THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020 21
koff ’s book is or was ever classified.) And
Trump hasn’t stopped: last year, he re-
quired doctors and staff who treated him
at the Walter Reed National Military
Medical Center to sign N.D.A.s.
Hardly a day passes that Trump does
not attempt to suppress evidence, as if
all the world were in violation of an
N.D.A. never to speak ill of him. He has
sought to discredit publications and
broadcasts that question him, investiga-
tions that expose him, crowds that pro-
test him, polls that fail to favor him, and,
down to the bitter end, ballots cast against
him. None of this bodes well for the his-
torical record and for the scheduled trans-
fer of materials from the White House
to the National Archives, on January 20,
- That morning, even as President-
elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr., is ascending
the steps of the Capitol, staffers from the
archives will presumably be in the White
House, unlocking doors, opening desks,
packing boxes, and removing hard drives.
What might be missing, that day, from
file drawers and computer servers at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue is difficult to say.
But records that were never kept, were
later destroyed, or are being destroyed
right now chronicle the day-to-day do-
ings of one of the most consequential
Presidencies in American history and
might well include evidence of crimes,
violations of the Constitution, and human-
rights abuses. It took a very long time to
establish rules governing the fate of Pres-
idential records. Trump does not mind
breaking rules and, in the course of a
long life, has regularly done so with im-
punity. The Presidential Records Act isn’t
easily enforceable. The Trump Presidency
nearly destroyed the United States. Will
what went on in the darker corners of
his White House ever be known?
“
T
he truth behind a President’s ac-
tions can be found only in his offi-
cial papers,” Harry S. Truman said in
1949, “and every Presidential paper is
official.” Truman became an advocate of
archival preservation after learning about
the fate of his predecessors’ papers. When
George Washington left office, in 1797,
he brought his papers back to Mount
Vernon, but, loaned out, they were “ex-
tensively mutilated by rats and other-
wise injured by damp”; eventually, they
were carried by the historian Jared Sparks
to Massachusetts, where Sparks threw
out anything he didn’t like, scrapped
what he found worthless, gave away much
of the rest, and, beginning in 1837, pub-
lished what he liked best as “The Writ-
ings of George Washington.”
For many years, there was no alter-
native for a departing President but to
take his papers home with him; there
wasn’t really any place to put them.
Thomas Jefferson, “having no confi-
dence that the office of the private sec-
retary of the President of the U.S. will
ever be a regular and safe deposit for
public papers,” took pains to deposit
many of his papers with his Cabinet de-
partments. In 1810, Congress established
a Committee on Ancient Public Rec-
ords and Archives of the United States.
It reported that the records of the fed-
eral government were “in a state of great
disorder and exposure; and in a situa-
tion neither safe nor convenient nor
honorable to the nation.” Congress took
little action. In 1814, the congressional
library burned to the ground.
Most of the papers of William Henry
Harrison, the log-cabin candidate, suc-
cumbed to flames when that log cabin
burned down. Those of both John Tyler
and Zachary Taylor were largely de-
stroyed during the Civil War. In 1853,
when Millard Fillmore left the White
House, he had his papers shipped to a
mansion in Buffalo. He died in 1874,
having made no provisions for the pa-
pers. When Fillmore’s only son died, in
1889, his will ordered his executors to
“burn or otherwise effectively destroy all
correspondence or letters to or from my
father.” Only by the merest miracle were
forty-four volumes of Fillmore’s Presi-
dential-letter books found in an attic of
a house, in 1908, and only because it was
on the verge of being demolished.
Chester Arthur’s son had most of his
father’s Presidential papers burned in
three garbage cans. “The only place I
ever found in my life to put a paper so
as to find it again was either a side coat-
pocket or the hands of a clerk,” Ulysses S.
Grant once said. For years after Grant’s
Administration, scholars were able to
locate hardly any of his Presidential pa-
pers. In 1888, Congress urged the Li-
brary of Congress to collect the papers
of the Presidents. In the eighteen-nine-
ties, the library established a Manuscript
Division, and a historian who later be-
came its chief began lobbying for the
establishment of a National Archives;
meanwhile, the American Historical
Association formed a Public Archives
Commission. In 1910, after the commis-
sion reported that “many of the records
of the Government have in the past
been lost or destroyed,” the A.H.A. pe-
titioned Congress to build a depository.
Congress authorized the funds, but no
plan was undertaken until after the close
of the First World War.
Grover Cleveland, during his two
terms, preferred to communicate in per-
son, leaving no paper trail. He insisted
that the records of his Presidency were
his personal property and, in 1886, re-
fused to turn over papers that the Senate
had demanded: “if I saw fit to destroy
them no one could complain.” (That is
what, during the Presidency of Dwight D.
Eisenhower, came to be called “execu-
tive privilege.”) Cleveland’s contention
became a convention: the President’s pa-
pers belong to the President, who can
deny requests for disclosure not only
from the public but from other branches
of the federal government. William
McKinley was assassinated in 1901; his
secretary held on to his papers until 1935,
when he donated them to the Library
of Congress, where they remained under
his, and later his son’s, tight control until
- In 1924, a raft of papers from the
Taft, Wilson, and Harding Administra-
tions were found in the attic of the White
House. Warren Harding’s Presidency
was riven by scandal; after his death, his
wife told the chief of the Manuscript
Division of the Library of Congress that
she had destroyed all his papers, although
she had burned only those she thought
“would harm his memory.” Most of the
rest she left to the Harding Memorial
Association. The Library of Congress
acquired a cache of those and other pa-
pers in 1972, on the condition that they
be closed to the public until 2014. (They
turned out to include a thousand pages
of love letters between Harding and his
mistress. “Won’t you please destroy?” he
wrote her in one letter. She did not de-
stroy.) Calvin Coolidge instructed his
private secretary to destroy all his per-
sonal files; on Coolidge’s death, the sec-
retary said, “There would have been noth-
ing preserved if I had not taken some
things out on my own responsibility.”
In 1933, Herbert Hoover laid the
cornerstone of the National Archives
