That Nasty Bureaucratic Habit of Writing Things Down

Long after it cost him the presidency, Richard Nixon said the lesson of Watergate was that he should have burned the tapes.

A more constructive lesson would deal with conduct, and with the perils of doing and saying things that are going to be embarrassing or worse if--and more probably when--they become public.

They usually do.

But the lessons go unheeded. The diaries, letters, lists and memos flow among officials and politicians and then into the files. And then, into the political arena, with Republican investigators currently amassing mountains of documents on the White House and Democratic fund-raising.

Federal officials doing government business are required to keep records and documents.

The Democratic National Committee isn’t, but a subpoena for its papers on one man embroiled in the fund-raising case, John Huang, produced more than 10,000 pages, dating back to 1992.

Nor was it mandatory to keep all the money memos that flowed through the White House. But there they were, including President Clinton’s handwritten instructions to get started on overnight stays for big-money donors, and a memo suggesting that briefings and reports to him would have to be cut short because of the time demands of the drive for campaign funds.

Nor the 1992 Democratic Party memo urging that 15 “leading national fund-raisers” be considered for White House positions, and a longer list for other posts in the new administration. Rewarding supporters with jobs is as old as the system, but seldom so bluntly spelled out.

Of course the authors of memos and instructions like that aren’t writing them for disclosure to investigators, and certainly not for publication.

But there seems to be a sense of imperviousness, especially in the White House, as though these hard-to-explain notes would be forever private, despite successive cases that show otherwise.

That extends to other office holders, accounting for the notes that have been part of earlier cases.

Caspar Weinberger, the Reagan administration secretary of defense, was indicted in 1992 on the basis of his own handwritten notebooks about the Iran-Contra case. He later was pardoned.

Former Republican Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon wrote down 8,200 pages about himself, including episodes that became part of the sexual harassment case that led to his resignation. He also was accused of trying to rewrite his diaries to counter a Senate ethics charges.

Office-holding diarists tend to do that in advance, recording their history the way they want it seen.

But that leaves the puzzle of why, 25 years after the Watergate break-in, questionable or culpable conduct still is recorded.

White House Press Secretary Michael McCurry has said that if the Republican National Committee were to release its fund-raising records, “you’d see the same thing.” That’s probably so. But it is the Democrats, not the Republicans, who have acknowledged improper donations and promised to return $2.7 million worth. And it is the Democrats who are under subpoena for those documents and reams more.

Fund-raising records are written, and saved, because there always is another election coming up, and one campaign’s donor list is the prospect list for the next one.

It also is simple, bureaucratic habit. When Harold Ickes took hundreds of pages of documents with him after serving as deputy White House chief of staff, other aides said he always had been a pack rat who saved everything. He doesn’t seem to have been alone. As the reams of subpoenaed documents flow, some preemptively released by the Democrats before they go to Republican congressional investigators, it sometimes seems that everybody saved almost everything.

In addition, there’s a self-protection flavor to some of what’s been issued, memos to the file saying who told whom to do what.

It adds up to reams of documents, released and still to come.

In Watergate, the way to unravel what happened was said to be to follow the money.

In the fund-raising controversy, the more apt guide would be to follow the paper.

Walter R. Mears, vice president and columnist for Associated Press, has reported on Washington and national politics for more than 30 years.