Shots In The Dark: Bush: More Liberal than Harvard

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Bush: More Liberal than Harvard

The New York Times reports that historians are fighting President Bush to gain access to presidential papers after he signed a law restricting said access.

In December 1989, one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Malta and, in the words of a Soviet spokesman, “buried the cold war at the bottom of the Mediterranean.”

The Russian transcript of that momentous summit was published in Moscow in 1993. Fourteen years later American historians are still waiting for their own government to release a transcript.

Fourteen years! Why, that's outrageous.

Except...oh....wait...that's actually 36 years fewer than it would take to gain access to papers of the Harvard Corporation. And Harvard is a university, which theoretically believes in scholarship, free speech, access to archival materials, and so on and so on...

Well, Harvard now has an historian as president. Perhaps Drew Faust will change the Corporation's noxious 50-year-rule?

¶ 11:15 PM

Comments:

Did you see the three-part Frontline, "News Wars," that ended last week? Dealt with this issue and many others (Plamegate, Balco, etc.). Terrific series. Still far and away the most informative show on television, and the ones done by Lowell Bergman are the best of them.

Whether you agree with their pov or not, it was a fascinating account of the administration's stance on the media--that the media does not have a legitimate checks and balances right to information, or at least not in any fashion similar to congress and the judicial branch. IMHO, the media came out of the series looking to be in the right, but I was shocked at how close it was. Plenty of issues--such as the unnecessary detail of the NYT wire-tapping story (particularly the 2nd)--made the media look really dangerous.

# posted by Anonymous : March 8, 2007 7:34 AM

I didn't see it, no. But the Bush Administration's obsession with secrecy long predates that Times piece. I think this rule about presidential documents was signed very early in his first term.

# posted by Richard Bradley : March 8, 2007 7:49 AM

About Me