Deleting history
Sometime after leaving the White House in 1929, but before Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, Calvin Coolidge burned most of his Presidential Papers. In so doing, he denied Americans an irreplaceable record of what the President of the United States did and didn't do during the Roaring 20s, that go-go economic era. Given the time period of the destruction, Coolidge may have been knowingly trying to cover up his own administration's culpability for the Great Depression--Herbert Hoover was President only six months before it began, although his dithering inaction made the economic pain far worse.
What Coolidge did was a crime against history, but it didn't violate any laws of the time. The same can't be said for George W. Bush, who knows that federal law now requires the President to save all White House documents, whether in traditional paper form or e-mails. As we now know from the oversight hearings being conducted by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., a large percentage of White House e-mails during the Bush Administration appear to have been permanently lost, including many of those in the period before the start of the Iraq War. The number may be in the millions.
Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin tells the story best. Perhaps only journalists and historians know what this really means--that much of the stupid and foolish and, yes, criminal decisions of Bush during the last eight years will escape meaningful historical scrutiny. I strongly suspect that the number of conventional letters and memos being written by government officials has been on a steep downward curve since the late 1990s, when e-mail became ubiquitous.
Eliminating the paper trail, including e-mails, is the most effective way for government wrongdoing to be permanently hidden. Devastating books like Tim Weiner's stunning, "Legacy of Ashes," about the CIA's monumental incompetence and criminal behavior over the decades, would simply not be possible without documents. Imagine if Nixon had burned the White House tapes?
The question is whether the Bush Administration's war on e-mail retention is simply another Katrina-like FUBAR situation, or a cleverly designed, and quite criminal, attempt to evade federal document retention law. Given the lack of cooperation from the White House and the Republican National Committee in finding the missing e-mails, I think we know the answer.
It is time for Congress to appoint a special prosecutor to look into these crimes, and perhaps as well some sort of overseer to protect the paper documents (there are still a lot of them). Only a complete fool would believe there isn't a risk of massive shredding of files--much like Enron did in its last days--before Bush rides off into historical ignominy in 2009.