BRIAN LAMB, HOST, Q&A: Allen Weinstein, when did this country start collecting records under the National Archives?

ALLEN WEINSTEIN, ARCHIVIST OF THE UNITED STATES: The National Archives goes back only to 1934, Brian, so we basically have – just had that one brief period. But we‘ve been collecting record since the beginning of the republic.

In fact, Thomas Jefferson was complaining very early on about the fact that the records were getting lost and misplaced and he was very concerned about that, as have all of our presidents since Washington. But the Archives is a late edition.

LAMB: How big is it?

WEINSTEIN: Well, we have 11 presidential libraries. If we had Nixon next year, which we‘re hoping to, that would be 12. Bush 43 would be 13. We‘ve got about 20 archival – no, that‘s not true, about 14 archival record centers regionally, about 20 regular record centers regionally, the Federal Register in Washington, four Washington-area facilities. It‘s – we‘re in 20 states. It‘s quite massive. And it‘s basically like a university campus except spread out over the country.

LAMB: How much money do we spend a year on archives?

WEINSTEIN: Not enough, but we – this past year, we spent about $320 million on all of those efforts.

LAMB: How many people work for you?

WEINSTEIN: About 2,800.

LAMB: How long is your appointment for?

WEINSTEIN: I serve at the pleasure of the president, and he can remove me tomorrow or he can let me stay, or the next president can remove when there is a next president.

LAMB: Could it be an ending? I mean, is it wide open or is there a year limit…

(INAUDIBLE)

WEINSTEIN: Well…

LAMB: … at all?

WEINSTEIN: … no year limit at all. Maybe there should be. This is one thing we ought to consider. This has been much talked about. I have no objection to a year limit. But we have had archivists serving essentially nine of 10 years traditionally.

LAMB: Why was your appointment controversial and why did it take so long?

WEINSTEIN: Well, of course, the controversy with a 100-0 vote in the Senate. There were organizations that didn‘t know me. And they objected predominantly, as many of them said, not to me, as to the manner of the appointment, which is to say that archival and historical organizations did not feel they were consulted adequately. That can be addressed as well.

The fact of the matter is I work very closely with those same organizations today so that whatever the issues of the pre-confirmation, they seem to have disappeared.

LAMB: When did you first get a call from somebody in the administration saying, would be interested in being the archivist?

WEINSTEIN: The fall of 2004.

LAMB: And when were you approved?

WEINSTEIN: February 2005.

LAMB: So it really wasn‘t that long.

WEINSTEIN: Well, maybe it was earlier in the fall, I would have to go back. It was about a nine-month period from the time that I got the first call to the approval.

LAMB: What were you doing then?

WEINSTEIN: I was advising as a senior counselor the International Foundation for Election Systems, working on various projects, including the Iraq election.

LAMB: And when somebody asked you to be the archivist, what was your first reaction?

WEINSTEIN: Delight. Surprise and delight. I, in fact, said to the folks in the White House when they asked whether I would be willing to be archivist – I wasn‘t appointed, they just invited me in to talk, I looked at them surprised and said, But I‘m Democrat. I‘ve been a registered Democrat all my life.

He said – well, that didn‘t seem to concern them as long as I was capable of being objective and fair as an archivist.

LAMB: What had you done before your consultancy right before this…

WEINSTEIN: I‘ve had three careers, Brian. I‘ve been an academic. I‘ve held three tenured professorships. I‘ve been a professor at Smith College for 16 years, at Georgetown for four or five, at Boston University for four. There were visiting appointments, so that goes back over 25 or 30 years.

I‘ve been a writer and a scholar, published a bunch of books, some of which I‘ve had the privilege of sitting to you about. And then about 1985, I founded an organization called the Center for Democracy. And we work to facilitate transitions to democratic processes in countries all over the world.

I had the privilege of working in that organization as president for 18 years. And when I decided it was time fold (ph) that organization, I went as a senior counselor at IFES, and was, frankly, planning on retirement, or at least semi-retirement when this came along.

LAMB: Were there any restrictions on you when you took this job?

WEINSTEIN: No.

LAMB: The reason why I ask, and I‘ve asked a number of people in the historical, if you could ask Allen Weinstein a question, what would it be? Almost everybody asks the question about the president‘s executive order on records.

WEINSTEIN: OK.

LAMB: Just so I can put it in context for others who don‘t even know what we‘re talking about.

WEINSTEIN: That‘s fine.

LAMB: Let me read Michael Tackett, a reporter from The Chicago Tribune‘s description of it, and you can say whatever you want.

WEINSTEIN: Sure, sure.

LAMB: This was in August 14th, 2005, he says: "So take a look instead at an action for which the president is solely responsible," meaning George Bush, "namely, Executive Order 13223, that Bush signed November 1st, 2001," so this is his first year, "the order empowered the president to control the release of former presidents‘ records, even if the former president wanted the records to be open to the public."

This is the last sentence: "The effect of the order was to render nearly meaningless the Presidential Records Act of 1978, a post-Watergate era law that was designed to give the public access to many presidential papers 12 years after that president had left office."

WEINSTEIN: Well, if you look at the Presidential Records Act, you discover that the president has some authority there to restrain release on the grounds of claiming privilege.

We just, Brian, finished a process which normally would take four to six months of releasing material on Judge Roberts. We did this in four to six weeks. I‘m very proud of the way in which the National Archives made this process work.

Seventy-nine thousand pages were released by our count, more than 79,000 pages. The White House did not claim executive privilege for a single page, that did not enter into the issue.

We‘ve released about a million pages of presidential record material over the last several years, and 64 pages, I believe (INAUDIBLE) have been held back on a claim of privilege.

Now let me say that I‘m not defending the executive order. I inherited it. I got some tough questioning in the Senate, and legitimately so, what my view of it would be and I did not feel that as an official of the government, that it‘s my place to express my views publicly where I can express them privately. And I have been expressing them privately.

But so far, at least, it has not proven to be the millstone over the backs of researchers trying to get records.

LAMB: Do you have any idea why President Bush thought it was necessary to even issue that executive order?

WEINSTEIN: I think you had best ask him. I don‘t…

LAMB: So what is the philosophy of the government now – or what is the law about things presidential, I mean, meaning documents? Who controls and what is the time period in which you can – have to release them?

WEINSTEIN: Well, of course, this depends on which documents and who one is talking about. We moved very quickly on the Roberts thing because the Senate and White House wanted to move quickly. The Senate wanted to move quickly in both parties.

We have been meticulously nonpartisan. We‘re above politics in all of this. We just get the material out the best we can. There have been some normal Freedom of Information Act restrictions on some of the material because of privacy issues or in the case of national security and law enforcement.

But I think basically we follow the laws. And the law governing presidential records, Presidential Record Act, the Freedom of Information Act, provides procedures for processing this.

The problem, Brian, is resources, candidly. We have a backlog at presidential libraries, a very significant backlog. We‘re trying to sort of get everything out. And that‘s because we simply don‘t have the funding to have the trained archivist to help this process – to have enough in the way of a trained archivist to help this process. That‘s what I would like addressed.

LAMB: When the Roberts papers were released, how many of those came from the Reagan Library and was that under your responsibility?

WEINSTEIN: Yes, all the presidential libraries are under our responsibility. About 50,000, I could check my notes, but somewhere around 50,000.

LAMB: What happened to those misplaced documents?

WEINSTEIN: Well, first of all, this was one folder of documents that was misplaced. The best we can reconstruct that process, it was looked at, it was returned to the control of the Reagan archivist, and we were dealing, after all, with – we were pulling hundreds of files to try to see whether there was anything on Roberts in these files to be released.

And in the – candidly, in the chaos of those days, we had our researchers there, you had White House people, you had others there, that folder – there were actually two folders, and actually we found one. And we worked on the premise that the other one would turn up as well.

Frankly, the other one didn‘t turn up, not yet at least, it may still turn up. But it‘s our responsibility, I took responsibility for that. I‘ll hold responsibility for that. What happened to it, God only knows.

LAMB: So the people that are in the Reagan library, do they work for you or do they work for the Reagan family?

WEINSTEIN: They work for me. Every person in the National Archives, whether in the presidential libraries or the Federal Register or at the Archives downtown, we have a billion documents, a billion pieces of paper in the building downtown. I know because I‘ve counted every one of them.

And supposedly we have 9 billion system-wide. Well, that, of course, with electronic records will increase exponentially. But the entire cast of characters works for me, works for the National Archives and Records Administration, more precisely. And they do not work for the Reagan family, they do not work for any particular political interest, they work for us.

LAMB: How much money do we spend a year on presidential libraries through you?

WEINSTEIN: I would have to quote that figure, I know I was going to be asked that and I didn‘t get the information. But I would say that we probably spend $50 million.

LAMB: Of taxpayer money on the presidential libraries.

WEINSTEIN: Taxpayer money.

LAMB: And how do they divide up the foundations that are based at each one of these libraries versus…

WEINSTEIN: Well, of course, the foundations are – the library buildings have to be built by the foundations, so the taxpayers don‘t build the buildings. We‘re waiting right now for – the Nixon Foundation is committing to building a building to handle the 40 million or so pages of Nixon records. And we‘re waiting on that process right now.

But once they are transferred to the federal government, once the deed of gift transfers them to the federal government, then we provide an annual allocation to them. All of the foundations work with – all the presidential libraries work with separate foundations that help, as you know, to support them, just as the National Archives.

We have a foundation for the National Archives which was responsible for developing that beautiful exhibit on American history, the Public Vaults exhibit. That we now have plus (ph) a beautiful theater – plus the McGowan Theater and other – the O‘Brien exhibit hall, and other facilities.

So we work very closely with our private foundation which cannot – which can do things that we can‘t as a government agency.

LAMB: So, I know one of the things that we ran into when we did our series on presidential – on presidents is that we had some libraries say to us basically, if you‘re going to have that particular person sitting here representing the president in that library, you can‘t come in here.

WEINSTEIN: Really?

LAMB: Yes. And so we would move our – we had to move our (INAUDIBLE) to some other place where there wasn‘t the restriction on what somebody would…

(INAUDIBLE)

WEINSTEIN: Brian, if you occasion to do any filming at any of the presidential libraries and that statement is made, please have that person call me, because they won‘t be working for us very much longer.

That‘s not – now let‘s be realistic, Republican presidents are bound to attract, for example, support from the Republican side of things. Democratic presidents from the Democratic side of things. There is a certain amount of rational logic here. But there can be no ability to avoid the breadth of – we engage in this discussion because of some complaints that had been made about the Nixon Library‘s cancellation of this Vietnam conference.

We‘re redoing a Vietnam conference, not the same one, but we have six presidential libraries involved. It‘s being coordinated by the Kennedy Library people, the Nixon Library people are involved.

But basically full faith and credit, we will not have any censorship at presidential libraries of political viewpoints, at least not as long I‘m archivist.

LAMB: As you know, some of these libraries start and they start out by having people run them that are from the families.

WEINSTEIN: Well, they do that, and that, as long as they have our permission, that‘s OK. But, look, we have – I‘m trying to visit in this first year, I originally said 100 days, which was a crazy thing to say. It was the most foolish thing I‘ve done since I‘ve been archivist. I‘m done some other foolish things, I‘m sure, but that‘s the most foolish one.

You can‘t visit in 100 days – when you‘re trying to run an organization from Washington, you can‘t visit 14 archives, 20 records centers, 11 presidential libraries. But I‘m getting to most of them. I‘ve been to most of the presidential libraries, and a good many of the other things.

And the fact of the matter is that there is a desire on the part of all of these things – all of the components of the archival system to be deeply involved in the public dialogue on issues, to be deeply involved in education on issues.

I commissioned a study when I became archivist of what the educational resource – what was happening in education? It‘s not technically even in our mandate. It turns out I‘ve got 22 single-spaced pages of programs that are already were in existence that were being initiated at the presidential library level and others.

So there‘s an awful lot of that going on. We can‘t – of course, the family is going to be involved. The family is involved in the foundations. There is nothing unusual about that. We have a fourth generation Hoover, a young woman who is one of the new part (ph) trustees of the Hoover Library. That‘s going to continue.

I‘ve met with most of – I‘ve met with Mrs. Reagan. I‘ve met with Mrs. Johnson. I‘ve met with Margaret Hoover. I‘ve met with Caroline Kennedy in Boston. I‘ve met with most of the family people. Tricia Nixon, with Julie Nixon.

The family members can be a very constructive force in terms of focusing attention on these libraries.

LAMB: How much control does a family member have on what is released to the public?

WEINSTEIN: None. Well, I shouldn‘t say none because basically the Nixon situation is covered by court agreements. And one of the things that we‘re very, very excited about with the coming of the Nixon Library, if we can conclude that process next year, is that we will be receiving the political papers of the president that have been withheld up to now, but that the library has agreed to give us, and the family has supported this effort.

We are receiving the pre-presidential papers, the post-presidential papers so that for the first time in 30 years – the "30 years war" will come to an end, and we will have basically all of the Nixon papers in one place where they can be used by scholars.

LAMB: What started the fact that the Nixon Library and Museum didn‘t have any of his presidential papers there?

WEINSTEIN: Well, there is a government statute covering the Nixon papers and tapes. And that was basically designed to preserve the integrity of those papers and tapes. That has governed our control of them. We control at (INAUDIBLE), and if you want to see any Nixon papers that – whether they‘re released or not, you‘ve just got to go to our archives building in College Park. They‘re all there. The tapes are there. The records are all there. And the transfer process in the best of circumstances is going to take three or four years to the Nixon Library.

LAMB: Why are you transferring them now all of a sudden?

WEINSTEIN: We‘re not transferring anything.

LAMB: No, but, I mean, why do these papers begin (ph) to be a part of the library in Yorba Linda?

WEINSTEIN: Because the Nixon Library, if we can absorb it, if it fulfills all the agreements that we came to, the Nixon Library will become the 12th presidential library in the system so that all of the presidencies from Hoover through Clinton will have presidential libraries.

We are trying to develop a presidential library system in which there is cooperation back and forth, there is collegiality, people working on joint projects, research projects, even some joint fundraising. That‘s in motion. And we‘re very excited about that process.

The Nixon Library fulfills – just closes the gap on that issue.

LAMB: Do you have anything to say as to where a presidential library will go, like George Walker Bush‘s next library?

WEINSTEIN: The Texas guessing game. Well, the answer is no. What we try to do is to provide every – and we certainly have continued this tradition under my stewardship. We try to provide every president with as much information as we can on how to develop a library, how to develop a foundation, how to develop – how you organize papers, because presidencies are forever sending us papers. We get stuff on a weekly – even a daily basis of gifts and papers that come through us.

But basically, no, the president, if they ask me directly, I would, frankly, I think, decline to make a choice. But I will say this to any president in the audience who is listening to this – any potential president.

It‘s very important for a president, and for that matter, for his spouse or first lady or whatever – or first man, it‘s very important for a president and his or her family to decide while they‘re president how they want to spend their lives after the presidency. What do they want to be when they‘re in that phase? Because that will determine to some extent what the location will be.

Do you want it near an airport because you want to travel the way Jimmy Carter travels or the way President Clinton travels? Or do you want a more relaxed lifestyle the way, for example, President Ford has had all these years. It‘s up to the president.

LAMB: (INAUDIBLE) for the Eisenhower Library – or the Hoover Library is West Branch, Iowa, and it‘s way far away from the people. And, you know…

WEINSTEIN: Tell me about it.

LAMB: And the Eisenhower – I know. The Eisenhower Library has got five buildings on it and its near Salina, Kansas. It‘s hard to get there.

WEINSTEIN: It‘s hard to get there. One of the things that we‘re trying to develop through the foundation and also through archives generally – our foundation, is a series of presidential tours, where we can perhaps just encourage people to sort of start on a process of visiting with their families all of the presidential libraries, and perhaps even do some rewarding of those who go along with us.

But we‘ve been way behind in the marketing, Brian. And we‘re trying to develop that. Jack Valenti has started a little committee that we‘ve asked him to do of people involved in the presidency, in all of these presidencies. We‘re trying to focus our attention on how to market in the century that we happen to be living in, not the century that the libraries were created in.

LAMB: The other thing you notice is that Lyndon Johnson‘s library has the most visitors over some – in the last 30 years, far more than anybody else, and it‘s free.

WEINSTEIN: Right.

LAMB: But then you go to other libraries and they charge you a significant amount of money to get, significant meaning something, you know, $5 to $10 for people. Do you have anything to say about what people are charged?

WEINSTEIN: No, but I think we are going to look at that. That‘s one of the major things that I want to look at. Be sure there would be some consistency in the way people are treated in the presidential libraries. I think there should be (INAUDIBLE) myself personally.

Well, look at what has happened in the last few days since Hurricane Katrina, President Clinton and President Bush and others have announced that the proceeds – they‘re going to contribute the proceeds of admissions from their libraries to the Katrina fund or just to some – the Red Cross or whatever.

That‘s a whole other subject, what the National Archives are doing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I would like to talk about that during the hour.

But basically why should there be any – if there are going to be admission charges, should – doesn‘t it make sense to have a uniform admission charge. I think it may. I want to look closer at that.

LAMB: What‘s your own goal or goals?

WEINSTEIN: I‘ve got three for as long as I‘m there. We just announced yesterday the awarding of an over $300 million contract to Lockheed Martin to work with us on developing an electronic records archives, a record archive that would be capable of absorbing electronic records from no matter what their software and no matter what their hardware, and maintaining them for a very significant period of time, decades, even centuries.

A long way to go there. It‘s a first step, it‘s a beginning. It‘s not – we haven‘t solved the problem. It‘s not a panacea. But we‘re working on it. And one of my goals is to move that process along significantly so that we can deal this incredible outpouring of electronic records that otherwise we‘re just going to lose, Brian, we‘re just going to lose.

There are electronic records now that were created in the 1980s and 1990s that we just don‘t have the equipment to deal with any longer, so.

LAMB: What will this mean for the public?

WEINSTEIN: Well, it will mean, I think, a great deal for not only the public but for business and for government at all levels, because if this system works for us, it will work for the state of – for any of the states, it will work for any of the cities, it will work for private industry. And it will improve the process of absorbing public records electronically.

LAMB: So does that mean a student could access it electronically from over the Web, is that what you‘re after?

WEINSTEIN: That‘s one of the things that may happen. Of course, properly protected in terms of security and making sure that we deal with the privacy issues. That‘s one goal.

Second goal is to strengthen and expand the educational capacity of the National Archives. We have facilities that can be of use in the public school systems. Elsewhere we have ways of basically reaching out to audiences with our documents all over the country. We‘re not using them enough. And I‘m going to focus on that.

For example, Constitution Day, we‘ve turned that into Constitution Week. We have a program checks and balances in the digital era with Roy Blunt and Steny Hoyer, the two whips – the majority and minority whips coming to debate this. Senator Byrd will be with us for that program. He‘s, of course, the creator of the Constitution Day mandate to do something on Constitution Day.

And we have a whole series of programs, films, television shows, debates on civil liberties and things over the course of the whole week. I want to get the archives much more active in this process of public education.

LAMB: Why?

WEINSTEIN: Because we can be. Because we can help. Because we‘re creating, many of whom simply do not have an adequate understanding of the taproot of the country, of what the values are, what the history of this country is. And if we can do something to alleviate that a little bit, we should be doing it.

LAMB: Why are we creating that kind of a society today?

WEINSTEIN: Well, where should we begin? In part I think we go back to the question of what is taught and what is not taught in the schools. When you and I were in school, history was a required subject. You may not have liked it, but it was very hard to leave school without some basic knowledge of American – the facts of the American past, whatever one wanted to do, whether they wanted to think about it. That‘s not so difficult these days. So we have education to do and we‘re happy to play a role in that process. The other thing – that‘s two, the third goal I have is to basically assist at this transition from the older group of archivists and records managers to those of the electronic era, those who are going to come to take their place.

I‘ll tell you story. We had our 20th anniversary as an independent agency in May, and I presided over that. I said to my senior staff, I would like to send letters to people who have worked for us for 20 years to thank them. They looked at me like I was a bit strange because they said, well, you will have to send letters, sir, to a third of the agency.

I said, well, what about 25 years, 30 years? So finally they let me send letters to people who were here for 35 years. We gave medals to people who had been there 40 years. I tried to track down the gentleman who had been there for 40 years. He was the first archivist that I worked with at the National Archives back in the "dark ages," back in the "Precambrian period" in the ‘60s.

And I won‘t mention his name, though, because of privacy considerations, but he didn‘t show up to receive his medal. So I asked why, and he said, well, he‘s afraid that if he gets a medal, I was told, that maybe this is like the watch you give someone just before you make them retire. He doesn‘t want to retire, he‘s happy at his work.

I tried to track him down. I couldn‘t reach him. I finally just had to leave the medal for him and go. It‘s a dedicated workforce, Brian, it‘s not the normal government bureaucracy. These are people of talent. They work their tail off. You know many of them, you know that as well I do.

I want to preside over the transition to that next group that can continue this process in the electronic era.

LAMB: Are there no staff people now that are in that electronic world?

WEINSTEIN: We have many, many. I just want to accelerate this process.

LAMB: How do you do that?

WEINSTEIN: You just watch carefully as vacancies come available. You also do something else, you persuade the authorities of this country, which is to say, the Congress and the administration, whatever the administration is, that the National Archives in underfunded, that despite this time of budgetary crunches, when an issue comes up, we‘re there.

For example, one of the things I‘m trying to organize with current resources now, and others are as well, is a National Archives-coordinated team of state, local, and federal archivists who can take a look down at the Gulf region and find out, first of all, what the situation is there, because we have to get our conservatories and those who are responsible for preserving records in there as quickly as possible to see what can be preserved given the dimensions of the tragedy.

We don‘t know that at this stage in the game. There‘s the 5th District Court of Appeals in New Orleans, that whole record might just be in jeopardy, we don‘t know that. There are 95 or 100 government agencies scattered throughout the region at the federal level, must less the state and local level. So we‘re trying to put together a coalition, in touch with the White House, to just go down there, I‘ll go down there myself to start with, and just try to gather the information to address this.

Otherwise what you‘re going to have is a major problem of identity loss, not identity theft, but identity loss, people searching around for adequate records to get normal relief, to just transact normal business. It doesn‘t exist right now. We don‘t what exists. So we‘re working on that.

I tried to explain to my colleagues at the archives, there is no such thing as an unfunded mandate, if we have to do it, we do it. And we work around it.

LAMB: You‘ll know why I‘m asking you this question this way, because of people outside want to know that you are working for them instead of for this administration, what would it take – let‘s see if I can ask this right. At what point would you blow the whistle on this administration if they were asking for you to suppress records? Have you thought that out?

WEINSTEIN: Oh, I‘ve thought it out very carefully. I‘ve thought it on – remember, I‘ve just gone through – we were just going through a process with Judge Roberts in which a senator on this side and a senator on that side had very different views as to what the Archives should perhaps be doing or not doing? The administration might have some views on that.

I should make one point clear about the release of papers, we‘re in charge of that release. We take advice, we take counsel. The administration can claim privilege, but basically in terms of the normal process of evaluating procedure, the Archives is in charge of what is released and what is not released on a given moment. We do the initial testing.

How would I respond? What would it take to resign on principle? I happened to be down at the Carter Library and I saw that extraordinary letter that Cyrus Vance wrote the president, which is memorable, probably the last time that we had had a highest-level resignation on principle in American life (ph).

I think I‘m going to hide behind Justice Brennan‘s comment on pornography, which is he would know it when he saw it. And I will know it when I see it. If somebody tries to persuade me or to insist that I do something that I consider to be improper or violation of the law, I‘m out, I‘m out of there.

LAMB: You know that…

WEINSTEIN: I don‘t expect that to happen, though. I just don‘t expect that to happen, though.

LAMB: But you know your detractors, before you even were confirmed…

WEINSTEIN: Oh, sure.

LAMB: … said that you are working for Karl Rove in effect.

WEINSTEIN: Hardly.

LAMB: Do you know him?

WEINSTEIN: I met him for the first time about a month ago.

LAMB: And then under what circumstances?

WEINSTEIN: A discussion of a collection that we‘re trying to acquire that he might help with.

LAMB: But if he calls you up on the phone and says, Allen, you‘ve got to kill this request, you can‘t let this record out, we don‘t want it out, what do you say?

WEINSTEIN: I would say, thank you very much, but this is a conversation we shouldn‘t be having and obviously I‘ll have to make my own judgments on that.

Funny thing, Brian, and I forget who was responsible for the old cliche that never explain because your friends don‘t need the explanation and your adversaries won‘t believe it anyway. But I rather like Lincoln‘s formulation. He said about people who voted against him in 1860, he said – well, he said, I have every intention of – he said, I‘m going to be killing my enemies, I‘m going to turn them into friends.

I‘ve been trying, but I can‘t – well, I think people were, for example, very surprised at the settlement I arrived at with the Nixon people, very surprised. That was one of the first things I did over there.

We‘ve also been very active in other ways to try to sort of make certain that the archives are absolutely not misunderstood as a partisan agency. It isn‘t. Even just down to the people who speak there, Senator Byrd has spoken there twice. He‘s coming to this – you know, there are as many Democratic speakers as Republican speakers.

The last thing in the world that this country needs is a partisan National Archives. And it doesn‘t have one now.

LAMB: Is there any internal check and balance around you? And would people – you know, I assume, there is always the whistleblower problem – well, not problem, opportunity people have in this town. How can they…

WEINSTEIN: Well, let‘s start with the inspector general. We have a very active inspector general. He has his ways of doing things. We‘re in constant communication. Within a half-an-hour of my discovery that this file was not where it should be at the Reagan Library, I called the inspector general, and that investigation has begun, it‘s still in process.

We hope not to have too many more cases like the one that we saw adjudicated in court, the Berger case, yesterday. But we take security very, very seriously. And we are trying to tighten our procedures as best we can while maintaining access. But we are an access agency and people have to have the right to access as fully and as freely as we possibly can make it. And that‘s – I‘m dedicated to that.

LAMB: How did the Berger develop? You weren‘t there then, but how did that happen?

WEINSTEIN: Well, how did it happen? I don‘t know, honestly. I don‘t know what went through Sandy Berger‘s mind when he decided to take that material out of the Archives.

LAMB: He was taking copies, not the actual material.

WEINSTEIN: Copies, not the actual material.

LAMB: And the reason I ask that is that if I were – excuse me, going to do the same thing and I came to the Archives, weren‘t there cameras watching him?

WEINSTEIN: There weren‘t then but there will be now, not just Berger but any other researcher in any part of the Archives that are in Washington or at the presidential libraries or the regional archives or the regional record centers.

We‘ve tightened up on a number of major procedures. I don‘t want to talk about all the ways in which we‘ve done it, but it would be virtually impossible I think now to do what Berger did then, hopefully.

Now, he came a special mission on behalf of President Clinton, on behalf of his testimony before the 9/11 Commission. Who‘s to know that this would be the background of an effort to take material from the Archives? We just didn‘t know.

But we know now and that won‘t happen again.

LAMB: What kind of – excuse me, we‘re all having to clear our throat. What kind of a country is it in which you had to go to this length – I mean, this is the first time probably, tell me if I‘m wrong, in history that the National Archives has to watch people coming in to do research constantly, that they‘re going to steal something or tear it up or try to take it away?

WEINSTEIN: We had another sad case a few months, you may remember the sentencing of the gentleman – elderly gentleman, who had been stealing Civil War materials and was found out. And we recovered a good portion of that material, but not all of it.

What kind of a country? A more complicated one than perhaps we would like it to be in this regard. But I want to address the point you made earlier, Brian, about how can people who are not for political reasons, because they don‘t like the history I wrote or whatever, adversarial, how do I assure those people that things have changed or at least they have no concerns to make – to worry about in terms of my objectivity at the Archives?

It‘s a hard one because it‘s done one-on-one. One of the things I‘ve done, I don‘t want to mention names as well, is taken some of the people who have pivotal critics of the Archives in the civil liberties community, I‘ve met with them personally. I‘ve continued that process. Certainly in the archival community and the historical community that has been the case.

Although the amazing thing to me is the extraordinary amount receptivity. Small story, The Washington Post did a profile on me. There are some who would find parts of that profile less than flattering. But I thought on the whole it was pretty balanced. But the less-than-flattering pieces did not seem to attract the attention of any of the – many of the co-workers I have at the Archives. The question I got asked more than anything else was whether I really played stickball as a kid in the Bronx, which I did.

LAMB: Well one of the organizations that has been after you for years is The Nation magazine.

WEINSTEIN: Right.

LAMB: And that leads to asking you what impact do you think your book "Perjury" had on your life, and frankly, would you be sitting here today if you hadn‘t written that book?

WEINSTEIN: I don‘t know. Maybe not. I won‘t say "probably not" because life provides funny extremes, detours. It had an enormous impact on my life in the sense that, first of all, when I wrote the book – just for the benefit of some folks in the viewing audience that may not know the book, I began by thinking that Alger Hiss may have been innocent and wrote some articles to that effect.

Sued the FBI, received (ph) – I guess one of the first Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the bureau for files of historical interest.

LAMB: What year?

WEINSTEIN: 1975.

LAMB: And you were where then?

WEINSTEIN: Smith College, a professor of history.

LAMB: A professor?

WEINSTEIN: A professor of history at Smith College. Published a book called "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case" on the case, having changed my mind, the book received generally very favorable reviews. It was blasted in the page of The Nation.

And that adversarial quality I think has been reflected in The Nation‘s comments on me ever since – The Nation magazine‘s comments on me ever since.

LAMB: You basically concluded about Alger Hiss that he was not innocent.

WEINSTEIN: That he was guilty.

LAMB: As you know, The Nation is still after you for the tapes of your interviews.

WEINSTEIN: They‘re all at the Hoover.

LAMB: At the Hoover Institution?

WEINSTEIN: The Hoover Institution.

LAMB: And are they available for people to listen to?

WEINSTEIN: As far as I know.

LAMB: And these are interviews you did with people?

WEINSTEIN: Yes.

LAMB: Why…

WEINSTEIN: They‘re making a transcript of the whole – I mean, various people have used my files over the year, including Sam Tanenhaus who used them extensively in writing his excellent biography of Whitaker Chambers.

So everything I had got rolled over to the Hoover Institution. They have it.

LAMB: Do you have any – I mean, go back to what we were talking about earlier. Do you have any interest at all in your private conversation with the Bush administration to try to get this executive order on the release of presidential papers changed?

WEINSTEIN: Let me simply say that they know where I stand on this matter. And they also know my very significant commitment to maximal access of all presidential administrations at the earliest possible moment. There are no ifs, ands, or buts on that.

And we‘re doing our best to make that happen. And, frankly, if anybody has a complaint or not – this is not happening, I would like to hear about it personally, just write me.

LAMB: You‘ve been in the Archives now four or five – seven – how much?

WEINSTEIN: Seven months.

LAMB: Seven months. What have you found…

WEINSTEIN: But who‘s counting?

LAMB: Yes. What have you found once you have gotten into the top job in their that you were surprised about?

WEINSTEIN: Well, two things – three things. First of all, how complex the organization is, because I was simply not aware – I was aware of it in having read about all of these different parts of it, but until you‘re governing them, until you‘re actually trying to administer them on a day-to-day basis, I had not been aware of just the complexities of the Archives mosaic. I am now. It‘s an impressive mosaic.

Secondly, the quality of the bureaucracy. It wasn‘t that I expected duds or people I wouldn‘t consider to be impressive, but I found so many of them at every level. We have Doris Hamburg, arguably the best preservationist and conservator in town, running our program – our preservation program. I could just reel down a list of folks at staff level that are just extraordinary to work with. My senior staff in particular is great.

The fact we‘re doing an extraordinary range of things effectively on a relatively, relatively small amount of money for what we‘re doing. And that‘s surprising. And also what surprised me basically was that we haven‘t done more in public outreach than we‘re starting to do now.

Every one of our presidential and regional archive centers, every one of our presidential libraries, every one of our regional archives, every one of the regional record centers is now, in addition to that, a place where they are tasked to public outreach of conceivable sort: education and the like, to let people know.

We‘ve been one of the best-kept secrets in Washington. I still get people coming up to congratulate me, Brian, and say, this is terrific, I‘ve heard about your appointment. You work for the Library of Congress now, don‘t you? Or, you work for the Smithsonian, don‘t you?

Well, we‘re working on that.

LAMB: What‘s the – how do divide this stuff in a town like this? You have the Library of Congress, and you have the National Archives. Who gets what?

WEINSTEIN: Well, you would have to ask my good friend Jim Billington as to what corner of the universe is his. I think we generally probably do – they do a wonderful job. And they have this American Memory project, and they have put millions of pages up on the Web. We‘re catching up with them now, but we‘re still behind on that score.

LAMB: But why – for instance, they have 22 presidents‘ papers there at the Library of Congress, why wouldn‘t that fit naturally under the National Archives?

WEINSTEIN: Well, in some countries it does. Canada, for example, has a very talented man in Ian Wilson who is the librarian and archivist of Canada, does both. Other countries combine the two roles, some countries do not.

In an administrative sense, there is no reason they can‘t be combined, the two jobs. But basically they‘ve taken – they‘ve had separate histories. Librarian of Congress can go back to Jefferson‘s – the sale of Jefferson‘s library to create the Library of Congress. And they are the great tradition in this town.

But at some stage in the game, interestingly enough, most of the professional historians got interested in this. And those who are records-keeping archivists back around the turn of the century, J. Franklin Jameson, others, and said, we need a separate archives. It took 30 years to get it but once they‘ve done it, I‘m just the ninth of the archivists in the United States, which is not a lot of archivists for that period of time.

Jim does – the Library of Congress does much more in terms of social and cultural and economic history than we do. We are the library of record. We – I‘m sometimes asked, what is your mission statement? And I brought one along. We‘re working on it, again.

It‘s just a few sentences, if don‘t mind, I‘ll read it.

LAMB: Sure.

WEINSTEIN: "The National Archives and Records Administration serves American democracy by ensuring that the people can discover, use, and trust the records of our government."

This is the one in our new strategic plans, the statement that I‘m arguing for.

"The National Archives preserves for the American people and their public servants the records our of federal government. We ensure continuing access to the essential documentation of the rights of American citizens and the actions of their government. We promote civic education and historical understanding of our national experience."

That‘s it in a nutshell.

LAMB: What are the rules if you‘re a federally-elected official or a federally-appointed official about your papers?

WEINSTEIN: About my papers?

LAMB: No. About their papers, like, if you‘re a United States senator or a congressman, or, say, a secretary of state, who has call on those papers?

WEINSTEIN: Well, senators and members of Congress can do with their papers as they want to, except, of course, obviously if they‘re handling records that come from one or another government agency and they‘re classified, then there are rules governing that.

Rules for federal officials, they basically, in the case of cabinet members and others, would most likely go to the administration that they worked in last. This is the experience that we‘ve had.

President are governed by the Presidential Records Act, so there‘s no problem there. But increasingly we have these collateral collections. Every administration has a bunch of folks who are not government employees but who are very crucial to an administration. And getting their papers handed over is something of a task, but we‘re working on that with every one of these presidential libraries.

As you know, the presidential libraries have done an enormous job in terms of expanding the research base on the American presidency. I think when you look hard at it, one of Franklin Roosevelt‘s great achievements was in fact in focusing the attention of not only his own generation, but successive generations on the role of the presidential library. It‘s amazing.

LAMB: Well, when it comes to the presidential libraries, as you know, you‘ve seen the press on this, every time one is opened up, people say, well – say, in the case of Bill Clinton, well, he avoided really talking about the Monica Lewinsky thing, or in the case of Richard Nixon, they really avoided talking about the important things around Watergate. If it‘s the Ronald Reagan thing, they avoided talking about Iran-Contra.

How do you get honest treatment of these issues in these presidential libraries, especially from the beginning when so often the families control it at the early times?

WEINSTEIN: You work hard at it and you keep pressing away at it. I think in most of the presidential libraries now there are scholars working who are going against the grain, who are not necessarily apologists for the presidents of one sort or another.

But it‘s not easy, and the fact is that there is a logic, I suppose, to the families not particularly wanting to host their severest critics in the early days when the thing is still alive.

Now when the president has passed from the scene, that‘s another story. I think you will find a very complex range of views at the Hoover Library, the Roosevelt Library, the Eisenhower Library and the like.

I just want to be certain that every scholar of whatever persuasion, that he or she is an honest scholar, has the ability to work at whatever president‘s library they want to work at, that they‘re not treated in a second-class fashion because they have views hostile to that particular presidency. That‘s one of my goals.

And one of the goals in restoring the Vietnam conference after it was cancelled was to be certain that one could have a totally candid discussion with all sides represented, all perspectives represented on Vietnam. That will be the goal.

LAMB: Let me stop you about the Vietnam conference, because some folks watching may not have any idea what you‘re talking about. The Vietnam conference was supposed to be held at the Nixon Library, and it was cancelled. Who cancelled it? Why was it cancelled? And what are you doing now to restore it?

WEINSTEIN: The director of the Nixon Library cancelled it on the grounds that enough people had registered to come. It was going to lose money and various other reasons. We found those unacceptable at the National Archives. We indicated that fact to them and we said that certainly it would be important to us to recognize that scholars of all perspectives and persuasions would be welcome at the Nixon Library before we could honestly absorb the library into our system. And…

LAMB: Go back to the Nixon Library. You negotiated behind the scenes that switch so that the Nixon Library would accept becoming a part of the system.

WEINSTEIN: Right.

LAMB: How did you do that? And what were the pressure points?

WEINSTEIN: Well, there had been negotiations, as you probably know, all along, for a period of years. But I don‘t know what I added except being new, which may have helped matters there, which is to say that – and being new in a complicated way.

For example, whatever my views on the Hiss case, my perspective – my portrait of Richard Nixon there is not necessarily the most favorable portrait, but it‘s a candid portrait of his behavior during the case.

So I guess I knew most of the players or had some relationships with most of the players. The important thing from my point of view is getting everybody‘s hands on this agreement, to getting the critics of the Nixon Library on the agreement to getting the Nixon Library folks.

And we did that in part by I think developing a very fair and balanced negotiating package. The library would be responsible for developing the building that the papers would go into. It would agree that there would conferences held with scholars of all perspectives who would be represented.

We also basically had a provision in there that they agreed to to provide – to donate the pre- and post-presidential papers, and most importantly, the political papers. This is a period in which the Republican Party becomes prominent because of the "Southern Strategy" in the Nixon years.

So there is new history to be gathered there, particularly if the focus is not exclusively on Watergate, but on the whole totality of the Nixon presidency. And I think even the scholars most critical of Nixon understood that and supported it, knock wood, up to now. We will see what happens by next year.

LAMB: Who‘s allowed to go into any of these presidential libraries, or even the archives, for that matter, and physically touch these papers?

WEINSTEIN: Well, of course, very often copies are provided if the papers are very rare or people are asked to wear gloves or whatever. But basically any American citizen can, any citizen – any researcher from any part of the world.

The largest group of users of the NARA system – of all the NARA system, are genealogists. They‘re our bread and butter. They‘re the folks who come day after day after day and they‘re wonderful.

And I have a little personal story in that regard, a little personal genealogy. We‘re in the process of negotiating a venue in New York. We have site in New York where there‘s a record center. But we wanted a flagship venue in the New York area. We‘re working on that now.

In the course of a New York trip, I was escorted over to our record center. An archivist approached me and said, now I understand your parents came from Czarist Russia, I was told. I said, that‘s right, that‘s right. He said, well, do you know when? I said, well, not really. I said, my mother – what‘s your father‘s name? Gave him my father‘s name Samuel Weinstein.

He said, well – did a print out and said, well, we‘ve got too many Samuel Weinsteins, I can‘t really find it. I don‘t think of Samuel Weinstein as a common (INAUDIBLE), but there it is.

What‘s your mother‘s name? I gave him my mother‘s name, Sarah Popkov (ph). What emerges later – Brian, what emerged an hour later was the certificate of arrival, the ship she arrived on, the date of her arrival, plus her petition for naturalization with actually a name that I had not known.

That basically what happened often at the immigration counter is that the immigration official changed the person‘s name to make it sound more phonetic. Well, they did that with my mother. I didn‘t…

LAMB: What was her name?

WEINSTEIN: Well, those are the two pieces of paper. Her name is – I knew her as Sarah Popkov. Her name is Sarah – was Sure – or the name they changed it to was Sure Popco (ph).

LAMB: And on this, and we‘ll get a close-up of it, her name is spelled S-U…

WEINSTEIN: Sure, S-U-R-E, Sure Popco (ph).

LAMB: And then it‘s changed to Sarah. Who changed it?

WEINSTEIN: I don‘t know. She‘s dead. I‘ll never find out. But there is a listing there that my mother became a citizen during the Second World War, waited a long time, always fearful that if she failed her written test they would send her back or whatever. She had an irrational fear there.

But there is a child listed, born on September 1st, 1937, namely myself, but either someone listed this name wrong or I‘ve been – you can read the name, right there.

LAMB: 1937, was it – which one is it. It‘s Alden (ph).

WEINSTEIN: That‘s right.

LAMB: So you were originally an Alden instead of an Allen.

WEINSTEIN: I guess so. Amazing things that you learn at the National Archives.

LAMB: And anybody can do this?

WEINSTEIN: Anybody can do this.

LAMB: Just go – what is the best advice you can give people who want to study their genealogy?

WEINSTEIN: Come visit us or write us. We have a wonderful Web site these days, you should – archives.gov – www.archives.gov. Or come visit us in Washington or come visit us in any of the Archive centers and we‘ll give you the straight skinny on how to proceed. Very simple.

LAMB: You have at the archives something called the United Constitution.

WEINSTEIN: I‘ve heard of it.

LAMB: What is your take on the American Constitution?

WEINSTEIN: In what sense?

LAMB: Well, you‘ve studied it for years. You‘ve proselytized for democracies around the world, is it unique?

WEINSTEIN: Yes. As a written constitution I would say it‘s close to unique. That‘s – the prime minister of Iraq, Mr. Jaafari, visiting the Archives right in front of the Constitution, we have a new program that I‘ve started at the Archives of inviting foreign heads of state who are here visiting the president or the Congress.

When they have a few hours to kill, instead of spending them looking at French impressionist art at one of our wonderful museums, or going down to a mall and buying some stuff, bring them over to the Archives. We will give them a tour. We will lecture them on – give them a lecture on our – on the great documents that we have there, let them learn something about America.

The prime minister was filled with questions about – interestingly enough, about separation of powers. Of course, in the Iraqi situation you can understand why. I think there are educational lessons there for all of us.

In the rotunda, it has not only the Constitution, but it has the Declaration of Independence, and it has the Bill of Rights. But when you see the four pages of the Constitution spread out on parchment, which we now have there – and by the way, we‘re adding – on Constitution Day Ross Perot has donated his copy of the Magna Carta. It‘s a 1297 original…

LAMB: Permanently?

WEINSTEIN: It‘s on loan. It‘s on loan. We hope that Mr. Perot is sufficiently happy with the way we treat it that it becomes permanent. But for the moment it‘s on loan. But we‘re opening that up on Constitution Day, the 17th.

But the four pages of the document, you look at it and you see in much clearer fashion than you would just in ordinary print the dominant role of Congress in the early republic. Two of the four pages are on Article I, on the role of Congress.

Then you have the Article II dealing with the presidency. And you ask yourself, how long would Article II be, how strong would the presidential powers be had George Washington not existed? If you hadn‘t – if everybody involved had not known that Washington was going to be the president, what would they have made of that office? Something very different, I think.

Article III on the court system, the smallest of all three articles. They hadn‘t worked it out. I think it has been an extraordinary experience touring this with the Iraqi prime minister, the Russian chief justice of the supreme court. Vaclav Havel toured with us a month-and-a-half ago.

I want to introduce people to the documents of our country, starting with the important ones.

LAMB: Are you – as you know, there are people who are aficionados of the Declaration of Independence, some of the Constitution, some of the Bill of Rights. Which one of those three are your favorite – is your favorite and why?

WEINSTEIN: That‘s a hard one. That‘s a very hard one.

LAMB: All right. Which one is the most important, do you think, in history?

WEINSTEIN: In history, well, the Bill of Rights, of course, are part of the Constitution, so I would say the Constitution. I would say the Constitution. We‘re still here. We‘re more than 200 years into civil wars and world wars and every conceivable kind of crisis and tragedy.

And we‘ve survived and we‘ve prospered as a nation so that, for example, the current archivist of the United States, depending on who you‘re talking to, I‘m the first Jewish-American archivist or the first Semitic-American archivist. My Lebanese and other Arabic friends call me the first Semitic archivist. Hell of a country, possible nowhere else.

LAMB: As you sit there in the archivist job and you look out to all the collections, what have you discovered personally that when you get some time you want to go after yourself?

WEINSTEIN: Well, I wish I had discovered it sooner. But let me share something with you. We have a project known as the Civil War Conservation Project, which is a group of 60 volunteers. We have a wonderful cast of volunteers. Many of them retired people who are very expert professionals.

And they – this particular group has been working on Civil War records, and we put them about five or six years ago on the records of the Freedmen‘s Bureau, the agency that helped freed slaves and assist them in every conceivable way during the Reconstruction era.

And they have done an extraordinary job of getting those papers ready for microfilming, digitization, and the rest. All the – we are obviously supervising – have some people supervising them, but volunteers.

There is an unknown American history that we started working with Lonnie Bunch, the new head of the African-American Museum of History and Culture on some joint programming. He‘s interested in this as well.

But I would go to work – and it‘s probably too long to read, but I would go to work on that material if I could.

LAMB: "Transcription of Samuel Cable (ph): A Letter To His Wife," this is what you have given me.

WEINSTEIN: Yes.

LAMB: Yes.

WEINSTEIN: I would go to work on that, because you‘re rediscovering people who have been left out of history up to now, and they‘ve got to be brought back in, and they are being brought back in, and we‘re doing some of that work and I‘m very proud of that.

LAMB: We‘re out of time. Allen Weinstein, archivist of the United States, thanks for joining us.