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The White House: Off Limits to Historians?

Meredith Fuchs, the general counsel of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, writes that the Bush administration’s hostility towards public access to and preservation of records combined with changes in technology that have transformed the way in which we all communicate are leading to a situation in which “primary sources on the most important decisions and activities in the government may be lost, destroyed, or closed to the public.” [emphasis added]

  • The White House: Off Limits to Historians? by Meredith Fuchs, Passport: The Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (5-1-08), posted at History News Network on Thursday, May 8, 2008.

[O]ver the last seven years there have been a series of moves by the current administration that may ensure that the records of the White House and the federal offices and agencies that work closely with the White House will not be available to historians.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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