just what was in a Navy record or what was in a Marine Corps record or Air Force record. They wanted them to have a cross service knowledge. And then the searching operation was put into one search branch, which would search for all the records of any type that anybody needed to respond to a request from the public. So the idea was to streamline it and to make things better at the same time, because computers had advanced so much, we had much better computer systems and we could track the requests, we could enter the request into the system. Other than preliminarily checking the registry system to see if we had anything, it was a totally paper-based system and oh my God, we used a system of colored tags with letters and numbers on them to tell us when the request was received, and those paper requests were just kind of bunched together and in the old days were sent to the particular reference branch that would handle it. Well, along with this change of course they came up with a new computer system and they entered each request into the computer system. And the requests were then printed out at some point because the people from the search branch had to find a record and then it had to go to a core and be assigned. But it was all done with this much more detailed computer system. Because 30–40 years between developing these old registry systems and 2000, computer technology had advanced so much that it became much easier. We still had people that did data entry in our incoming mail operation. They reviewed each request, but besides just checking the register system, they actually put it into a tracking system, and the managers at the upper levels could check in there and see what is our oldest request, or how many requests we have. Whereas before it was all a manual count of paper on shelves. So it changed quite a bit. I never worked in one of the cores, but as an archivist from 1991 until the time I retired, I was in the archival line of work. We became subject matter experts for the different cores and for complicated or unusual requests. Things that needed somebody to do some research beyond what the staff in the cores could do. If that makes sense." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "It does. And I was going to ask a little bit about your involvement or can you talk about the discussions that went on in the 90s and then I guess eventually in the 2000s where these records that belong to the Department of Defense were deemed permanent and transferred to the legal custody of the National Archives." }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "I was involved. Actually the person—and I know you mentioned talking to him—the person who was my supervisor much of the time I was an archivist, William Seibert. He was very involved in that process. But this is kind of the sad thing about the military personnel records—they were not deemed permanent. They were considered temporary records. And I want to say a 75-year disposal date. Well, that's—I don't want to say crazy, but that's just not right because interest in military service does not end. You have veterans' families and historians that would like to do research, and to just destroy those records? I want to say I think a similar thing was going on in the civilian side. Those civilian personnel records. But I wasn't really involved in any of that. But making these records permanent, which you have to consider the immense cost that the government is then going to incur, because then instead of storing these records for up to 75 years you're going to store them in perpetuity. And I know at the National Archives in the DC area, they have records from the Civil War, and it's a cost because along with the fact that you're going to keep them longer, you have to store them in better conditions. I want to say climate control; I will say air conditioning because St. Louis can be a hot, humid place. I know Washington can be a hot, humid place. You don't have these in buildings with open windows and no air conditioning or no humidity and temperature control. So again, an immense cost to do that. And I think it took a lot of wrangling between the National Archives and the services, and I'm assuming Congress and everyone else to do this and come up with the funds to pay for it. So it took many years. And the beauty of one of the archivists being involved in this project was we could talk about the famous records we had, you know, Charles Lindbergh or other people that were in the news. Unfortunately, many of those were destroyed in our fire. But at one point they tried to counter-propose that, well, we just go through and pull out the famous people and destroy everybody else. But, you know, that wasn't going to go with the historical and genealogical communities. I believe they got very involved in pushing for making these records permanent. So it was a complicated thing, but it had consequences for us because once these records were then made permanent, we couldn't stay in the buildings we were in because they were not, how would you put it? They were not ready to be storage areas for permanent records. They just could not be retrofitted with the machinery, technology, what have you, to control the temperature and humidity. So that's when we started, I guess, working to get a new building. And there was pushback saying, “well, can't you just scan all this and then get rid of the paper?” Well, they did a study. I was not involved in it, but I'm aware of it and what it would take to scan some of these records. They're old, they're folded, they're stapled. Sometimes they're glued together. There's all these different systems of record keeping that the services used. The cost of preparing these and scanning these—and then what people don't think about is once you scan it, it becomes a permanent system. So you have to migrate that system from computer system to computer system so that it continues to exist. Because if the record is permanent, the scanned images need to be permanent. So they determined this was way more expensive than getting us a new building. I think the only concession to cost was that we don't own the building, we lease it. But in a way that means somebody else has to take care of mechanical issues with the building and we no longer have to do that. It's kind of a double-edged sword because you don't own the building. But we pretty well directed exactly how it was to be built and what was to be in it. So. That's how we ended up at One Archives Drive in a brand-new building, well brand new as of late 2000s—I think we actually moved in in 2011, but it's a far cry from where we were in the other two buildings. The biggest difference is where we store the records that were involved in the fire that had been water damaged or singed, fire damaged, or water damaged. They used to be in a stack area at the building on 9700 Page that did have air conditioning. It was kind of okay. But then at some point GSA, the organization that maintains those buildings, ran a huge steam line through that stack area to get to a new building they built next door for the Army Reserve. Well, in the winter, if you were near that steam main and it wasn’t insulated, you couldn't hardly touch it. It was so hot. So it wasn't good for those records. So they're now in a stack area that I want to say is kept at a very comfortable, well, comfortable if you'd like to be in cool temperature, probably in the 60s with the humidity controlled even in the summer. I saw searchers go in there wearing a fleece jacket or something because it was chilly. But that's what you need to do to preserve these records that have been water and fire damaged. So, is that what you were getting with the change?" }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yes. Yes, for sure. You mentioned the new building. So were you involved and what did moving to this new building entail?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Oh, my. It was a lot because we were moving over a million boxes of records, and I'm talking cubic foot cartons. And at the same time, because there were records that were not deemed permanent, we then came up with another facility—not co-located with the building on One Archives Way—across the Mississippi River in Illinois, in a town called Valmeyer. They created a record center in a former underground quarry for the non-permanent records. And they opened up and they had people working there. And I've been there. It's very nice. There are certain places where the walls look like rock, but they've fitted it out. They've got ventilation systems, and sometimes it's just to keep the air moving because this underground quarry maintains a fairly constant temperature somewhere in the 60s. And so we weren't just sending everything to one place; we were going through and deciding which went which way. And as an archivist, there were projects at the civilian building to go through collections and determine exactly what was there and check it against the various systems that control those non-personnel type records and determine that at that building on Winnebago, there were all these civilian personnel records, which were also made permanent at some point, although I'm not as involved in the details of that. And they were moved to the building on Archives Drive in North St. Louis County. And then other things were moved to the underground facility in Illinois. And the same thing occurred at the building in 9700 Page—there were records moved to the archives facility on Archives Drive and other things moved to the underground facility in Illinois. So the archivists were involved in that at the time, at the military building, we had a security vault. Both buildings actually had a security vault. So those of us that had security clearances were involved in going through different things. I believe the new building is no longer going to have a security vault here in St. Louis. So anything that was actually classified was sent to the DC area. And I don't remember the particulars—there were things that were disposable that had to be disposed of as you would handle classified records. And then the vaults at each of the buildings was where we kept what we used to call our VIP collection of famous people. And it was the job of the archivist to go through our registry system. You'd see things in the news, you'd read history books, you'd find out that X movie star had been in the Army, and their movie star name was the name they served under. So in order to protect these records, you didn't want them out in the open stacks where somebody could go, \"Oh, I wonder if this is the guy that was in whatever movie.\" So we pulled those and put them into the security vault because it was just an easy way to do it. We didn't really have any other locations. But it required then if somebody was going to need a record of one of these people to answer a request, they had to work with the people who had clearances, and that was several of us archivists that we would then go to the vault, find the record, deliver it to the branch or, later on, the cores. And they would answer. They would respond to the request. We usually dealt with supervisors and said, \"Okay, now you've got this vault record. Let me know when you're finished with it. We'll come pick it up.” And then we'd put it back in the vault. So that took a certain amount of work. But actually getting rid of the classified records, and we're talking classified records from prior to the mid-60s. Nothing current. These were things that the military services, when they ran the joint records center in St. Louis, that they had or at our civilian building. There were a couple of, well, mainly one federal agency that created classified documents. They were what was called the Defense Mapping Agency. It's now a different name—the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which still has a location here in St. Louis. But we had records from them. And so those had to go somewhere else. I believe the agency actually took them back for storage. And so that was also a part of what the archivist did with closing out the old buildings and moving to the new buildings. I hope that hasn't gone too astray, but that was all part of the process." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "It is not. All the information you're providing is helpful. It doesn't have to be all fire related. I do know we're over an hour. Do you have plans, or could you stick around just for a little longer?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "I can stick around as long as you would like. I don't really have any firm plans today. I made sure that once you set this up that I didn't do that." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Okay, good. Well, these interviews were prompted by the fire, so I was going to ask a couple more fire questions, but then I also wanted to move on to maybe a couple of the other things that you worked on after. Did you have anything in particular you wanted to share about the fire that you think that people should know? I know you weren't there, but you definitely worked with the people who worked there during the fire. And then you were there very early—in the 70s." }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Well, the thing I guess that amazed me the most is after the investigation into the cause of the fire, and it occurred on the night shift, as I understand it, because they used to work an evening shift and it occurred in the stack area on the sixth floor. There was reason to believe the cause involved something with smoking. Whether it was smoking in a stack area, which was not really allowed or some other reason, but for the immediate period when the building was re-inhabited after they had rehabbed it, torn off—this was terrible. They had bulldozed a whole floor off the building, cleaned that up, and turned what was the sixth floor into the roof of the new building. They had to redo piping or drainage and what have you. It was a mess. But all that was done before I started. But also what happened before I started is they allowed smoking in the building again. This was the 70s so it was just the beginning of the anti-smoking crusade in this country. But the employees, and I guess the employee unions, I don't really know the particulars. They went from no smoking in the building, and then you had to go to a smoking area, which was kind of in an open lobby on each floor near the escalators and freight elevators. And actually you were not supposed to bring lighters or matches into the building. They had some sort of electric lighters they had installed in these areas. By the time I started, people were allowed to smoke, and those electric lighters had been dismantled and removed. But it always amazed me that you have all this paper and you're going to allow people to smoke around it after you had this fire. It just seemed a real paradox or contradiction, but part of it had to do with the fact that these weren't considered permanent, so they didn't have the elevated storage conditions required of permanent records. So that was the thing that really got me. So I don't know. The sad thing is a couple years before I started this job my mom died of lung cancer from smoking. So I think, oh, my God, really? How important is it? But I understand it's a physiological need. People can't necessarily quit once they've started. And for that generation, smoking wasn't seen as a danger. It wasn't until later. So that was just really something that I found crazy." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "When you were there in the 70s, what was the culture like in the facility?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Oh, well I think you had a whole lot of people that worked very hard and were very good at what they did. But unfortunately, it seemed like some of the younger people, I don't know, weren't as interested. I don't know if it was a countercultural thing or what it was but they still performed their work. They just maybe weren't always easy to deal with. So I don't know. As a trainee, my first couple of years there, I had a few people that were like, \"Oh, you're a big shot cause you're a college kid, right?\" I went, \"I just got this job. I’ve got to learn how to do this.\" But those were very few and far between. For the most part, I think people that work there saw the job as important and we were helping people. Whether it was the veteran or their relatives or somebody. So I think it was a pretty good culture." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "This may be a hard one, but what do you think the biggest impact of the fire was on the National Archives and NPRC?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Oh, I think probably the biggest impact in my mind, and I've never had anybody tell me this officially, was that it was really one of the reasons that making these personnel records permanent actually was able to occur, because I think the decision to have better storage conditions was very important and that fire was always there as a warning. The building, this is just weird, I believe there were sections of the building that did not have sprinklers until after the fire. Because, and I'd been told that apparently the disasters in record storage facilities prior to 1973 had involved floods and water, so they were very leery about sprinkler systems. Well, let's say that changed and the building was retrofitted with sprinkler systems, which was again part of the rehab of the facility. So now I don't think you'd have any records facility that didn't have sophisticated fire prevention methods, sprinkler systems, even the new building. We have to divide it up into a particular size bay that cannot contain more than a certain number of cubic feet of records. And again, we're, for the most part, almost entirely dealing with paper records, because if there were a fire and automatic doors closed, then hopefully you can keep that fire in just one bay. And not that it wouldn't be disastrous, but between the various fire protection systems, you hope that it wouldn't turn into something like the fire in 1973." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Hope not. No. So then you left the National Archives for a little bit, and then you came back and worked in the Office of Regional Records Service. Can you talk about your last, you know, I guess the work you did when you came back and then for the remainder of your career?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Well, I had left. I was actually looking for a promotion and there were some openings with a particular Department of Defense office in St. Louis, and I did get a promotion, but then they rearranged things and decided I was going to have to move to Chicago and for the same pay grade. And I decided that was not good. And simultaneously with that, because I kept in touch with several people that I had worked with at the National Personnel Records Center, and I was told there was an opening. So I applied. And so the remainder of my career from 1991 on to my retirement I was as an archivist or, for the final not quite three years, I was as a supervisory archivist because it was all part of the reorganization of how we did things in the archival branch. But yeah, there were organizational changes. The archivists at 9700 Page had been in what was called the Military Operations Branch, which lumped, as I said, maintenance and mail, and computer data entry, and the archivists together. And then as things changed we went to the cores, and then the archival staff was moved into the Office of Regional Records Services, and my position was in what was called Research Services, which involved responding to requests from individuals and organizations. And also requests that were conveyed to me by senior management in the cores or the record center itself that they had. And it would often involve dealing with a high-profile thing that came from Congress or the news media or whatever. They wanted to make sure that we would find every record that could pertain to a particular topic, burned or not. They didn't always involve burned records, but to me it was very interesting that there was another side of the archival program that dealt with pulling records of the records collections that we had administered. So there was a little of everything." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Was there any particular aspect of your job that you enjoyed the most?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "I'd have to say I really enjoyed working with—and many of my requests would come to me in a phone call or start as a phone call. And we had veterans organizations, and we had authors writing different historical books that would come looking for things to provide background information for whatever they were doing. And I enjoyed these phone calls. I dealt with many military people. We dealt with the—it's changed its name several times, the Defense Prisoner of War Missing in Action Office. They were doing a lot of work with Korea, Korean War deaths and missing individuals. And we provided assistance in looking at these unit records that they could use to find things that happened during the Korean War or World War II. And then that research that we did was then translated into providing information to a team that may actually go to Korea and work with the Korean government to go to a battlefield and exhume remains or what have you. I know we did similar things with Vietnam. We provided records to verify something that maybe they found in an aircraft or helicopter crash site. So those were some of the most interesting." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Over your entire career, do you have any memorable experiences that you want to share?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Well, how would I put it? We were involved in oh, it seemed like this one election where it was Bush and other people—we were verifying their military records. And probably the most humorous one was when Ross Perot was running for President and he had been in the Navy, and we had records and supposedly there were accusations of things being leaked and, you know, we had to verify that we pulled the records and then we immediately sent them to the branch of service, I think. And if anything happened after that, we can't control it. But these high-profile things, they kind of stick with you. So, like John Kerry and dealing with the boats and Vietnam and different things. It was just very interesting to work on something and do all this digging and then realize that, well, this ended up in the news." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So that's very cool. Yeah. I always love how Perot lent us his Magna Carta and we had it on display for a couple decades." }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "I think the most humorous thing is at one point when he was upset about the supposed leaks, he personally called our director. And at the time, our director was named David Petree. And he also, like Perot, was from Texas, had a very similar twangy accent. So we often wondered what that phone conversation sounded like. Because, I don't know, it just tickled us to think that they'd be talking to each other and both have the same Texas ]accent and probably thinking, \"Are you making fun of me?\" I don't know. That seems silly, but it was a thing that stuck out." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah. That's so funny. Wish I could hear that conversation too." }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "We did, too, because, you know, the director sat in his office with the door closed and had a phone call with Mr. Perot. But they have very similar to me, very similar kind of twangy Texas accents." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I just have a couple more questions. So you worked here for a significant amount of time and under several Archivists. Did you notice changes in how the NPRC was run or your daily work when we had a new Archivist come on board?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "To me, the biggest change was when the National Archives became independent. Because at that point it seemed like we were more closely aligned with the Archivist and what went on in DC, it sounds weird. When GSA was involved, the General Services Administration, they seemed like—especially because we were in a GSA run building and we had those people there—it just didn't seem like we spent as much time being directly connected to the Archivist. So I guess the biggest change was maybe under Dr. Warner, because I believe he was the Archivist when the National Archives became independent. And if I'm wrong, I apologize. I don't have any of those names or dates in front of me, but that's when I noticed a change. And then the next big change in especially dealing with the Archivist and all the archival staff in the Washington area is when these records are made permanent. In the 90s because, I don't know how to put this, but it was almost as if what we did at the National Personnel Records Center, military and civilian, didn't fit in with what the Archives did in Washington. So we were, I won't say a mystery, but it always took a little explaining when they'd go, \"Well, why don't you do this?\" And we'd go, \"Well, because whatever.\" And it always took a little, I guess, explanation, but I'd have to say at my level, I never worked directly—I do remember when David Ferriero came to visit, but he had been in the Navy. And I believe he actually visited us in the vault because by the time he visited, we had already pulled his record and had it stored in the vault. So it was protected. So he came and visited us and wanted to look at the record and we chatted about, I think he was a corpsman. Something to do with medical, I think. But that to me was kind of a highlight because most of the time if you saw one of the Archivists, you know, they came to St. Louis, you had an all-hands meeting. He was up on the podium and being introduced by the director and made a speech or gave a statement and that was about it. But Dr. Ferriero, I think he was a Dr., well, David Ferriero, the Archivist, he actually came to visit and because of his veteran status, you know, wanted to see his record. Kind of a natural thing." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yeah, you guys scanned it because I've seen it. I've seen parts of it." }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Oh, I guess we did. Or we made copies or whatever. I don't remember the details. I just remember, you know, we didn't just pull it and bring it to him. He wanted to come and see it. So he came and we met him in our vault. We were there. He came in. We called it this VIP file because they were records that we just wanted to make sure something untoward didn't happen to. And it could have just been something innocent that it got misfiled when it was being put back. So that was kind of I thought that was kind of a very interesting thing. So. And you have a new Archivist now. That's the first permanent female Archivist." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Yes. And I believe she is going to NPRC soon, next week." }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Oh, boy. Okay." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "I think there's a congressional open house happening. So I think she's visiting for that. So if you're around, she'll be there." }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Yeah, I probably will not. I mean, I may. It may be on the news. I don't know. I will say I said first _permanent_ Archivist because I know Debra Wall was Acting Archivist, and I had a few occasions when I was employed to deal with her. And I always found her really easy to deal with; a sharp person. So I couldn't think of a better person to handle some of that stuff in the interim. And I know filling these positions that have to be approved by the Senate and everything, they're just not easy." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "It's an understatement." }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Yeah. Yeah, that is definitely an understatement. I haven't really kept up with all the particulars, but I just know it's never easy and it seems like those things have gotten harder." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "So is there anything else you'd like to add to the interview? Do you have any additional anecdotes?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Well, I actually have one that is kind of weird. I told you I was born and raised in St. Louis, and my dad was very active in the Marine Corps Reserve. So I had been a Cub Scout, but I really didn't want to be a Boy Scout. I don't know why. I think most of my friends weren't doing it. Well, he came to me and said, well, they have this Marine Corps League program, like a local Marine Corps veterans group. He said they have this group called the Young Marines. You could do that. So in 1967, I did that. And we had goofy-looking, little uniforms with a beret, but where we met every Saturday for spring and summer of 1967 when I was 13 was the National Personnel Records Center on 9700 Page." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "No way." }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "Kind of weird. And of the people that I still regularly see and we have a monthly group of retirees that get together, I think I was actually at the building before any of them, even Mrs. Bruno that I know you're going to talk to, because 1967, it was still a full six floors. And we actually met on Saturdays. And apparently Saturday work must have been common because that building was open, and we just met there and marched around and learned different things. But it's just a weird, sideline to the fact that I was there before the fire, but at the time I'm not even sure that I paid any attention to how many floors it was." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Well, then, when you were in the area during the fire, do you remember it happening?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "I remember it being on the news. I guess I was a sophomore in college and it was summer, so I was not at the university, which distance-wise was not far from the National Personnel Records Center there on Page. But I lived quite a bit further south and I actually had a job even further away that I worked at. So other than seeing things on the news, I think my dad said, \"that's where you did that young Marine stuff.\" I went, “Oh, yeah, look at that. That's terrible.” It didn't really hit me too much at the time. More so when I went for my job interview at this building. And when I was hired, it was like, oh, yeah, right out there in that parking lot or, you know, there were offices underneath the cafeteria that still were used by the Navy and Marine Corps. And that's where we had meetings or different things, training sessions. I don't know, considering it was the period of the Vietnam War, it was kind of a weird thing to do. But it's a nationwide, or it was a nationwide program. But that's kind of my strange anecdote." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "It's very interesting. Well, if there isn't anything else, we will wrap up the interview. But I did want to explain what we're going to do with these interviews. Did you have anything else you wanted to add before I stop recording?" }, { "speaker": "Eric", "text": "No, I think I've thrown out a lot because we've gone half an hour over our initial time. So I apologize if this is too wordy." }, { "speaker": "Jessie", "text": "Not at all." } ]