Monday, April 13, 2009
Nearly a quarter million pages of records from the Reagan White House are finally going to be released to the public today, thanks to an executive order signed by President Barack Obama. Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the documents were supposed to have been made available to the public after January 20, 2001; twelve years after Reagan left the White House. However, on March 23, 2001, only five weeks after assuming the presidency, President Bush ordered the National Archives not to release the Reagan papers to the public. Bush also kept sealed the papers of Reagan’s vice-president, who happened to be Bush’s father.
The documents cover 244,966 pages of Presidential Briefing Papers, speech writing material, foreign policy topics, and other subjects. Many of the documents were requested by historians and others through the Freedom of Information Act, only to be denied by Bush’s order. Some of those requests involved memos relating to possible pardons for Iran-Contra conspirators Oliver North and John Poindexter. However, experts don’t expect those papers to be among the ones that will be made available through the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Approximately 800 pages from President George H.W. Bush’s administration on the topic of Saudi Arabia will be released, though.
The Obama decision does not address the consequences of another executive order that George W. Bush signed on November 1, 2001. That order gave former presidents and former vice-presidents, and their families after they die, the right to continue preventing the release of their papers. Not only that, but, according to Bush’s executive order, even if an ex-president wants to release his papers to the public, the sitting president has the right to bar their release anyway.
-David Wallechinsky, Noel Brinkerhoff
Obama Releases Reagan Records (by Josh Gerstein, Politico)
Obama to Release Reagan Records Kept Secret by Bush (by Muriel Kane, Raw Story)
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