"Historian With a History"

Jon Wiener, LA Times

The nominee for U.S. archivist has a penchant for dubious methods.

Go ahead, try. Name the archivist of the United States.

It's a pretty fair bet you failed. The archivist, former Kansas Gov. John Carlin, oversees the nation's most important documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. The position has traditionally been one of the lower-profile jobs in the federal hierarchy, but, as its website notes, the National Archives is not simply "a dusty hoard of ancient history. It is a public trust on which our democracy depends. It enables people to inspect for themselves the record of what government has done."The archives collects and preserves the records of government, including many presidential papers and documents from hearings such as those conducted last month by the 9/11 commission. In the next year, the archives will be preparing the release of papers from President George H.W. Bush's term in office.

Researchers rely heavily on the archives' documents and on its commitment to openness and access, which may be why so many historians are deeply worried about President Bush's nomination last month of historian Allen Weinstein to take over the job from Carlin next year.

The White House nominee has a controversial history involving charges of excessive secrecy and of ethical violations. Almost two dozen organizations of archivists and historians have expressed concern about his nomination, and will almost certainly speak against it at Senate hearings later this year.

The charges against Weinstein center on ethical issues involving access to research materials he used in writing two books. Other historians have not been permitted to see his documents and interviews, which violates the standards of the American Historical Association and the Society of American Archivists.

Weinstein's 1999 book, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America — The Stalin Era (coauthored with a Russian-speaking former KGB agent named Alexander Vassiliev), is based on documents said to come from KGB archives.

Weinstein's publisher, Random House, paid approximately $100,000 to an organization of retired KGB agents to gain exclusive access to the documents for its authors — something widely regarded as a violation of research ethics. It's wrong for a historian (or his publisher) to pay archivists not to provide information to anyone else. It prevents others from checking the accuracy and completeness of the resulting work.

After the archival operation at the KGB had been going on for two years, the Russian government closed it down. It has remained closed ever since, leaving Vassiliev (Weinstein doesn't speak Russian) as one of the few people to have had access to it. The result, says Anna K. Nelson, a historian with expertise in government archives policy, is that "we have no way to confirm the contents of this book."

Other historians with other publishers did it the right way: When Yale University Press obtained access to the Communist Party archives in Moscow, editors declared that their documents would be available to other researchers. Jonathan Brent, executive editor of the "Annals of Communism" book series at Yale, explained that "we want to enhance scholarship, not impede it."

Full story is: here.

[Jon Wiener is a professor of history at UC Irvine and contributing editor to the Nation magazine. His forthcoming book is Historians in Trouble.]