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Henry Kissinger's Claims that the Telcons Were "Private"
Problems Encountered by State Department Historians In Conducting Research in the Kissinger Collection

 


 
For immediate release,
9 August 2001
For further information:
Thomas Blanton, Archive director, 202/994-7068
William Burr, senior analyst, 202/994-7032
Lee Rubin, Mayer Brown & Platt, 202/263-3267
ARCHIVE HAILS TURNOVER OF KISSINGER PAPERS
GWU Group Persuades State Department to Recover Telephone Transcripts
Washington, D.C., August 9 – The State Department today announced that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had returned 10,000 pages of transcripts of his telephone conversations conducted while in office from 1973 through January 1977, and spokesman Richard Boucher credited the National Security Archive for prompting the Department to seek this return.

“These telcons are a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour verbatim record of the highest-level foreign policy deliberations of the U.S. government during Mr. Kissinger’s tenure at State,” commented Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a foreign policy documentation center based at George Washington University.  “We applaud the State Department for taking action to recover these unique and invaluable historical documents, and we commend Mr. Kissinger’s decision to do the right thing.”

The transcripts had been locked up in the Library of Congress under a purported deed of gift from Mr. Kissinger since December 1976, with access strictly controlled by Mr. Kissinger until five years after his death.  A federal district judge and a U.S. court of appeals panel both ruled in the late 1970s that the transcripts were government records, improperly removed from the State Department, but these decisions were vacated in 1980 by the Supreme Court in Reporters’ Committee v. Kissinger for lack of standing by the plaintiffs, rather than on the merits of the case.  For a complete review of the legal issues and chronology, see the draft legal complaint sent by the National Security Archive to the Department of State and the National Archives on January 25, 2001, and the correspondence between the government and the National Security Archive’s pro bono lawyers, Lee Rubin and Craig Isenberg at Mayer, Brown & Platt.

The National Security Archive first wrote the Archivist of the United States on January 15, 1999 requesting government action to recover the Kissinger telcons.  After receiving the draft legal complaint in January 2001, the government entered extended negotiations with the Archive and its lawyers.  The State Department’s Legal Adviser, William H. Taft IV, took the lead in corresponding with Mr. Kissinger, and obtained the affirmative response that produced the document handover announced today.

“Now the Justice Department and the National Archives need to recover the telcons from Mr. Kissinger’s years as national security adviser to President Nixon,” noted Dr. William Burr, senior analyst at the National Security Archive and editor of The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow (New York: The New Press, 1999).  “Today’s announcement shows that the government’s own lawyers have concluded the telcons are government records, and we call on Mr. Kissinger to do his duty under the Presidential Records Act and provide the National Archives with a full set of his White House telephone transcripts.”

Henry Kissinger, Deed of Gift and Agreement with United States Library of Congress, November 12, 1976, 6 pp.
Henry Kissinger, Second Deed of Gift and Agreement with United States Library of Congress, December 24, 1976, 1 p.
National Security Archive to Archivist of the United States John W. Carlin, January 15, 1999, 1 p.
Archivist of the United States John W. Carlin to National Security Archive, January 21, 1999, 1 p.
Attorneys for National Security Archive to National Archives and Records Administration and Department of State, January 25, 2001, 2 pp. [Encloses letter from State Department Spokesman James P. Rubin to Archivist of the United States John W. Carlin, 2 pp.]
Complaint by National Security Archive presented to the Archivist of the United States and the Secretary of State, January 25, 2001, 10 pp. [Attachment to previous letter]
Attorneys for National Security Archive to Department of State, National Archives and Records Administration, and Department of Justice, April 25, 2001, 3 pp.
United States Department of State Press Release, "Former Secretary of State Kissinger Provides Department with Documents," August 8, 2001

The following is an example of a Kissinger telephone conversation transcript that was found in a collection of his records at the National Archives:
Telcon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Edwin H. Yeo, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs, August 21, 1976, 2 pp.

 

Henry Kissinger's Claims that the Telcons Were "Private"

1. [Tony] Judt, based on [William] Bundy, asserts that I have reclassified public papers as “personal” in order to close them to “prying eyes.” This is flatly untrue. No public document has ever been reclassified by me. Well over 90 percent of the papers in my collection at the Library of Congress are copies of originals in the files of either the State Department or the Nixon and Ford libraries. They are available to researchers on the terms established by the originating departments.
The only unique papers in the collection are records of telephone conversations that a court of law—not I—held to be personal papers and that never were treated as public papers before that.
--Henry Kissinger, letter to editor, New York Review of Books, 24 September 1998

2.  Every document in the Library of Congress is the copy of an original in the State Department, the Ford Library, or the National Archives. (The only exceptions are telephone conversations ruled by the US Supreme Court as private. However, in October 1998, I gave access to these conversations to the State Department historians so that they might extract portions relevant to foreign policy decisions for inclusion in their publications.)
--Henry Kissinger letter to editor, New York Review of Books, 12 March 1999)

3. The "Kissinger Collection" in the Library of Congress also contains rough transcripts of telephone conversations that the Supreme Court in 1980 ruled to be private. In 1998 I voluntarily made these available to State Department historians so that they could determine which, if any, might be useful for the Foreign Relations of the United States series. In short, no historian has had access impaired by the location of duplicates of my papers in the Library of Congress.
--Henry Kissinger, letter to the editor, The New York Times Book Review, 18 April 1999
 


Problems Encountered by State Department Historians In Conducting Research in the Kissinger Collection

1. Report of Advisory Commitee to the Department of State on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, for the Period January 1, 2000 - December 1, 2000, Excerpt: Kissinger Papers and the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act

As noted in last year's report, the Committee has been concerned about access to the papers of Henry Kissinger at the Library of Congress. Transcripts of telephone conversations selected for inclusion in FRUS arrived from the Library of Congress with many deletions. The Historian's Office was unable to determine how significant these deletions were because access procedures prevent HO staff from taking notes or otherwise determining the original full content of the documents. Although Dr. Kissinger's personal intervention and the assistance of his representative, Peter Rodman, often ameliorate this situation, it remains a problem. The HO needs to review the excisions to determine if they are legitimately personal or if they threaten the preservation and authenticity of the historical record. The Committee believes that the Library of Congress has established an inappropriate system of access and that the Kissinger papers should be deposited at NARA.

2. Minutes, Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation April 10-11, 2000, Report of the Subcommittee on the Kissinger Papers and PFIAB Records, Excerpts

[Philip] Zelilow asked if HO [Historical Office] Historians could bring back copies from the Library of Congress.  David Geyer said no, they cannot even make a list of documents requested. Zelikow declared that this was unsatisfactory and recommended calling their bluff. Regarding the letter to  [Archivist John] Carlin, he pointed out that it will be hard to complain later if it is ineffective.  ....

[Warren] Kimball asked other Committee members how they felt.

[Robert] Schulzinger stated that there was a full agenda, the subcommittee had recommended that HO make contact with Kissinger's agent [Peter] Rodman, and suggested that another subcommittee could examine the issue again in July. Kimball suggested that the [James] Rubin letter to Carlin did not pass "the smell test" and did nothing to help public access to the Kissinger records or improve HO's access. [Frank] Mackaman suggested that it was impossible to separate "the smell" from practicalities.

Zelikow stated that the Department should change its position. This was not a marginal issue and he wanted the Committee to go on record on it. Kimball said he wanted more information, that he was uncomfortable deciding on the issue without it.

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