History’s Gatekeeper : Bledsoe to Oversee Release of Presidential Papers at Reagan Library

Months before the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library opens to the public, Ralph C. Bledsoe already has begun to receive a continual stream of court subpoenas and other requests for secrets buried within Reagan’s presidential papers.

As library director, Bledsoe sits atop the largest collection of White House documents ever assembled. The federal courts, Congress, President Bush and even former President Reagan have asked him to dig through the records for clues about the Iran-Contra scandal and other sensitive matters. So far, nothing startling has been revealed.

Once the library near Simi Valley opens Nov. 4, Bledsoe expects a surge in requests from the public that will swell as he and his staff slowly unveil the paper legacy of Reagan’s eight-year presidency.

Although Reagan and national security concerns will block release of most documents for a decade or longer, Bledsoe will be in charge of making public as much as 40% of the 55-million-page collection and recommending that Reagan reconsider other documents for release.

It promises to be a thorny, if not thankless, job for the former Reagan White House aide and USC professor of public administration. With each decision, Bledsoe may face criticism from those who hold sometimes contradictory expectations for the Reagan library.

Those closest to Reagan want the library to present a sympathetic, if not glowing, portrayal of their beloved former President. They delight in having a trusted Reagan aide run the library for the National Archives and Records Administration.

“He has a longtime background of academic integrity,” said former Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III, a close Reagan friend and adviser. “At the same time, people who are Reagan loyalists feel that he would be fair and objective and not as hostile as some who might have come straight from academia.”

Meanwhile, scholars and journalists are itching to get at the papers, which they hope will shed new light on the Reagan Administration--warts and all. The warts are likely to generate the greatest interest and researchers hope that Bledsoe’s academic background will help him appreciate their needs.

“He can set the tone for the library, whether it will be friendly or hostile to scholarly research,” said Roger Dingman, an American history professor at USC. Dingman, who does not know Bledsoe, said “he will have some tough choices to make.”

As for Bledsoe, he said he accepted the position with his “eyes open” to the potential pressures.

“My job is to try to strike a balance,” said Bledsoe, 57, who was appointed library director in February by U.S. Archivist Don W. Wilson, in consultation with Reagan. “I need to be careful in making the papers available, but not bog down and become too bureaucratic.”

Bledsoe, a balding and bespectacled man, said he plans to win over the scholarly community with his professionalism and adherence to the Presidential Records Act, which governs release of the documents.

“I will try not to paint a picture one way or another,” Bledsoe said. “The library will tell it like it is. The documents will stand by themselves. And all kinds of things will be written about the former President.”

Bledsoe’s friends and colleagues say he may be uniquely qualified for the position. Although he spent eight years in the Reagan White House, his role was that of an expert, expected to help run the government smoothly rather than push an ideological agenda.

“Ralph is a bureaucrat, not a politician,” said Charles Smith, a former Reagan aide who brought Bledsoe into the Administration. “But at the same time, he is a guy who has worked with President Reagan and the key people around him with the same comfort. That is an unusual combination.”

Bledsoe’s reputation for neutrality and integrity is cited in a 1988 scholarly work about the growing influence of White House staff. The book, “The Ring of Power,” singles out Bledsoe as an “honest broker” in the Reagan White House, who cut through the politics to provide the President with an unbiased range of options for making policy decisions.

Bledsoe said he has his own agenda for the $60-million library, which was built by the Ronald Reagan Foundation with private donations and will be turned over to the federal government in November.

He said he wants to turn the complex into a Western center for the study of government and history during the Reagan era. As he points out, the Reagan library will be the only official presidential library west of Austin, Tex.

(The Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda is not an official presidential library because Nixon has retained control of the private facility.)

“I need to educate people about what we have to offer,” Bledsoe said. “A presidential library is a place where you can see history through the eyes of a President. The taxpayers pay for (operating) the library and they should know how to use it.”

The $100,500-a-year position of library director is the culmination of Bledsoe’s long career in and out of government service that seemed to groom him for the job. Most recent, Bledsoe was director of USC’s Washington Public Affairs Center, a graduate research and education center in the nation’s capital.

Born and raised in Waco, Tex., Bledsoe attended Texas A & M College before serving in the Air Force from 1955 to 1958 as an air traffic controller.

During the next 13 years, Bledsoe worked his way up the managerial ranks of a Santa Monica aerospace company, Systems Development Corp., and simultaneously earned a master’s degree in business administration from UCLA and a Ph.D. in public administration from USC.

In 1971, he switched careers and left for Sacramento to open USC’s School of Public Administration graduate studies program for state employees.

At that time, Bledsoe first encountered then-Gov. Reagan, who appointed him to a state group researching the application of computers and other scientific breakthroughs to police work.

From 1973 to 1980, Bledsoe gained a broad knowledge about the federal bureaucracy and its key players while serving as a professor of public management at the Federal Executive Institute in Charlottesville, Va., which offers intensive courses to thousands of high-level federal officials.

When Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in 1980, Reagan associates asked Bledsoe to draw on his experience to help with the transition. “He’s one of the most brilliant individuals on the government process and how things work,” said Smith, the former Reagan aide.

Bledsoe held several positions in the White House, finally as executive secretary of the president’s Domestic Policy Council, a forum for establishing policy on domestic issues.

In the early days of the Reagan Administration, Bledsoe was assigned the task of reviewing the operation of the National Archives, at which time he met many of the agency’s key staff members, including John T. Fawcett, assistant archivist in charge of the nation’s eight presidential libraries.

When the Reagan library was built, Fawcett said Bledsoe became the “natural choice” for library director because he already understood archival work, the needs of researchers, and had an insider’s knowledge of what occurred during Reagan’s years in office.

In addition to the preparations for the library’s opening day, Bledsoe has been busy overseeing the never-ending search for documents.

For example, Reagan last month asked him to scour campaign records for any evidence that Reagan-Bush campaign officials conspired to delay the release of American hostages in Iran until after the 1980 election. Bledsoe said he and his archivists found nothing.

Under the Presidential Records Act, the Reagan library does not have to give the public access to any files until 1994, five years after Reagan’s departure from the White House.

Fawcett had suggested taking all five years to review which files should remain secret for reasons of personal privacy, national security or myriad other reasons. Opening any records would expose the archivists to a deluge of requests and slow the process down, he said.

Reagan has asked that some records be made available as soon as possible. Bledsoe said he has started the process of opening, by Nov. 4, as many as 10 categories of documents, including agriculture, public recreation and occupational and transportation safety.

“We are looking at opening between a million and a million and a half pages of records on opening day,” Bledsoe said. “These are materials that would normally be closed for 12 years.”