The end of written history.........sad
DAB
June 4, 2003
War Stories
The End Of History
How e-mail is wrecking our national archive.
By Fred Kaplan
When tomorrow's historians go to write the chronicles of decision-making
that led to Gulf War II, they
may be startled to find there's not much history to be written. The same
is true of Clinton's war over
Kosovo, Bush Sr.'s Desert Storm, and a host of other major episodes of
U.S. national security policy.
Many of the kinds of documents that historians of prior wars, and of the
Cold War, have taken for
granted-memoranda, minutes, and the routine back-and-forth among
assistant secretaries of state
and defense or among colonels and generals in the Joint Chiefs of
Staff-simply no longer exist.
The problem is not some deliberate plot to conceal or destroy evidence.
The problem-and it may
seem churlish to say so in an online publication-is the advent of
e-mail.
In the old days, before the mid-to-late 1980s, Cabinet officials and
their assistants and deputy
assistants wrote memos on paper, then handed them to a secretary in a
typing pool. The secretary
would type it on a sheet of paper backed by two or three carbon sheets,
then file the carbons.
Periodically, someone from the national archive would stop by with a
cart and haul away the carbons
for posterity.
Nobody does this today. There are no typing pools to speak of. There are
few written memos.
Eduard Mark, a Cold War historian who has worked for 15 years in the
U.S. Air Force historian's office,
has launched a one-man crusade to highlight, and repair, this situation.
He remembers an incident
from the early '90s, when he was researching the official Air Force
history of the Panama invasion,
which had taken place only a few years earlier. "I went to the Air Force
operations center," Mark says.
"They had a little Mac computer on which they'd saved all the briefings.
They were getting ready to
dump the computer. I stopped them just in time, and printed out all the
briefings. Those printouts I
made are the only copies in existence."
That was a decade ago, when computers were not yet pervasive in the
Pentagon and many offices still
printed important documents on paper. The situation now, Mark says, is
much worse.
Almost all Air Force documents today, for example, are presented as
PowerPoint briefings. They are
almost never printed and rarely stored. When they are saved, they are
often unaccompanied by any
text. As a result, in many cases, the briefings are incomprehensible.
The new, paperless world has encouraged a general carelessness in
official record-keeping. Mark says
that J5, the planning department of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, does not,
as a rule, save anything. When I
talked with Mark on the phone Tuesday, he said he had before him an
unclassified document, signed
by the Air Force chief of staff and the secretary of the Air Force,
ordering the creation of a senior
steering group on "transformation" (the new buzzword for making military
operations more agile and
more inter-service in nature). The document was not dated.
Mark has personal knowledge of the situation with the Air Force.
However, officials and historians in
other branches of the national-security bureaucracy say, on background,
that the pattern is pretty
much the same across the board.
Certain high-level documents are usually (but, even then, not always)
saved-memos that cross the
desks of the president, Cabinet secretaries, and military chiefs (the
Air Force and Army chiefs of staff,
and the chief of naval operations). But beneath that level, it's hit and
miss, more often miss.
An enterprising historian writing about World Wars I or II can draw on
the vast military records at the
National Archive, as well as letters from Churchill, Roosevelt, de
Gaulle, and others. (Who writes letters
anymore?) Those chronicling the Cold War or the Vietnam War can plumb
the presidential libraries of
Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Ford (less so of Nixon because
it's a privately funded
library), and find plenty of illuminating memos written to and from not
just Cabinet officers, such as
John Foster Dulles, Robert McNamara, and Dean Rusk, but the crucial
sub-Cabinet officials and
security advisers, such as Andrew Goodpaster, Walt Rostow, John
McNaughton, McGeorge Bundy, and
George Ball.
Twenty years from now, if someone went looking for similar memos by Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle,
Richard Armitage, and Elliott Abrams on, say, the Bush administration's
Middle East policies, not many
memos would be found because they don't exist. Officials today e-mail
their thoughts and proposals.
Perhaps some individuals have been fastidious about printing and saving
their e-mails, but there is no
system in place for automatically doing so.
Robert Caro, author of the revealingly massive and detailed biographies
of Lyndon Johnson and Robert
Moses, often advises aspiring historians, "Turn every page." What to do,
though, if there aren't any
pages to turn?
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate.
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