Bi-Partisan Purloining of Classified Documents

Because of his liberal though usually unavailing use of executive privilege arguments to protect his personal wrongdoing, President Clinton was often, with good reason, compared to President Nixon. Recent revelations about his national security advisor, Sandy Berger, playing fast and loose with classified and potentially embarrassing documents re-inforces that comparison by reminding us of a somewhat similar controversy that engulfed Henry Kissinger at the end of his service in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

Briefly, Kissinger packed up and took with him (his critics said stole) a large volume of sensitive foreign policy documents. With scholars and journalists in hot pursuit, he delivered them first to a private estate in upstate New York, and then to the Library of Congress under an agreement that limited access until five years after his death. Much of the background can be found in KISSINGER v. REPORTERS COMMITTEE, 445 U.S. 136 (1980) 445 U.S. 136. According to William Burr, author of THE KISSINGER TRANSCRIPTS (1999), these papers “contain the only complete set of the highest-level records of the foreign policies of this country in the Nixon and Ford years.”

I found William Burr’s comments cited above (which are worth reading) in the process of searching for something else I recalled from this debate, a scathing review of the first volume of Kissinger’s memoirs in the early 1980s by the distinguished historian Theordore Draper, which I remembered made reference to a stunning example of official declassification dissembling. I never found it, but fortunately Burr summarizes it succinctly (which is why his comments came up on my search):

Theodore Draper made a similar point when he reviewed the first volume of Dr. Kissinger’s memoirs in the spring 1980 issue of Dissent. Mr. Draper observed that Dr. Kissinger’s use of classified documents was “nothing less than scandalous” because his book “contains literally scores of direct references to and textual quotations from documents obviously of the highest classification

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  1. Andrew Lazarus July 20, 2004 at 10:33 pm | | Reply

    According to my dad, Winston Churchill made similar use of secret papers for his hexology (?) The Second World War.

    As for Berger, I don’t know what he was thinking.

  2. William Meisheid July 23, 2004 at 12:25 pm | | Reply

    What Berger was thinking, at least in my opinion, was that those handwritten comments on the pages that disappeared could not stand public scrutiny. I think the other materials he took were part of a smokescreen to obfuscate the real issue, getting rid of specific pages that had damning comments on them.

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