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 Editorials | March 2007 
Bush Makes History by Not Also Writing It
 The Republican
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush was inside Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., to promote his education reform when he learned that America was under attack.
This was a day that changed the Bush presidency and the nation's history.
Scholars and archivists will one day travel to the Bush presidential library on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas to learn more about the nation's leaders and the decisions they made on that day.
The history textbooks and papers that they will write after visiting the Bush library might very well be incomplete.
On Nov. 1, 2001, less than two months after the attacks, Bush issued an executive order that allows former presidents to keep some of their papers secret indefinitely.
This executive order violates the Presidential Records Act of 1978, legislation that guarantees public access to papers 12 years after a president has left office.
The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote today on a bipartisan bill to overturn the executive order so that Bush and future presidents will not be able to write their own political histories by releasing only those papers, e-mails and other communications that put them in the most favorable light.
The executive order also allows former vice presidents to stop the release of their papers, which means the Vice President Dick Cheney - perhaps the most powerful and secretive second-in-command in the nation's history - will be able to influence his own legacy as well.
This order should be overturned so that historians and scholars will get an honest portrait of the Bush administration and future administrations.
Presidential records are the property of the federal government. Imagine if a president, in his final week in office, decided the bed in the Lincoln bedroom would look good in his own home and claimed it as his own. Once a president leaves his office, he cannot claim his presidential papers as his personal property.
Should it really matter if a former president wants to keep a lid on the embarrassing details of his administration?
Yes.
Presidents make history, they don't write it. |
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