Kutler: Restore access to presidential papers

“Really makes you wonder what’s in those papers,” muses Stanley Kutler, UW–Madison’s E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions.

Kutler’s wonderment is rooted in President Bush’s recent executive order barring, in the interest of national security, access to presidential records.

Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, papers, tapes and other presidential materials became public record after 12 years; records from the Reagan administration would be opening now if not for the new executive order.

If it stands, scholarly inquiry in a number of disciplines will be undercut severely, Kutler says. “Research by historians, archivists and journalists depends on access to records,” he says. “This executive order has the potential to stall a great deal of work.”

Kutler’s own work in the last decade dealt with the presidential records — audio tapes, to be precise — of Richard Nixon. In 1992, Kutler successfully filed suit to have the tapes dealing with the Watergate break-in declared open. Now, 10 years later, he has joined a lawsuit to reinstate the Presidential Records Act.

John Cooper, Kutler’s colleague in the UW–Madison Department of History and an authority on Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, doesn’t think the matter will get to court.

“I think Congress will chip away at it,” he says, noting that the elder Bush tried and failed during his presidency to prevent access to Oliver North’s e-mails in the Iran-Contra affair.

Kutler concurs. “Congress is looking for an honorable way out of this (executive order),” he says. “Both parties are committed to overturning it — this is not in any way a partisan issue.”

But he says it may well be a family matter — George Bush Sr. was Reagan’s vice president, after all.

“Bush Jr. has been aiming toward this (executive order) since the day he took office,” Kutler says.