James E. David, Conducting Post-World War II National Security Research in Executive Branch Records: A Comprehensive Guide.Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. 266 pp. $84.95.
The vast expansion of the U.S. national security bureaucracy after World War II involved a host of agencies that generated enormous quantities of records in all sorts of formats (paper, electronic, film, photo, etc.). Some of this was routine paperwork of no lasting value, but a significant volume, much of which was classified secret or above, is of enduring historical importance. For researchers interested in Cold War-era U.S government diplomatic, military, and intelligence activities, the proliferation of records along with the problem of classification has created major problems. Simply identifying, much less locating and getting access to, relevant documentation can become a daunting task. To aid perplexed researchers, James David has produced [End Page 128] a reference work that is the first major effort to chart the universe of classified and declassified federal records pertaining to national security policy. A researcher at the Smithsonian Air and SpaceMuseum, David is well known for the prodigious energy he has devoted to comprehending the huge volume of security-classified historical documentation.
David begins his book with a succinct and helpful overview of federal records management and classification/declassification policies, including the executive orders that, to varying degrees, have provided for systematic review of classified historical documentation. As the author points out, the recent history of historical declassification has been a checkered one. Encouragingly, the relative openness heralded by Bill Clinton's Executive Order (EO) 12958 in April 1995 facilitated significant progress in expediting the review of the huge backlog of historical records. Yet EO 12958 soon foundered on the shoals of agency resistance. David passes over the political dynamics that enabled the Energy Department and congressional Republicans to constrain EO12958 in the name of nuclear secrecy, but he amply shows the results. Of course no one favors exposing nuclear weapons-design information to public scrutiny, but the resulting legislation (the so-called "Kyl Amendment") undercut historical declassification programs, thereby forcing agencies to return to unworkable page-by-page declassification reviews and enabling the Energy Department to reclassify archival documents that had been released in previous years. The executive order (13292) issued by George W. Bush in March 2003 to amend EO 12958 will undoubtedly exacerbate the worrisome situation described by David. The Bush administration's relatively small budgets for historical declassification and its emphasis even before September 2001 on greater secrecy suggest that the backlog of classified historical records will be an ever greater problem.
Most of David's book amounts to an inventory of two categories of federal historical records: those that are available at the National Archives (and to a lesser extent, smaller official archives and the Library of Congress); and those that remain under the control of the agencies that created them. Looking at individual Record Groups (RGs), David itemizes the Department of State, Department of Defense (DoD), and National Security Council records, among others, that are open at the National Archives or at presidential libraries and the records that remain closed, although still subject to declassification requests. His most extensive inventory, however, is of agency records that have not been deposited at the National Archives and are stored instead at the National Archives warehouse in Suitland, Maryland, known as the Washington National Records Center (WNRC). Except for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency, and National Reconnaissance Office, most federal agencies in the national security sphere, especially the Defense Department and the uniformed services, keep historically significant records in the huge storage space at Suitland.
David devotes well over 100 pages of his book to a description of military records that are still classified. A perusal of this inventory will dismay researchers because such a huge volume of valuable material on Cold War history remains inaccessible. This is [End Page 129] especially true of the records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense; the historical review of these records has stagnated for years. Secret and top-secret "SecDef" files for the years since the late 1950s, which are of great importance for research on any number of topics, including the Berlin crises, the Cuban missile crisis, wars in Southeast Asia, Middle East policy, military assistance policies, and nuclear strategy, are generally unavailable. The only way for researchers to get access to most of these records is by looking at the inventories stored at WNRC and framing mandatory review or Freedom of Information Act requests, which often take years to process. Military intelligence records are even more elusive, and details on the filing systems of the CIA and other intelligence agencies remain classified.
Unfortunately, and perhaps because of space limitations imposed by the pub- lisher, David does not provide the accession number assigned to each of the agency collections stored at the WNRC. This means that researchers who are interested in a particular set of documents—say, the Pacific Command OPLANS cited on p.149—will have to plow through the often voluminous files at the WNRC unaided (except for RG information) if they want to use the inventory to frame a declassification request to the Defense Department. For some record groups, such as RG 330 for DoD records, scholars might have to rummage through a number of file drawers at the WNRC to locate the description of a specific accession. Another gap in David's inventory is the records of congressional committees stored at the NationalArchivesCenter for Legislative Archives. For example, the files of the Joint Committee onAtomic Energy, though still mainly closed, are highly relevant to research on U.S. nuclear history.
Even with this book's limitations, David has performed an inestimable task in producing it. With this guide, researchers will at least know which record groups and collections at the National Archives and the WNRC might hold material related to their research interests. Although the book may be too expensive for individual buyers, it is an essential reference work for university and large public libraries.
William Burr
National Security Archive, GeorgeWashingtonUniversity