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Let me begin by noting some of the things that my colleagues and I were not surprised to discover as we researched the history of the Foreign Relations series. We found devoted champions of transparency debating equally zealous guardians of security over how to keep necessary secrets while fostering public accountability. We saw decision-makers face the same dilemmas over and over again even as practices and institutions evolved and contexts shifted. We also grew more aware of what we already appreciated implicitly, having been hired by the U.S. Government to push for the publication of its own secrets: that the impulse for openness has proven tenacious even in the face of temporary reverses. We were surprised, however, by many of the details of FRUS’s 220-odd years story–including the fact that the story was, indeed, that long. This morning, I’d like to outline some of our unexpected findings related to three broad themes: the role of Congress, the evolving mission of the series, and the actual stories behind some of its delays and gaps.

We knew that Congress would be involved in our story, but we were surprised by how central a role it played for so long. The inaugural 1861 volume marked the regularization of how the US Government released diplomatic records to Congress. Before 1861, the Executive Branch transmitted documents to Congress in response to specific requests and withheld information that it deemed too sensitive to release. After 1861, the State Department produced annual FRUS volumes alongside these traditional targeted compilations of requested documents.

For much of the 20th century, Congress used its power of the purse to influence FRUS.In the late 1920s, Congress endorsed the Department’s professionalization of the series by funding a new publication program.In the mid-1950s, Congressional Republicans tied increases in the FRUS budgetto accelerated coverage of controversial issues like Roosevelt’s summits and US-China relations.In the 1970s, Sen. George McGovern sponsored a provision enjoining the Department from radically changing the format or reducing the scope of FRUS in response to academic concerns about plans to condense the series and replace printed volumes with microfiche.

Finally in 1990, after a decade-long crisis in the FRUS series, Congress enshrined responsible transparency practices in law. When the Department fought legislation to govern the production of FRUS and the declassification of Department records, its lobbying backfired. In November 1990, Senate staffers briefed the HAC that the Department’s resistance had made Congressional intervention inevitable.

We were also surprised to discover how many times the series had been threatened with termination or corruption – or, to employ another perspective, how durable the series has been.FRUS survived because it was an effective way to fulfill necessary tasks and because its “objectivity” and “comprehensiveness” earned it committed defenders.

In the 1870s, FRUS proved its worth after Secretary Hamilton Fish tried to forego publication of the diplomatic correspondence in 1869. As Congressional requests mounted, Fish reinstated FRUS as an efficient tool for reporting Department activities even though it caused occasional operational and political headaches.

After FRUS acquired its lag from currency in the first decades of the 20th century, its mission had to change. Harry Dwight, the official in charge of the series in 1924, wasn’t even sure it would survive. At the end of that year, the Department hired Tyler Dennett as the first professional historian to take charge of FRUS. He drafted new principles to guide the editing of the series and urged Department leaders to leave their official papers in the Department’s files to preserve a record of the decision-making process. Dennett laid out a new vision for FRUS that traded timeliness for comprehensiveness.

In the 1940s and 1950s, policymakers and historians disagreed about the purpose of FRUS. The professional historians charged with producing the series wanted to preserve its objectivity. In the midst of World War II, they pressed for publishing a comprehensive record of the 1919 peace negotiations. FDR and other senior policymakers, on the other hand, wanted to promote propaganda and popular mobilization objectives. In 1943, Roosevelt vetoed publication of Wilson’s Council of Four negotiations at Versailles and instead endorsed Secretary Hull’s proposal to publish documents on U.S.-Japanese relations between 1931 and 1941 in the 1943 “Peace and War” volumes. These volumes did not conform to the editorial standards that Dennett introduced in 1925. In 1952, FRUS historians added an accelerated–but objective–volume on US-Soviet relations during the 1930s to a broader Cold War documentary arsenal. Although compilers worked to assure the integrity of FRUS, mid-century efforts to use history as a weapon left the series vulnerable to corruption.

In the mid-1950s, Congressional efforts to politicize FRUS threw the series into crisis. When Republicans took over the Senate in 1953, Majority Leader William Knowland requested that the Department produce special, accelerated volumes on Roosevelt’s wartime summits and US relations with China. These volumes demanded greater interagency collaboration than ever before, and confronted Department historians with thorny clearance issues that delayed publication. Frustrated with these delays and suspicious of his superiors, the volume’s compiler went rogue and leaked information to the press. Faced with mounting public pressure to release the Yalta record, an assistant secretary leaked the volume in draft form to the New York Times in March 1955. Fallout from the leak threatened interagency cooperation and alarmed the academic community. Congress held hearings and launched an investigation. In 1957, the Department created a Historical Advisory Committee to safeguard the integrity of the FRUS series and advise on editorial matters, completing the shift from its 19th century mission of immediate accountability to its 20th century role as a contested instrument of objective historical transparency.

Jumping forward, the 1991 FRUS statute both reaffirmed this shift after the prolonged crisis of the 1980s and served as a springboard into a new phase of procedural, institutional, and conceptual adaptation leading into the 21st century. Although FRUS stakeholders hoped that the law would resolve all the problems the series faced over documenting intelligence activities and the role of the Advisory Committee during the previous decade, it could not. Instead, it empowered Department historians and the academic community in new ways as they continued negotiating the proper role of the series and the boundaries of responsible transparency.

We also encountered unexpected stories behind many of the delays or gaps in coverage that had always been attributed to concerns about endangering “national security.” The first volume to appear more than a year after the documents it contained was the 1898 FRUS. Its delay was not caused by fears of adverse diplomatic or political repercussions but by bureaucratic confusion following an internal reorganization. In fact, as the Department addressed the delay in 1900 and 1901, senior officials worked to incorporate additional sensitive documentation that had been withheld from Congress in 1899.

The FRUS lag that began in the early 20th century resulted from rising printing costs and tightening resource constraints, not elevated concerns for security. When the 1906 volume was not published in 1907, Secretary Elihu Root demanded an explanation and directed Department officials to restore the series to currency. Owing to budgetary factors, they failed to do so before World War I erupted. After the war began, the Department was simply too overwhelmed to address the FRUS lag. Despite a steady erosion in timeliness between 1906 and 1924, Department officials consistently advocated returning FRUS to near-contemporaneous publication in Congressional testimony. Gradually, however, they implicitly recalibrated their own expectations for timeliness and abandoned the 19th century norm of immediate or nearly-immediate publication.

Decades later, Department historians and the Advisory Committee tried to justify additional resources for the series in the mid- and late-1960s by convincing the Department leadership that accelerating publication could mobilize public support for the Vietnam War. They argued that releasing the record of the early postwar period would undercut Cold War revisionism, dampen antiwar ferment on college campuses, and buttress public support for containment. This gambit failed on both fronts: the Department didn’t devote more resources for FRUS and the publication of volumes documenting the early Cold War years did not impeach revisionist historiography.

More recently, when national security concerns did impinge on FRUS during the 1980s, many participants misattributed responsibility for the erosion of transparency. The Historian’s Office and the Advisory Committee developed a distorted understanding of key FRUS excisions that left them bewildered when resistance to including covert operations in the series persisted after the passage of the FRUS statute.

The Department of State – not the CIA – was responsible for the erosion of transparency in FRUS during the 1980s. In 1978, the Department reformed its declassification process in response to Carter EO 12065. Although intended to promote greater openness, Carter’s initiative had unintended consequences that empowered transparency skeptics in the newly-created Classification/Declassification Center. In 1980, the CDC re-reviewed cleared but unpublished FRUS volumes using more restrictive declassification policies. David Trask, the director of the Historian’s Office, was forced out of the Department after he made an unsuccessful Dissent Channel appeal of the re-review. In 1981, the Department curtailed HO’s role in coordinating interagency and foreign government clearances. For the remainder of the decade, the CDC insulated Department historians from playing a direct role in FRUS declassification and systematically frustrated HAC efforts to provide oversight for the series.

During this time, the State Department also took the lead in censoring covert operations from FRUS. For example, declassification guidelines for Iran prepared by the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in 1981 specifically excluded “documents that would reveal intelligence sources, methods, plans, or operations” from release. These guidelines remained in effect when the Department conducted its final verification of the infamous Iran, 1951-1954 volume in the summer of 1988.