Uncovering the Final Secrets of the Bush Administration

[Joanne98]

Treat Cheney's offices like a crime scene, create a 9/12 Commission, and declassify the Bush papers -- the public deserves to know.

In March 2001, U.S. Archivist John W. Carlin received a letter from Alberto Gonzales, then counsel to the newly inaugurated president George W. Bush. It concerned an important deadline that was looming -- one that Bush owed to Richard Nixon.

In 1974, Congress ordered a lockdown on all records kept by the Nixon White House, afraid that the outgoing president would try to wipe out the paper trail of his disastrous second term and chastened by the recent destruction of decades' worth of FBI files by the late director J. Edgar Hoover's loyal secretary. That order was expanded four years later into a law requiring that all presidents' papers -- everything from briefings to personal notes and everyday communications between the president, vice president, and their staffers -- be handed over to the National Archives twelve years after their terms ended for eventual public release. Ronald Reagan was the first chief executive to whom the Presidential Records Act applied, and his papers were due to be turned over to Carlin at the beginning of Bush's term.

Gonzales wanted Carlin to delay the release until June. His letter didn't say why, but Carlin agreed. Then in June, Carlin got another memo from Gonzales -- Bush's attorney now wanted until the end of August. Carlin agreed again. The extensions continued until November, when Bush issued an executive order: effective immediately, the release of presidential records would require the approval of both the sitting president and the president whose records were in question, rather than just the former. It was what open-government advocates would later describe as a two-key system: under Bush's rule, Nixon could have buried the Watergate tapes without explaining himself to anyone.

Bush's executive order had little to do with any concerns of Reagan himself, whose estate has since shared his papers enthusiastically. Some administration critics theorized at the time that Bush was trying to shield from scrutiny his father's vice presidential records, which were among the Reagan White House documents -- but ultimately it wasn't really about George H. W. Bush, either. It was about the new president and vice president, and the kind of government they intended to run. Bill Clinton's White House had been relatively obliging in matters of secrecy, handing over millions of pages of documents -- down to the White House Christmas card list -- when Congress demanded them. Things would be different under Bush. "I think they thought Clinton was too open, had caved in to Congress too much," Carlin says. "It was a different philosophy."

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