THE VIEW FROM WASHINGTON : The Stuff America Is Made of--Boxes and Boxes of It

Mike Gillette has been at the National Archives only a couple of months, so he still burbles excitedly when he talks about “the great stuff” in the stacks.

“Wait until you see what we have,” says the gangly Texan as he navigates the narrow aisles of the eighth floor.

Gillette, director of the Legislative Archives, is taking a visitor into the bowels of the Archives Building, a temple with 72 Corinthian columns outside and America’s memory squirreled away in acid-free boxes inside. It is here on Constitution Avenue, midway between the White House and the Capitol, where the paper trail ends.

The trip to the best legislative documents goes slowly because Gillette keeps craning his neck to read a book title or a box label. His first few times up here, he was amazed by what he stumbled across. Once he opened a box and there under the fluorescent lights found himself reading Alexander Hamilton’s handwritten report on manufacturing, the 1791 document that foreshadowed the industrial base of America.

“That’s the way it is,” says Gillette, as if trying to explain life on Earth to a Martian. “You just open a drawer and you’re back 100 or 200 years.”

Gillette leads the way to the ubiquitous steel drawers where the archivists tend to stash the best stuff. From drawer RG233HR (Record Group 233 House of Representatives) he lifts a few folders and gently sets them on a desk as if he is carrying his sleeping son from the couch to his bed.

Inside the first folder is George Washington’s first inaugural address. It is handwritten by the President and signed in ultra-neat script, the way everyone seemed to write in the days before there were telephones and computers--and before penmanship was the curse of every sixth-grader. Gillette guesses that, like a lot of the oldest papers, the inaugural address hasn’t seen the light of day in 100 or so years.

Nobody is quite sure where many documents were before the Archives Building was opened in 1934. Before that, every federal agency in Washington kept its own attic, so to speak, and much was lost to fire, rain and thievery.

(It took 150 years and countless destroyed documents for Congress to accept the idea of a “hall of records” and then to recognize the need to preserve the documents in an orderly manner. According to legend, Congress became convinced it needed a building only after some drone, rummaging around in a storeroom in the Capitol, looked down and saw his footprint and the signature of John J. Calhoun on the same piece of paper. But that may be apocryphal.)

The next document Gillette pulls from the folder is an 1874 petition to Congress from Susan B. Anthony asking for help after the suffragette was jailed for trying to vote. On another petition, the signature of “A. Lincoln” is among a dozen others asking Congress to build a postal road between two obscure towns in Illinois. And from yet another folder, Gillette produces Andrew Jackson’s handwritten veto of the 1832 legislation rechartering the federal bank.

“It is to be regretted,” the President scrawled, “that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government for their selfish purposes.”

Gillette is breathless as he reads these words in a Southern drawl that the Tennessee-born Jackson might have appreciated. His enthusiasm, the musty smell and the low ceilings with a latticework of pipes create a sense that we are tunneling for treasures in a stranger’s attic. But of course, this is no ordinary attic; it’s a repository of every document precious and monstrous, whether it be the Monroe Doctrine or Eva Braun’s photo album.

“I tell you, this is just the beginning,” says Gillette, abruptly putting away folders and locking drawers. Soon enough, we are jogging down flights of stairs, racing through locked doors and into a cool, airtight cave--the room they call the Vault.

In the Vault, Milt Gustafson is waiting. For 25 years, Gustafson has been around the oldest and most symbolic papers. As he signs us into the inner sanctum, he admits that he doesn’t quite get the kick he used to out of looking at, say, the Emancipation Proclamation down Row 13. But he has good stories, such as the one about the time an old judge, attempting to fend off a nit-picking lawyer, came looking for the exact hour that Lyndon B. Johnson had signed a bill.

To give a sample of the class of history knocking around the Vault, Gustafson pulls out the Louisiana Purchase and goes right to the last pages. There, written almost vertically, is the signature “Bonaparte”; the B is awfully large, the script dramatic. To think, he gave up a territory that doubled the size of the United States for $11.25 million--an amount Wayne Gretzky makes in just six seasons.

“You think about anything in American history, and it’s here,” says Gustafson, looking around like a bookshop proprietor searching for a title for a customer.

“Here,” he says, pulling a box off a shelf, “look at this one.”

This one is labeled “Resignations.” The law calls for the President and vice president to resign to the secretary of state; the first time it happened, John Calhoun wrote a short resignation note after Jackson booted him off the ticket. The second time it happened was in 1973, but the letter from Spiro T. Agnew was lost by the State Department.

Gustafson flips to the third resignation letter. On plain White House stationery dated Aug. 9, 1974, is the tersest note of all: “Dear Mr. Secretary, I hereby resign the office of President of the United States. Sincerely, Richard M. Nixon.” When he got it, Henry A. Kissinger jotted in blue ink: “HK 11:35 AM.”

The spare words lost on that white page and the remembrance of their impact on America make it hard to restrain oneself from blurting out: “Cool!” (Others, says gatekeeper Gustafson, have been known to be more articulate.)

In fact, the bulk of the 1.7 million cubic feet of stuff stored in the archives’ record centers and libraries across America--and soon in Archives II, a new research center with 500 miles of shelving in suburban Maryland--doesn’t begin to hold the awe of Nixon’s resignation.

So much of papered-over Washington is so encyclopedic, so dreary, so overwritten and even boorish, that archivists end up throwing out 98% of it after keeping it two or three years.

But what people such as Gillette are wondering is if there’s a market in what we save. Naturally, historians think so. They have mined the stacks for nuggets for their books and dissertations for years.

Ken Burns often tapped the archives for his television documentary on the Civil War, as did an author researching the making of the atomic bomb. Increasingly, as the Supreme Court has become more conservative, lawyers have been foraging for “legislative intent” in bill markups and margin notes.

But more than half the record requests come from “the genies”--the fledgling Alex Haleys who clog the microfilm room while rummaging for their genealogical roots in census data.

Yet Gillette and the other archivists have this fantasy that a lot of people wouldn’t mind a journey through the stacks if the stacks were culled thematically and documents were copied for them to explore.

“There’s nothing like seeing the eloquent words of a real person in his or her own handwriting,” says Gillette. “You don’t have the same intimacy with a printed Xerox of the words.”

Gillette, 46, recently tested his theory on his 9-year-old son, Robert. Gillette copied some letters that Thomas Jefferson had written about what he thought the Lewis and Clark expedition would accomplish and brought them home to his boy, who was studying the expedition in school.

“He was interested,” says Gillette, sounding tentative. “Sort of.”

If his son’s enthusiasm didn’t quite match his own, Gillette is convinced there are ways to make even the dullest words of the characters in a history book speak to new generations.

“It isn’t enough to have documents sitting on shelves,” he says.

Before coming to Washington, Gillette was in charge of oral history at the Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Tex. Now, instead of searching out the friends and foes of Lyndon B. Johnson, he is stalking the stacks and is determined that through small expeditions among the words of the dead, we can learn as much as we do from living. One archivist in Gillette’s legislative section is culling petitions to Congress from women to track their voices over time, while others are collecting documents about Illinois so its citizenry may better understand its traditions.

“Listen, you’ve got to come back and see the still photographs,” Gillette says as the tour ends. Before he lets us go, he brings out one more bound volume, one more “unbelievable” letter, from a shipwrecked sea captain to the President of the United States.

He sighs. “Isn’t this great stuff?”