On Oct. 9 the Madison Council met in the Library's Pickford Theater, where four panelists discussed how they had used the Library's manuscript collections for their own projects and why a person should consider depositing manuscript collections at the Library. Panelists Alan Brinkley, Sylvia Morris, David Garrow and Alexander Haig joined moderator Dr. Billington.
Dr. Billington: [Each of our panelists has] been given general questions to answer: Why is documentary research necessary? And why should distinguished people give collections of their personal papers to libraries and archives so that scholars can examine them?
What did you find that was new and unexpected in the collections you used here at the Library? Were there surprising gaps and omissions in these collections that the Library should attempt to fill? How did your manuscript research change your view of the subject? And, What are the benefits of digitizing and making available on the Internet collections and research collections you've used here at the Library of Congress?
Alan Brinkley: My first experience using manuscripts occurred when I was an undergraduate at Princeton working on my senior thesis, and I traveled one day up to the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, N.Y., where I've spent many months, perhaps second only to the Library of Congress. And I'll never forget the feeling of opening, for the first time, a box of papers, and holding in my hand a letter that Franklin Roosevelt had written and signed, and the sense of being a part of the great tradition of historians who have built their work around this exposure to the immediate product of the minds of the great figures, and not so great figures, of our history. …
Let me try to answer just briefly the first question [Dr. Billington] asked, which is why is it important for historians to have access to manuscripts, because the answer to that question really leads us to the answers to some of the other questions he raised. …
Studying the early history of the United States, really prior to the 20th century, the manuscript collections are the best avenue we have to understanding the inner lives, the private lives, and even the official lives of some of our most important public figures. …
The Library of Congress manuscript collection is unparalleled in the United States, perhaps in the world, not just for the famous and great collections it has, but for the concentration of material from so many sources that one can use on any period of American history that complement one another. When I was writing about Huey Long and Father Coughlin, neither of whose papers exist at all, let alone in the Library of Congress, nothing was more valuable to me than being able to sit in the Manuscript Division reading room … and go through collection after collection after collection of people who had been in Congress - in the Senate with Huey Long, people who had dealt with Father Coughlin in various parts of the government, people outside the government altogether who had - journalists and others - who had written about, and commented on these men.
In one building, there was such an enormous concentration of commentary, documentary evidence, and explicit criticism and evaluation, that it was an extraordinary opportunity for me to take the story of two men who left no documentary record of their own, and piece together a history based on the documents of so many other people. …
Sylvia Morris: I'm going to address the question, Were there surprising gaps in the collections which you have used in the writing of your books? And the answer to that is, yes. …
I have found in both books that I've written - the first one on Edith Roosevelt, the second on Clare Boothe Luce - that I was two years or so into the work, and I suddenly realized, having gone through a thousand boxes of Clare Boothe Luce's papers … that I really didn't know this person. Who was she? Where did she come from? Who influenced her? How was she shaped? How did she become so witty and beautiful and clever and smart, and a congresswoman and a diplomat, and all of these things? It was not there, in the public papers.
So you then have to hit the road. And you have to go in search of this private person. Who is, after all, the core inner being. …
Anyway, I just wanted to say that everything is not as it seems when you go through public papers. You are getting very much the image person, and the real person behind is often elsewhere.
David Garrow: I bring two pieces of background to the Library, to my experiences with the Manuscript Division. No. 1, in writing a good bit about the civil rights movement, where perhaps the most valuable collection of all in the country are the papers of the NAACP, which are here.
And one of the great virtues that the NAACP Collection reflects is not the documents generated by an organization's headquarters, but the correspondence and copies of other items that are sent in to headquarters by local activists out there in small towns or rural counties who aren't, themselves, at the time saving anything, or making copies of things.
Second, the last six or seven years, I've written primarily about the Supreme Court. … The Library's collections on the Supreme Court are a phenomenal resource, far and away the greatest resource in the country, for understanding the impact that the court has had on American life. …
The [William] Douglas and [William] Brennan papers, particularly because both of those men were quite fastidious note-takers, unlike Justice [Thurgood] Marshall, are a phenomenal resource for tracking and detailing the private conversations and discussions within the court. And while, especially as Justice Douglas got older, his handwriting became more and more of a challenge to decipher, there is a remarkable degree of congruence between the notes that Justice Douglas would take of the conference - the nine justices of their private discussions - and the parallel notes of Justice Brennan. …
But now, as we increasingly move into a culture where we communicate with each other by telephone and by e-mail, I think we all face the bigger issue of whether there is there going to be an inescapable decline in the quality of history that we can all write. …
Alexander Haig: I made the decision to store my papers in the Library of Congress some years ago during the tenure of Dr. Billington's predecessor, Mr. Boorstin, a very good friend. And I made the decision for two reasons. …
The first reason was because after leaving the Watergate-disgraced Nixon White House and returning to the military as commander of NATO, I learned that President Ford had shipped all my White House files to me. I never anticipated it.
And although I didn't have a chance to review them at the time, because of this extreme sensitivity, I wanted the most reliable repository I could find. Now, just as during Watergate, President Nixon turned to Congress to pick a new vice president, I chose to put my papers in a congressionally over-watched facility for safety. …
The second reason was that it's often been said that in Washington he who has the power writes the history. This has certainly been my experience. I am repeatedly astonished by the historic revisionism undertaken by the spinmasters of incumbent administrations - in both parties. Because I've been fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to witness firsthand a number of major events, in the national security area at least, I can attest to the appalling fact that in a contemporary sense, history is seldom objectively or accurately chronicled for the American people [by the media]. …
Happily, it is the American scholar, with the access to the actual data contained in collections such as those deposited in the Library of Congress, who must be relied upon to portray for posterity the facts of history. …
In each of the following cases, for example, the contemporary portrayal of events was later revised in substantial ways, years later, only after the meticulous professional research by American scholars. I refer to initial depiction of the 1950 Korean War. It was only years later that the American people learned that President-elect Eisenhower threatened to use all the weapons in the American inventory to achieve a settlement of that conflict.
The portrayal of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. It wasn't until the Kennedy Library was opened that the American people learned that that crisis was not solved by a momentous American victory, but rather a deal which could be very controversial: the relinquishment of American missiles in Italy and Turkey and a private assurance of a noninvasion by the Kennedy administration.
The events surrounding the Yom Kippur War in 1973, right at the height of Watergate, and The Washington Post headline was: "Nixon Contrives International Crisis to Survive." The facts are that a review of the history of that period confirms that we perhaps came closer to a nuclear conflict in that crisis than in any other in the history of the Cold War. …
So these are the things that repositories like the Library of Congress are all about. And these are the reasons I'm very pleased to have chosen the Library of Congress as a repository for my personal and official papers.
Alan Brinkley: I think the discussion seems to have moved, as perhaps it inevitably would, to the future of manuscript collections in the electronic age. …
Obviously, there are many things that will be lost that might, in earlier periods, have been saved, and many things that will never have been produced in the first place. Diaries, for example. Very few people keep diaries any longer.
But this has always been true, particularly in the 20th century. When the telephone was invented, an enormous amount of communication that used to be conveyed on paper began to be conveyed over the telephone, and was, of course, almost always lost entirely.
I think there are some things that will be gained. Biographers of late- 20th century figures will have an experience that biographers of 19th and earlier century figures have never had, and that's being able to see the subject of their biographies on film or on tape. To see them as living, breathing people, talking and moving. Talking about themselves, talking about other things.
So the documentary record of our history is always evolving, and different kinds of sources rise, and different kinds of sources fall. I'm not necessarily pessimistic about the rise of electronic communication and its relationship to historical memory, but I think there are enormous challenges of preservation and understanding that await us, and I think there are certain kinds of historical memories that we'll find more difficult to retrieve, but others that we may find easier to retrieve as a result of these changes.
Sylvia Morris: I worry a little bit about the electronic age, in the sense that you're sort of once removed from the documents. There's nothing like actually being able to hold a letter of somebody. And you can almost tell the emotional state, sometimes, of the person, or their health, when they wrote it, simply by looking, very close up, at the handwriting.
David Garrow: I think what all of our remarks underscore is that contemporaneous documents, contemporaneous records, are always a better and more dependable source for the writing of history than is human memory.
Certainly in my experience - I would think Alan and Sylvia would have had very similar ones - when we interview people, one often has the experience of knowing that the firsthand recollections of the person you're questioning are wildly off the mark. ...
I think what the Library represents, what the Manuscript Division represents, is that the preservation of contemporary documents is the fundamental foundation for American history.
Alexander Haig: I just underline once again that my experience has been - and I've served seven presidents, four at fairly close range. And the majority come into office believing that history began on the day of their inaugural. …
And if you have no historic memory, if you have history that has been distorted by self-serving political objectives, the basis on which you make judgments is profoundly shaken.
