The White House as a Black Box: Oral History and the Problem of Evidence in Presidential Studies

How Do We Know What We Know?

The primary source materials typically available for apprehending the intricacies of White House behavior are actually quite limited.

Official ‘Outputs’

Scholars routinely begin their research with the official actions and statements of the president: speeches and press conferences, as well as signing statements and bills drafted, signed or vetoed. But as the black box metaphor suggests, these outputs often say very little, with clarity or precision, about the complexities of decision making inside the White House. Astute students can draw inferences about how statements are phrased or events staged to estimate the relative involvement of various actors behind the scenes, or what processes led to an event. However, official outputs alone usually communicate very little, even to the most ingenious researcher, about process.

The Press

Probably the most common source of knowledge about the presidency is the press, which certainly is the most powerful shaper of perceptions of incumbent presidents, and remains an important force afterwards for tracking historical developments within any former White House. The role of a free press is so central to American conceptions of the proper functioning of the presidency that space has been allocated within the precious real estate of the West Wing itself to house a permanent White House press corps. This media presence is intended to communicate to the American people – and indeed to the world – virtually every presidential utterance and movement. Each White House spokesperson almost immediately becomes one of the most famous people in the United States, a voice and face instantly recognizable to anyone who devotes attention to the nation's public affairs.

The work of the press corps is essentially twofold: to serve as a conduit for official communications and to dig into the story behind the story to the extent possible, to give a more complete picture of what is happening within the White House than official communications alone allow. As Martha Kumar has written of this duality, ‘News organizations represent a source of pressure on a president and also serve as an important resource as he seeks to govern’ (Kumar, 2003, p. 669).

Official communications are, again, best considered as one kind of ‘output’ of the black box. They represent what the White House communications office deems to be the most appealing face to any decision or story (Kurtz, 1998) – but they seldom reveal much about the people and considerations that went into producing that output. Indeed, the White House presentation of a story – what more commonly today has become known as its‘spin’– may actually conceal more than it reveals (Kernell, 2006; Schram, 1987). For the inside story, outside consumers of political information typically have to rely on investigative reporting. And evidence derived from this process can also be problematic.

Much of what appears in press accounts to be the product of investigative journalism is simply another iteration of official communications – but hidden behind the cloak of anonymity. A reader who encounters an ‘unnamed senior official’ in a news account may simply be getting a detailed, but still official, gloss, by somebody who mere minutes earlier was appearing before a television camera offering a more limited version of the same story. Those added details may enrich our understanding about what has gone on behind closed doors, but the simple fact is that the source retains the same incentives as before to adhere to the official spin on the story. Yet the reader is left with the intended illusion of having a more intimate and reliable knowledge of what has just happened.

Even unofficial, unauthorized communications from insideWhite House sources, however, are problematic. ‘Leaking’, as it is known in the parlance of Washington, does open up the possibility that the consumer of leaked information will get a more thorough account of what is actually going on inside the White House. But, as was amply detailed in the trial of former vice-presidential aide Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, leakers often have agendas too (though not always the official one), and leakers are not beyond manufacturing evidence to score political points. In her memoir, Madeleine Albright reports that certain of her detractors planted a news story in 1996, during the time when President Clinton was contemplating a successor to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, that she was not a top-tier candidate (Albright, 2003, p. 221). That gambit backfired when Albright's supporters then aggressively mobilized to make sure that the president's closest advisers did not use the story as an excuse to pass her by. The simple fact is that leaking is usually quite purposive – and those purposes seldom include clarifying the historical record for history's sake.

It should also be noted that leaked information has two other demonstrated flaws. The first, already touched on, is that it is impossible for even a careful reader to know who the source is, and thus to make judgements about how much weight to accord the information reported. Libby evidently felt free, when passing along sensitive information about CIA employee Valerie Plame, to insist that reporter Judith Miller, of no less a paper than the New York Times, identify him as a ‘former [Capitol] Hill staffer’ (Kurtz, 2007, p. C01). That kind of subterfuge seriously compromises the reader's ability to judge the reliability of a source or the value of content. Second, there is usually no accountability for mistakes with leaked information. One Clinton-era oral history respondent was asked, within the confidential confines of a recent interview, about a published report stating that she was being considered for a powerful position on a federal regulatory board in Washington. ² She laughed at the question – and then recounted how a casual dinner companion had jokingly raised that position as a hypothetical career option, and then made a vague reference to their light conversation in a thank you note that went to her office soon afterwards. The note evidently sat on the top of her inbox long enough for one of her ambitious young staffers to see it, and then leak the'news' of this pending appointment to a respected newspaper. Future scholars of that board will undoubtedly find that erroneous published account and seriously ponder the set of circumstances that led to that job being offered in the first place – and then to fall through.

To be sure, the reporting of the White House press corps does the nation – and its scholars – a great service. But the information that comes through those channels is largely purposive and filtered.

One additional journalistic source of note merits mention here, because of the weight it has in shaping early impressions of sitting presidents: this is the work of journalist book authors, most prominently Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. ³ Woodward's self-description is that his work falls between journalism and history. Woodward's strong suit is his ability to get confidential sources to provide him first-hand, personal accounts of meetings and events that they will not disclose for attribution to newspaper writers, and to pass along original documents that he can use to develop his narrative and further lines of questioning. Woodward's reliance on unnamed sources raises objections from some critics, both because it makes the work impossible to check and because it lends itself to score settling. At their best, these works add color and detail to the outlines that are typical of modern journalistic accounts. At their worst – on the evidence of later oral histories – they relate fabrications.

Internal Documents

Another possible avenue for coming to an understanding about the internal operations of a given White House is its internal paperwork. The big question here, however, is access: how can outsiders come to see these privileged materials? the answer (Woodward aside) differs depending on whether we are discussing a sitting or a former president.

The most important opening of White House records in recent decades during a president's term of office has occurred not because of press inquiries or presidential benevolence, but because of investigations of alleged executive wrongdoing – by those armed with the power of subpoena. As a result, we outsiders have got extraordinary looks at:

the entire range of Oval Office behavior of President Richard M. Nixon, because it was discovered during the course of the Watergate investigation that Nixon had installed a voice-activated taping system that recorded all his conversations (Greene, 1992, pp. 170–2);

Much of what we know even now about the presidencies of the last three decades, then, can be attributed to White House materials made public because congressional investigators, officers of the courts or independent counsels compelled the White House to produce documents deemed useful for their purposes. And although these materials have been illuminating, the light they cast is neither systematic nor broad. What such records reveal about these presidencies touches only accidentally on what a scholar taking a logical approach to examining the institution would insist on knowing.

In principle, what scholars can learn from documents should increase exponentially after a president leaves the White House. A network of presidential libraries exists under the rubric of the publicly funded National Archives, to assist students of American politics in doing their work. But in practice the historic paper trail is far less helpful than might be expected. The core problem is that the legal and administrative regimens that currently govern the opening of presidential records, and which are nominally intended to facilitate public access, have actually succeeded in doing exactly the reverse. ⁴

Until 1978, modern presidents routinely donated their papers to the National Archives upon leaving office, with stipulations decreed to control the timetable for access. By most accounts, this was a serviceable practice. It ended in the wake of Watergate, however, because of the legal fight over control of Nixon's records, which he sought to keep out of the public domain. Congress stepped in with the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (PRA), which established public ownership of presidential papers and an official schedule for their release. The PRA provided a five-year delay after a president left office for processing and opening some materials, with the former president permitted, at his discretion, to delay release of certain categories of materials for a full twelve years. President Reagan (whose papers would be the first to come under the PRA's compass) refined the administrative framework for executing the Act with Executive Order 12667. More importantly, the Reagan order complicated the pending process of moving presidential records into the public domain by asserting the incumbent president's executive privilege powers to keep records of his choice secret.

The twelve-year anniversary of Reagan's departure from the White House was reached in 2001 – and was accompanied by great expectations within the scholarly community of a massive release of materials. Instead, the rules of the game were changed. President George W. Bush, shortly after 9/11, issued his own executive order, EO13233 (Bush, 2001) which made significant changes in the existing release regimen. It did so in such a way as to lead a chorus of critics to charge that Bush had in fact overturned the core of the PRA itself, perhaps to protect his father, whose vice-presidential papers were scheduled for opening. What is indisputable is that EO13233 created a new set of procedures that presidential records would have to clear, each with the potential to create extensive delays in release. These included:

the extension of ‘significantly more discretion and control over executive privilege claims to [each] former president than he had under the Reagan EO and the PRA, in effect equalizing control of both the former and incumbent presidents’ (Kassop, 2005, p. 267);

Although some processed Reagan materials have survived subsequent White House clearance, as of this writing there are major legal and legislative challenges being mounted to overturn the more restrictive Bush policies. ⁵

Typically overlooked in the heated debate over EO13233, however, is a more mundane – and decidedly more consequential (thus far) – factor in keeping recent presidential records out of the public domain: the Freedom of Information Act of 1966 (FOIA). One of the little-understood codicils of the original PRA was that it made presidential records subject to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act after the initial five-year interval. FOIA is the primary channel outsiders may use to get access to government documents that do not have to be kept out of circulation for such reasons as national security or personal privacy. The post-PRA libraries are legally obliged to deal with FOIA requests as a priority order of business. Accordingly, as Allen Weinstein, the chief archivist of the United States, testified to a congressional subcommittee in March 2007, ‘[B]ecause the PRA subjects all Presidential records to public access through the FOIA …, PRA Libraries in practice open records almost exclusively in response to FOIA requests’. These libraries thus ‘have less opportunity to conduct systematic processing of records’, a state of affairs that is both inefficient and time consuming (Weinstein, 2007, p. 3). This makes their records-processing enterprise idiosyncratic and reactive rather than logical and proactive. Weinstein might also have observed that this process leaves the archives hostage to the obsessively curious: fully one-quarter of the FOIA requests now pending at the Clinton Library are from UFO researchers seeking files on flying saucers (Thrush, 2007). Meanwhile, vast quantities of documents that have properly ripened for release under the existing statutes – material that by law can be made available to scholars today – sits in a years-long queue awaiting the attention of a vastly overwhelmed staff ⁶

Admittedly the new Bush regulations extend this problem considerably. ⁷ But the processing problems are far more thoroughgoing than this one order. Thus, unless there is a major change in either disclosure law or the priority national policy makers place on making these historical materials available, the documentary history of the recent American presidency will sit undisturbed in its archival boxes long into the future. One published estimate holds, for example, that the Reagan library is on pace to get all its holdings into the public domain by the year 2100 (Burka, 2007, p. 14).

There is, however, a real question as to how illuminating these materials will be once their release is ultimately secured. Ample evidence indicates that a variation on the Hawthorne effect has substantially eroded the quality of the presidential archive in recent decades.

One of the lessons of the last 30-plus years of White House history has been that the practice of keeping careful records of meetings and decision-making processes can be hazardous to one's political health. Accordingly, that record-keeping behavior has changed. Nixon was hanged by his own audiotape – and no president since has seen fit to make himself equally vulnerable, ending that brief epoch when technology and elevated presidential stature combined to produce an unmatched record of how presidents actually behaved in the Oval Office. ⁸ Thus the price of Nixon's indiscretions will be paid by generations of scholars who will be deprived of an extraordinarily rich resource.

But taping machines are not alone. Written records of every variety have been used by outside investigators to condemn presidents and their aides – and in each case, it appears that the results have been the same: an increasing reluctance to commit to writing a record of important or sensitive interactions. Emails, handwritten meeting notes, even personal diaries – all have resulted in disaster for one White House or another. And, as a result, there is ample evidence that senior White House aides, and indeed anyone politically savvy in the president's employ, have learned not to create them in the first place.

James A. Baker III, secretary of state to George H. W. Bush, has publicly stated that by the time of the first Bush presidency, senior aides knew not to take any notes at key meetings. The elder Bush's chief of staff, John Sununu, concurred, and openly worried that the results would be catastrophic for scholars (Sullivan, 2004, pp. 42–3). This practice has been confirmed in scores of confidential oral history interviews with Republicans and Democrats alike. One senior Clinton White House aide has recalled meetings of great moment where not a single person was making notes of the discussions. And Bob Woodward has reported that anyone keeping notes in a meeting with former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the second Bush White House, was likely to get yelled at for inappropriate behavior (Woodward, 2006, p. 109). In a related development, many Bush White House political officials have been using email accounts through the Republican National Committee – some of which were routinely destroyed – apparently to avoid having them treated as presidential records (Abramowitz, 2007, p. A3; Fein, 2007). Ultimately, however, because of the long delays in release schedules, it will be decades before we know exactly what note and record-keeping conventions have in fact prevailed in the current White House – and thus before we know how thorough the damage has been to the permanent historical record (Riley, 2005, p. B04).

The Memoir

A final source useful for scholars in developing an understanding of presidential behavior is the memoir. The advantages of these works of history and recollection are substantial. Most memoirists are able to rely on some of their own paperwork to refresh what are first-hand recollections of their time in the White House. And memoirs can provide color and detail that will be missing from the official papers. Of course the signature deficiency of a memoir is that it is a self-serving genre. Still, a collection of them from any one presidency, or about any one event, can give the discerning reader a chance to triangulate toward a kind of consensus conception of what actually happened in a given White House. ⁹

The Value of Presidential Oral History

The purpose of the foregoing discussion was to establish one simple point: that none of the regular sources students of the American presidency rely on to develop their portraits of institutional behavior is perfect. Indeed, while each category of sources will aid the scholar in unique ways, at the same time each is also vulnerable to certain singular deficiencies. What this reality suggests, then, is that presidential scholarship works best when it takes advantage of hybrid vigor, using multiple forms of sources – including oral history – to overcome the weaknesses of any single genre.

Merits of Oral History

Because oral history has become, especially in the fields of anthropology and sociology, principally a method for studying social behavior from the bottom up, it is not readily evident why its practice might be of use in examining the very apex of the American political order.

Oral history – or extended, open-ended interviews intended to create a lasting record of personal recollections for public reference – has most typically been used to document activity for which there is no existing written record. Spoken history thus serves as a substitute for written documentation in a host of settings where no substantial written record exists, such as the commercial practices of a small fishing village or the religious and family traditions of tribesmen and women in non-literate societies. In such instances, the value of oral history is clear and undeniable – it salvages the only historical source available: individual memories.

The case for oral history is much less straightforward for something as thoroughly documented as the American presidency. The Clinton Presidential Library contains, for example, over 30,000 archive boxes of paper records alone – notwithstanding the diminished record-keeping proclivities described above. Added to that are literally millions of emails, as well as a vast accumulation of photographs and physical artifacts – plenty of material to keep an army of researchers busy for a very long time. And yet there are deficiencies – which oral history can help remedy.

The basic reality, to which presidential oral history is addressed, is the fact that even good written records routinely contain important gaps and omissions. ¹⁰ Some of these holes can be filled by reading exhaustively a run of records on a given issue, across an entire range of participants. But even then certain fundamental matters may not be addressed in these writings, simply because the paperwork was not created as an aid to historians, but as a means to a specific end for a group of people who shared certain premises, common experiences and unspoken assumptions. Accordingly, each written communication inevitably is composed in a form of shorthand – and the silences can be extremely important.

A recent unpublished study on the president's personal role in the issuance of formal executive orders offers one example of this problem:

It is not possible to determine which executive orders originate at the request of the president or his most senior White House staff. Even following comprehensive archival research, the paper trail from instruction, to drafting, to signature, to publication is usually incomplete and is hampered by the fact that presidents in office rarely write anything down, let alone issue detailed written instructions to their subordinates. Those who have been through presidential archives will be familiar with the tick-boxes at the end of staffers' memoranda seeking instructions from the president on particular matters. Sometimes there will be a tick, occasionally a scribbled note in the president's hand. Usually, there is nothing (Boyle, 2007, p. 129).

In the absence of some corroborating data, then, it is impossible to know which uses of the important practice of executive orders are generated at the insistence of the president vs. those that are merely the product of bureaucratic action-forcing processes.

Indeed, it was for the purpose of filling in such silences in the written record that the first work in presidential oral history was undertaken. Historian Charles T. Morrissey was invited by the Truman Library, in the early 1960s, to develop an oral history project on President Truman's White House (K'Meyer, 1997). The concern of the Truman archivists was that the paper records did not adequately account for the full range of activity of that presidency. In that simpler time, one concern was how to account for the increasing use of the telephone for conducting public business. Morrissey began then with a six-month orientation to immerse himself in those paper records, to get a sense for what was and was not being revealed in them. His subsequent oral history interviews for that project were not only path-breaking, they produced an archive that has stood the test of time as a valuable complement to the paper record. Scholars today, unfortunately, do not have the luxury Morrissey had of being baptized in paper before beginning their interviews.

Yet the core problem Morrissey confronted is at least as acute today: the White House operates largely in an oral culture. The offices in the West Wing are famously cramped and the team of people responsible at the highest levels of decision making is ultimately quite small. Accordingly, in this close environment, much of the most important work of the nation happens by word of mouth. This has become especially true in the post-Watergate years, when the existence of written records leaves the writer vulnerable to outside attack.

It should be noted here that a strong reliance on oral communications among senior executive branch officials is not an American phenomenon alone. A careful study of British policy-making practices in the Blair Cabinet, related to failures associated with the Iraq War, was conducted in 2004 by Lord Butler of Brockwell. He concluded that one significant factor contributing to bad judgement on the part of Tony Blair's team was the existence of what had become known in the UK as a ‘sofa culture’, with senior advisers settling on major policy through batting around ideas in conversation (on the sofas), rather than relying on the time-tested rigors of circulating written documents for comment and discussion. ¹¹ At least a part of the reason for avoiding written communications in London was the same as it has been in the US: fear of leaks. It is striking, however, that this kind of behavior came to prevail in a place theretofore so thoroughly committed to clear and precise option papers.

Thus, in the current environment, with such strong disincentives for the written word, oral history is one of the limited ways of reclaiming evidence, in the form of memories, that might otherwise be lost for all time. Moreover, there are certain classes of question about which oral history interviews can be especially illuminating. One such area, for example, is the president's operating style. Glimpses of style can be gained both from watching a president's public performances (is he witty? intelligent? quick to anger?) and, to some extent, from the paperwork that goes into and out of the Oval Office (how much detail is there? how quickly does it get turned around? is there interesting marginalia?). But the best sources of evidence about operating style are the first-hand observations of those who work and live daily with the human who fills the office. The literature on presidential style testifies to this reality. Virtually every major treatment of John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson – including the meticulous works of Robert Dallek (2004) and Robert Caro (2003) – relies significantly on oral history projects conducted through those two presidential libraries. Fred I. Greenstein credits his seminal revision of Dwight Eisenhower's style, The Hidden-Hand Presidency (1982) to his own multiple interviews and to some reliance on the existing archive of oral histories. And Erwin Hargrove's Neustadt Award-winning Jimmy Carter as President (1988) was a direct product of a Carter White House oral history project organized by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Many of the major questions scholars still have about individual presidents over the last 30 years fit into this same category. How detached or engaged was Ronald Reagan and did his level of attentiveness change over time? Why was George H. W. Bush so reluctant to start up and focus on his re-election machinery in 1991? And to what extent was the younger Bush in control of his own first-term foreign policy in the company of so many long-established ‘Vulcans’? These are the kinds of question for which candid, first-hand accounts are essential for answering completely.

Or consider one more example: how distracted was Bill Clinton by the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998? Independent counsel Kenneth Starr's investigation of the Lewinsky matter flowed directly from the US Supreme Court's decision to allow a sexual harassment suit from Clinton's Arkansas years to move ahead during his presidency. Without dissent, the justices rejected claims by Clinton's lawyers that his ability to serve the nation would be impaired by allowing the suit to proceed. Indeed, at oral argument, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia ridiculed Clinton's assertion: ‘[W]e see Presidents riding horseback, chopping firewood, fishing for stick fish, playing golf and so forth and so on’, Scalia interjected to laughter, arguing on this basis that the president surely had time to deal painlessly with the matter of a civil lawsuit.

But the subsequent history of that episode is hardly conclusive – and has taken some odd turns. Clinton's critics now claim that his preoccupations with the Lewinsky scandal were substantial, and caused him to divert precious presidential energies away from a looming menace in the form of Osama Bin Laden. Clinton's defenders have held, conversely, that he was sustained by remarkable powers of concentration, effectively ‘compartmentalizing’ the scandal to deal with the nation's business. Such claims thus put the president's friends in the ironic position of confirming the Supreme Court's ruling – that Clinton was able to deal with the lawsuit without having it intrude too greatly on his time – and his enemies in the odd position of saying the Court erred. There may be useful documentary evidence on this puzzle buried in the archives – but this is not the kind of thing one would normally expect to find addressed in routine White House paperwork. ¹²

Another value of oral history is that it can actually simplify the ultimate use of the existing documents. Respondents familiar with their own paper trail can direct the interviewers' attention to records that will be especially illuminating or important on a given subject. The simple fact is that the paper records of every administration are still mountainous – but the ratio of valuable-to-trivial records is microscopic and diminishing. Good interviews can help later researchers know where to look for gems among mounds of archival debris.

A simple five-minute discussion in an interview can relieve a researcher of weeks of hard labor in the archives trying to track even simple transactions, especially those that involve multiple offices with independent filing systems and inconsistent record-keeping practices. One former Clinton-era diplomat quickly outlined in his interview a highly complex set of events that ultimately had him posted to one of the US's premier diplomatic assignments in Europe. His description was of an intertwined sequence of appointments, with A, B and C falling into place just in time for him to lay claim to the assignment of his choosing. This kind of sequencing is probably not described in any single document, and would take a talented and relentless researcher weeks to track down. The interview transcript provides the story in a single paragraph.

Finally, oral history, as James SterlingYoung has written, is valuable as a temporary surrogate for the written archive, until such time as the archived documents are released (Young, 1988). Unfortunately, given the now monumental delays associated with opening up presidential records, historians are largely deprived, for a long and lengthening interval, of their fundamental building materials. Oral history is one way to remedy this problem, to make available to scholars and practitioners alike fresh evidence for their labors as each incumbency fades into the past.

It should be emphasized before closing that oral history is not the handmaiden of any particular social science methodology. It is easy to see how the data collected through oral history interviews contribute to biography and narrative history. Such interviews also build on a long tradition of presidential studies – usually associated with Richard E. Neustadt – which focuses on understanding politics by viewing Washington ‘from over the President's shoulder’ (Neustadt, 1990, p. xxi). How better to do that than by consulting those who stood with him, shoulder to shoulder? But the raw materials of oral history are available, also, for those who find the older methodologies insufficiently rigorous. Detailed internal accounts of White House activity can be valuable grist for political scientists interested in rationality and institutional behavior (Moe, 1993). Indeed it may be that oral history can be uniquely valuable for the new institutionalists, who heretofore have found it necessary to construct their theories based on public evidence alone or on secondary accounts of presidential or institutional behavior written by biographers or others little interested in the questions they wish to explore. Those selective, heavily edited accounts may omit some of the most theoretically rich materials about White House rationality – simply because they were written for a different audience. An accumulation of raw narratives from the major players thus has the promise of preserving the details these theorists find most useful – especially in cases where an interviewer is trained to recognize which lines of inquiry might be especially beneficial to this branch of scholarship. The fundamental narrative character of oral history interviews, then, is not at all inconsistent with the kind of rigorous qualitative (and, perhaps in some cases, quantitative) analysis critics of the older traditions in presidential research want to see done (Sinclair, 1993, pp. 229–30).

The Deficiencies of Oral History

As the discussion above confirms, every form of evidence about the contemporary White House has inherent deficiencies. For all its multiple advantages, oral history is no different.

First, human memory is fallible and transient. Memory fades over time, and can mutate in ways not even discernible to the respondent, subject to all kinds of cultural and psychological forces. Moreover, the mutability of memory varies so much from person to person that it is not possible to establish any formal constant of adjustment. This places a heavy burden on oral history interviewers to make midstream corrections in their interviews to deal with the deterioration or acuity of the respondent's memory. Moreover, users of transcripts are also well advised to read widely enough in a body of interviews to get a sense about how reliable a given respondent's memory is relative to other interviewees.

Some interviewers find it useful to provide memory prompts to respondents, as a way of digging more deeply into their recollections than is typically possible with an unaided interview. One of the first elements of memory to fade is sequencing – the ability to say which of a set of remote events took place first, second, third and so forth. Accordingly, a prepared time-line helps to remedy this in relation to newsworthy activities. The time-line also serves as a prompt to the interviewers about the key events that ought to be covered during the course of the interview. A briefing book might also include selected public statements the respondent made during the White House years, contemporaneous news accounts of the period covered in the interview and any scholarly or other secondary works discussing significantly the respondent's service to the president. ¹³ The purpose of such briefing materials is not to generate memories where they do not exist, but to assist a respondent in bringing to mind events that may have lain dormant for a relatively long period of time.

Ultimately, oral history interviews are not, strictly speaking, intended to establish irrefutable facts. They establish what the best recollections are of each respondent. Memory is as much evidence about the relative importance of a variety of activities as it is a register of ‘what actually happened’. By triangulating from multiple interview sources, and cross-referencing those results with what is known from other sources, scholars are most likely to approximate history wie es eigentlich gewesen.

Second, oral history interviewers must operate with the working assumption that their sources will relate self-serving accounts to enhance their own place in the history books. Oral history is an ego-happy exercise. Indeed, one of the greatest inducements to participation in such an interview is the opportunity each respondent sees to help put his or her imprint on the permanent historical record. But it is a mistake to leap from this undeniable reality to the conclusion that oral histories are vacuous exercises in self-importance.

Respondents are not simply given a blank tape and told to go at it. They are joined at the interview table by scholars well versed in the history of the administration under study and in the presidency more generally. Good oral history interviews tend to be friendly, collegial exercises, inasmuch as respondents are most likely to open up and to speak candidly when rapport is established. But the interviewers are there to steer the discussions and to probe into even the most uncomfortable subject matter. Anything that does not pass the ‘smell test’ is subject to probing and follow-up. Informed questioning cannot completely prevent self-serving presentations, but it can have the effect of putting the brakes on excessive credit taking. And where variances in accounts are detected, good interviewers will push the respondent to see how firmly he or she wishes to stick to his or her story. Also, each interviewee is typically aware that his or her interviewers are talking, candidly and confidentially, with other major figures in a given presidency. There is a strong likelihood, then, that any embellishments will be vulnerable to exposure by other, perhaps more authoritative, voices than their own. This is an incentive to honesty.

It is also important not to underestimate the extent to which the culture of the interview itself can contribute to a willingness on the part of participants to speak with candor. Oral histories not intended for immediate release or quick scholarly exploitation – indeed those that emphasize the solemn obligations by scholar and interviewee alike to create an archive for future generations with honest, straightforward testaments of the past – can create a confessional dynamic. To be clear, typically, the vast majority of a presidential oral history interview deals with questions of institutional mechanics and inter-office relations for which there is little incentive not to be perfectly straightforward. But it is unusual for an interview not to deal with some delicate issues – scandal or conflict or controversy – for which there may be incentives to dissemble. It is here that the properly constructed interview environment can make a difference. ¹⁴

Finally, there is the problem of knowing whether oral history interviews are getting at the right questions – casting light on the kinds of matters future students of the presidency will want to examine. The earliest presidential oral historians had one major advantage over their present-day counterparts: access in advance to the White House paperwork. Today's oral historians are usually unable to take their cues from authoritative documents. That is an important shortcoming, but one that is impossible to remedy given current circumstances. Yet there are ways of compensating for this deficiency.

The first is to use teams of interviewers. No single scholar is likely to have a sufficient knowledge base, or insight into future developments, to ask all the right questions. There is accordingly security in numbers. Moreover, the use of interview teams also provides the opportunity for those with specialized expertise in a particular subject area to participate in the questioning. Those experts – in such arcane areas as trade relations, arms control or environmental policy – are more apt than the generalist to know what unfolding areas of controversy ought to be most carefully examined about any outgoing presidential administration. Second, the length of the interview can help address problems of knowing where to look. A brief, journalistic interview heightens the need to focus on what the interviewer thinks to be important. The long interview – perhaps lasting a full day or more – gives the questioner the opportunity to follow the lead of the interviewee into what might initially seem to be backwaters. These digressions can be among the most illuminating components of oral history, because they lead into the unexpected.

The Availability of Presidential Oral History

Although the practice of presidential oral history did not begin until the early 1960s, every presidency since Herbert Hoover's has subsequently been documented by some kind of interview project (Greenwell, 1997). The most expansive of these were initiated in that same decade, with vast official oral histories on Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In the latter two cases, the number of interviews now exceeds 1,000, the overwhelming majority of which are opened for public use. The overall quality, as with any historical resource, is uneven. The Kennedy project was marred in its early stages by overzealousness: groups of former officials were, in the aftermath of the assassination, grabbing tape recorders and eagerly interviewing one another rather than proceeding in a systematic way under the direction of a trained historian. And lore has it that LBJ liked to read his project's interview transcripts hot off the press, with predictable effects on candor when that practice became known to subsequent interviewees. At more developed stages of these projects, the process was decidedly more meticulous.

It should also be noted here that researchers working on Kennedy and Johnson now have access to a vast quantity of recorded Oval Office conversations, which, in tandem with the extensive oral histories, provide students with an unparalleled set of spoken resources to use in recapturing the history of those times. ¹⁵ As historian Regina Greenwell has written, the two spoken sources are complementary. Where the tapes ‘are spontaneous and often fragmentary or cryptic’, oral history allows ‘the interviewee to be analytical and thoughtful, … supplying detail and explanations that the recordings may lack’ (Greenwell, 1997, p. 602).

The rich archival landscape of the 1960s changed dramatically, however, in the following decade. At almost the same moment that the Oval Office recordings ceased, the libraries also stopped doing presidential oral history, mainly for budgetary reasons. Archival staff did, during these years, begin conducting ‘exit interviews’ of departing White House officials, but these were typically brief and were usually done as an aid to cataloguers processing an individual's files. Exit interviewing continues today, but those transcripts are governed by the Presidential Records Act – with the usual related problems of access.

In the early 1980s, the University of Virginia's Miller Center, under the guidance of James Young, stepped in to fill the void left by the archives, conducting a small but intensive interview project on the Carter presidency. That project was funded entirely by the Miller Center, but in return for the cooperation of the Carter alumni, the Center provided copies of the interview transcripts to the Carter library. In subsequent years, the Miller Center has conducted, in cooperation with the respective presidential libraries, interview projects on Presidents Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Clinton. These projects are much smaller than their earlier counterparts – sometimes numbering less than 50 interviews – but the sessions are usually lengthy, conducted by teams of scholars, and typically include the most senior officials in an administration. The transcripts are also not covered by the PRA.

The first tranche of the Reagan oral histories, numbering about 30, was released in January 2006, and is available online. ¹⁶ The elder Bush's cleared interviews are scheduled for release in 2010. The Clinton interview project has two coordinate parts, one being conducted by the University of Arkansas, on Clinton's prepresidential years, and the other, by the Miller Center, on the Clinton presidency. An initial release of Arkansas interviews occurred in November 2006 and can be found on the Arkansas project website. ¹⁷ The first cleared Clinton presidential project interviews are expected to be opened in 2009, and will also be made available online.

Conclusion

The evidentiary problems afflicting present-day researchers of the White House are largely beyond their control. Yet oral history interviews are an effective means of compensating for the short-term historical problem of a lack of new data, while at the same time generating evidence that will fortify the permanent documentary record. The precise value of these interviews is at present unknowable – in part because we are unclear on exactly how deficient the archived written record is, and in part because we cannot see clearly into the future, to predict what our successors will most want to know about the presidencies of our times. Moreover, some of what today may seem dull, or inconsequential, or opaque may, at some future time – with new developments in historiography, or psychology, or linguistics – prove to be extraordinarily valuable for later generations in developing new interpretations of our time and place in history. This is the promise of original data. Accordingly, oral histories are likely to have a half-life well exceeding even the best of our contemporaneous interpretive works about the American executive.