A Dark Oval Office

A five-page executive order signed by President Bush on Thursday would nudge the nation’s highest office back toward democracy’s dark ages, when history could effectively be kept from the public. The decree permits an incumbent president to veto the release of a former president’s papers even if the former president has agreed to make them public. It rolls back historians’ and journalists’ timely access to historical documents, giving even members of a former president’s family veto power over the release of material.

Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Long Beach) will chair a meeting of a governmental reform subcommittee today to look into Bush’s move, and with luck someone will begin the process of reversing the order.

Since 1974, when Congress put President Nixon’s papers and records under federal custody to avert the possibility he might destroy them, the trend has been toward greater openness. In 1978, the Presidential Records Act made such papers federal property and put them under the control of the archivist of the United States once a president leaves office. The law held that papers could be withheld no longer than 12 years after the end of a presidency. This was supposed to deter the kind of secrecy and dirty tricks that characterized the Nixon White House.

This didn’t shed light into every dark presidential corner, as evidenced by such matters as the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. Now the Bush White House views as anathema the prospect of 68,000 pages from that era being made available, and skeptics are left to wonder whether this reluctance has any relation to the fact that so many current staffers also worked for President Reagan.

The order was drafted by White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, who said it “simply implemented an orderly process” for dealing with past presidential records. In fact it would allow a former president--or members of his family if he is deceased--to withhold documents indefinitely. A sitting president could do the same. Any records deemed to be state secrets, “deliberative process” materials, confidential communications or attorney-client communications would require a historian or reporter to demonstrate a “specific need” for them to be released.

This is a recipe for inaction and endless legal wrangling. The administration knows that court cases challenging any restrictions it imposes could be long and cumbersome. It also knows that a sitting president can already exclude material that poses national security risks--allowing George W. Bush, for example, to lock away sensitive information about how Ronald Reagan or the first President Bush handled affairs in Afghanistan. But this decree is not about protecting troops or homeland security. Rather, the administration’s sweeping refusal to release any documents from the Reagan era suggests a secrecy fetish.

Critics are right to challenge Bush’s decision. The Cold War is not a model to which the United States should be returning. The more the public knows about how government business is conducted, the stronger a democracy becomes. This attempt to gut the 1978 Presidential Papers Act is an attack on the principle of open government.