165 War Department General and Special

Staffs, including the Office of the Chief of Staff, the Civil Affairs Division, G-2, Operations Division and its predecessors, G3, Special Plans Division, and others 168 National Guard Bureau

171 Office of Civilian Defense

175 Chemical Warfare Service

226 Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services

238 U.S. Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality

247 Office of the Chief of Chaplains

313 Naval Operating Forces

319 Army Staff, including various G-2 Intelligence Publication Files

330 Office of the Secretary of Defense (World War II Munitions Board records)

331 12th Army Group, 6th Army Group, and First Allied Airborne Army

332 U. S. Theaters of War, World War II
333 Munitions Assignment Board
334 Military Mission to Moscow

337 Army Ground Forces

338 Army Commands, including the Western Defense Command

389 Provost Marshal General

394 Army Continental Commands, 1920-42 407 Adjutant General's Office, including all World War II operational reports

WILLIAM J. STEWART

In January 1970, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library embarked upon a sweeping and systematic review of restricted and classified documents among its holdings. Scholars and other archivists have suggested that it would be productive to recount our experiences in this enterprise, for nothing in the archival field causes more confusion and hard feeling than denying access to the historical record. In addition, the Roosevelt library's experience may suggest a realistic schedule of access to presidential papers as well as point up certain problems encountered in moving masses of documents from closed cage to open shelf.

FDR library director Herman Kahn, speaking before the annual convention of the American Historical Association in 1953, could report that 85 percent of the Roosevelt record was available for research. Over the next seventeen years this percentage climbed-perhaps struggled is a more accurate word - to about 93 percent. The seven percent restricted represents 850,000 to 900,000 pages of manuscript. The holdings of the library contain three classes of restricted documents: security classified, donor restricted, and agency restricted. The review program was devoted entirely to examining donor restricted and security classified materials. The only records in the Roosevelt library now closed by agency restriction are those of the Secret Serv

ice relating to the safety of the president, 1934 to 1945.

Security classified documents are closed or restricted under authority of congressional statute or executive order. Documents carrying the World War II classification of top secret, secret, confidential, or restricted were scattered throughout the presidential files, the Harry Hopkins papers, the Morgenthau diaries, and fifty other collections. Donors of personal papers have the legal right to restrict them and most, including Franklin Roosevelt, have done so. The donor may seal a collection or parts of it for a number of years or, more often, executes a deed of conveyance that directs the library to restrict temporarily certain classes of items. These items relate to personal matters and confidential business affairs or certain information that might be used to embarrass, injure, or harass living persons. Investigative files concerning individuals and organizations, and information about foreign affairs the disclosure of which might damage relations with friendly nations are also restricted.

In recent years restricted documents have been a major source of conflict between researcher and archivist. Donor restrictions, particularly, if one gauges the academic temper aright, incite discontent. The researcher's attitude is understandable and his frustrations

real. He sees his labors impeded or undermined by what seems to be the tyranny of the small man behind the desk. An archivist is neither an obstructionist nor a censor but is a trustee who is obliged by law to exercise his trusteeship. Presidential libraries often receive papers that include confidences of a personal or official nature. Simply put, the archivist's primary obligation as trustee is to protect the donor's right of privacy and to protect information vital to national defense. The word protect is used advisedly. It does not imply shielding documents from justifiable public examination.

Before passing on to a history of the library's review and declassification program, a brief reference to the language of restriction is in order. There is one word often used in donorimposed restrictions that has caused mischief and ill will. The offending word is embarrassment, and many resent its use and question its application. Its meaning is so indistinct and hazy, researchers contend, that documents judged the least bit controversial by archivists. are withheld by invoking its power. Besides, the prospect that someone might be embarrassed, historians argue, is not as a rule good and sufficient reason for withholding documents. Nonetheless, there must be some means of protecting legitimate privacy. The issue is an important one and must be dealt with by both historians and archivists at an early moment. Perhaps recent developments in the law of privacy can give us the concept if not the specific language that will be accepted by people generally as an appropriate restriction standard. For instance, do we not have an obligation to restrict information the disclosure of which would be a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy or result in the defamation of a living person?

The review and declassification project, as mentioned earlier, began in January 1970. It was a good time for two reasons. First, most of our holdings were at least twenty-five years old, sufficiently old, we were persuaded, to warrant such a review. Second, the recent arrival of three archivists, thanks to a supplemental appropriation, gave us the reinforcements needed to undertake such a task. The prime movers in the review were the archivist of the United States, James B. Rhoads, and the then director of the Roosevelt library, James E. O'Neill. Their support of the principle of access was real and persevering. Although O'Neill left

Hyde Park for Washington in 1971, his successors, J. C. James and William R. Emerson, shared his determination to open as much material as possible as soon as possible.

We began our review with the correspondence of Ambassador William C. Bullitt. Sometimes splenetic, often sharp, Bullitt's portraits of fellow diplomats served as an instructive initiation to our task. The results of this pilot review were surprisingly promising - and portentous. Almost all of Bullitt's communications could be opened save a few letters to his close friend and confidant, Counselor R. Walton Moore of the Department of State. The opening of donor restricted material, it must be remembered, is done at the discretion of the archivist, acting on behalf of the donor and in accordance with the donor's instructions. In examining such material the archivist applied the test of time: Had the passing years rendered inconsequential the reason for an item being closed in the first place? Because the archivists were working with files at least twenty-five years old, decisions were made speedily and without consultation. Archivists were encouraged to discuss cases among themselves, however, to assure uniformity in their decisions.

The first two years of review and declassification were devoted almost entirely to presidential papers: President's Secretary's File, President's Personal File, President's Official File, and Map Room File. We soon became aware of two problems. First, such a review could only be performed by an archivist with substantial experience and with a security clearance; second, at that time only the agency of origin or custody could authorize the declassifying of security material, even though it was more than twenty-five years old. As late as mid-1971, no federal agency had published complete guidelines for declassifying World War II records. For this reason we at first made little headway in reviewing Roosevelt's wartime diplomatic, military, and intelligence files. A break occurred late in 1971, when the Roosevelt library received a declassification guideline issued by the archivist of the United States for review of White House classified material through 1945. Armed with this authority archivists began to open Roosevelt's wartime communications with ambassadors, cabinet officers, military leaders, and the heads of foreign governments, including Winston Churchill. The archives staff, at this juncture, could not

take action on classified communications received by Roosevelt. In the months immediately following, the British government and the Department of State issued guidelines for their records. The library's holdings, however, contained security documents classified by dozens of other federal offices. Declassification of such documents is not discretionary; it is governed by executive order and by agency-imposed guidelines. Clearly, government archivists were in need of central direction and oversight if declassification was to proceed apace.

This need was fulfilled on March 8, 1972, when President Nixon signed Executive Order 11652, which required that federal agencies adopt and publish schedules to declassify their World War II materials. This is not the place for a history of Executive Order 11652. Yet scholars ought to know that the archivists of the National Archives played a prominent role in its preparation and issuance. Within eighteen months most agencies had forwarded declassification instructions to the National Archives. One that did not do so was the Central Intelligence Agency, which is the custodian of the Office of Strategic Services files. However, the CIA readily agreed to examine and to decide on some 900 reports from OSS Director William J. Donovan to Roosevelt. It did so promptly and declassified over 95 percent of them.

The library's review activity reached its peak in 1973 and 1974. The review and declassification program involved sixty manuscript collections, including those of both the president and Mrs. Roosevelt, Morgenthau, Hopkins, Oscar Cox, and Adolf A. Berle, Jr., and the records of the War Refugee Board, Soviet Protocol Committee, and American War Production Mission to China. By 1975 only some mopping up remained, as it used to be said in war communiqués. The magnitude and effect of the review were clearly reflected in the statistics. Between 1970 and 1975 archivists opened 825,000 pages of formerly closed material, of which 450,000 pages were security classified. Over 99 percent of the library's manuscript holdings, excluding Secret Service files, are now open. Thus after thirty years the closed material in the Roosevelt

library has been reduced to four pages of every thousand. From 1970 to 1975 the library staff devoted 19,000 hours or 30 percent of its time to reading, opening, and declassifying documents. This figure represents not one but numerous reviews in the wake of ever-changing and newly issued guidelines. In reckoning this time we include several thousand hours spent recording and publicizing what had been done, an obligation assumed by the library on behalf of its users. Every document opened was listed, dated, and filed in an "openings book" for researchers. Informing researchers of the opening of material presented practical difficulties. The number of such documents and the number of interested researchers are large. Attempts at individual notification were not satisfactory; researchers, particularly doctoral candidates, often move and do not provide us with new addresses. Furthermore, research topics are often so broad or involved that there is no way of knowing what will be of value to an individual scholar. We made arrangements to publish listings of recently opened material in each issue of Prologue. The same information is sent to the other major historical and archival journals. In addition, lists of documents-six thousand pages in seventeen binders - are maintained in looseleaf form in the library's research

room.

Not unexpectedly, the surge of new openings, with periodic publicity, including frontpage coverage in the New York Times, stimulated reference activity. The period from 1971 to 1975 was far and away the library's busiest, averaging 1,360 research visits each year, a rise of 30 percent over the previous five-year period. Any suggestion that scholarly interest in Franklin Roosevelt and his era has reached a plateau or has begun to decline is not borne out by the experience at Hyde Park.

Only a relative handful of documents now remain closed, and during the next year or so even those should be halved. The archives staff is happy to turn to more traditional archival tasks, yet each one of them can take pleasure in the completion of an important task performed with dispatch and skill.